Notes on Life & Letters - Joseph Conrad

Already there are innuendoes, threats, hints thrown out, and even awful instances
fabricated out of inadequate materials, but it is historically unthinkable that the
Poland of the future, with its sacred tradition of freedom and its hereditary sense
of respect for the rights of individuals and States, should seek its prosperity in
aggressive action or in moral violence against that part of its once fellow-citizens
who are Ruthenians or Lithuanians. The only influence that cannot be restrained
is simply the influence of time, which disengages truth from all facts with a
merciless logic and prevails over the passing opinions, the changing impulses of
men. There can be no doubt that the moral impulses and the material interests of
the new nationalities, which seem to play now the game of disintegration for the
benefit of the world’s enemies, will in the end bring them nearer to the Poland of
this war’s creation, will unite them sooner or later by a spontaneous movement
towards the State which had adopted and brought them up in the development of
its own humane culture—the offspring of the West.