THE GROWTH OF THE MODERN NATION 39posture was conciliatory only on the practical question of political methods. On
many other issues, his style was aggressive, and his programme radical. He had
early decided that the principal threat to the survival of the Polish nation lay in
German Imperialism, and he looked for protection to Russia. In return for loy-
alty to the Tsar, he expected the widest concessions. He enjoyed the support of
Russian liberals, and in the Duma in 1907-12 was working his way towards
demands for Polish autonomy. In Poland itself, he aroused the economic aspi-
rations of the urban bourgeoisie, and did not shrink from inflaming their latent
antipathies towards Polish Jewry. He organized the attempted boycott of
Jewish enterprises in 1911, and as a result lost the next election. He was equally
opposed both to the old landowning conservatism and to the new class-based
movements of the peasant and socialist parties. His ideas, set out in Mysli
nowoczesnego Polaka (Thoughts of an Up-to-Date Pole, 1902) and Niemcy,
Rosja i kwestia polska (Germany, Russia, and the Polish Question, 1908)
stressed the virtues of individualism and constitutionalism, and drew attention
to his name in Western Europe. In the First World War, he was the natural can-
didate for liaison with the Allied Powers. From 1917 he headed the Polish
National Committee in Paris and in 1919 the Polish Delegation to the Peace
Conference. In terms of political attitudes, he was probably the single most
significant figure in modern Polish politics. But he never grasped the reins of
power. He was the lifelong rival and detractor of Jozef Pilsudski.^41
The organizations with which Dmowski was associated tended to be rather
ephemeral. Being formed in the first instance under generalized slogans of a
national revival, they attracted a wide range of incompatible interests and
personalities, and often developed in directions unintended by their original
founders. The Polish League, which took the name of an earlier body which had
appeared briefly in Prussian Poland in 1848—50, was founded in Switzerland in
1887 in co-operation with Zygmunt Milkowski (1824—1915), a veteran emigre
and novelist of a distinctly liberal persuasion. Finding it tinged with revolution-
ary elements unsympathetic to his taste, Dmowski abandoned it in April 1893 in
favour of his own breakaway National League, which, together with its militant
youth section called Zet (Union of Polish Youth), had a more right-wing
flavour. Over the next three decades, the National League spawned a stream of
political parties—the National Democratic Movement (SN-D) in 1897; the
People's National Union (ZL-N) in 1919; and the National Movement (SN) in
- Taken together, Dmowski's organizations earned the popular name of the
Endecja or 'National Democracy'. Their special contribution to nationalist pol-
itics was to propagate their aims in all three partitions - whereas most of their
predecessors had limited their activities to one of the Empires - and thus to put
debates on the national issue back on to the 'all-Polish' level. Although for polit-
ical reasons, the National Democracy was overtly opposed to national indepen-
dence, it was pressing for a reunion of the Polish lands which could not have
been accommodated within the existing framework of the Empires. To this
extent, its preferred solution of a 'separate and autonomous Poland', as opposed