96 PREUSSEN
Commission often found itself transferring property from one German owner to
another. Yet by inflating the value of land from 587 to 1,821 marks per hectare,
it encouraged landowners to sell to anyone who wanted to buy, whether
German or Pole. Except in the valley of the River Notec, the Netzedistrikt,
where some z2,ooo German families were installed in a solid block, the
Commission's gains were more than offset by its losses. Its activities were coun-
tered by those of the Polish Land Purchase Bank founded in 1897 and by Polish
agricultural co-operatives. By 1913, the Polish 'Union of Credit Associations'
under its patron, the Revd Piotr Wawrzyniak,had increased its membership to
almost 150,000 peasants. A decree of 1908 empowering the Commission to
expropriate 'unsuitable' landowners was never put into serious operation.^11
The campaign against Polish landownership produced one of the folk heroes of
Prussian Poland, Michal Drzymala (d. 1937). In 1904, Drzymala had succeeded in
obtaining a plot of land in the district of Wollstein (Wolsztyn), but found that the
rules of the Colonization Commission forbade him as a Pole to build a permanent
dwelling-house on his land. In order to beat the rule, therefore, he set himself up
in a gipsy caravan and for more than a decade tenaciously defied all attempts in
the courts to remove him. The case attracted publicity all over Germany, and even
found mention in the international press. It was highly typical of the national con-
flict in Prussia, where the Polish movement was dominated by peasants and where
the state authorities confined themselves to legal methods of harassment.^12
Paradoxically, therefore, the Kulturkampf and the Colonization Commission
succeeded in stimulating the very feelings which they were designed to suppress.
From the Polish point of view, they were the best things that could have hap-
pened. Without them, there might have been no Polish movement in Prussia at
all. Until German officialdom chose to harass the Poles, Germanization was
widely thought to be the natural destiny of all the Hohenzollerns' non-German
subjects. After all, enlightened Englishmen and Americans of the same era
largely assumed that all non-English speaking inhabitants of their countries
would eventually be anglicized. Cultural homogeneity was accepted as a legit-
imate necessity of modern civilization. The English poet and pedagogue
Matthew Arnold, for example, whose official memoranda as Inspector of
Schools drew heavily on his knowledge of German education, fully condoned
'the swallowing up of separate provincial nationalities'. Although he took a
close interest in Welsh affairs and wrote a study of Celtic Literature, he was also
convinced that 'the sooner the Welsh language disappears... the better'.
Ministers of Education who hammer English culture harder and harder into the
elementary schools of Wales, he thought, were to be praised. So one cannot
dismiss the Germanization policy in Prussian Poland as something uniquely bar-
baric. It was broadly conversant with similar programmes of social moderniza-
tion all over Europe (or, mutatis mutandis, with the cultural programmes of
Poloniza-tion undertaken in independent Poland after 1918). What was remark-
able perhaps was the thoroughness and inflexibility of its application, and in
consequence, the vehemence of the Polish response.