equally insist that frightful things would happen in Poland, were they to go ; there would be white terror and black i;eaction. Who has the right to suspect this nation -composed in the main of working people, peasants, workers, and intellectuals-of reactionary tendencies, for the sole reason that it wants to decide freely about social justice, about the equality oflaws, about liberty, about its parliamentary representation and its government ? Pilsudski declared that, by conducting the " Brest elections "1 he saved the nation from even worse things, and Colonel Slawek frankly said that it was better sometimes to practise electoral abuses than to have to shoot at the people. At that time we all shared a common indignation at such things. That is why I was appalled when I learnt of the Premier Osubka's declaration, in the Cracow University, to the effect that the Government must win, because there had never been a case of someone holding power to lose elections. I very well recall a number of cases in which the governments were defeated at the polls. Prime Minister Moraczewski in 1919 and Pilsudski in 1928 lost the elections, Republicans lost in America despite the fact that they were in power, the nationalist French Government lost in favour of the People's Front, Chancellor Papen lost in favqur of Hitler and now, recently, Churchill lost in favour of the Labour Party. It is only the totalitarian governments that cannot lose at the polls, because they terrorize the electorate. That is what happened in Italy, in Poland, in Germany. In the parliaments of those nations the governments had an overwhelqtlng majority, regardless of the opinion and the will of the nation. I could hardly believe that we should follow that exampl~. And when I told one of the present dignitaries that I simply refused to believe that our own comrades could practice the same electoral abuses which had been practised against us in the past,-he quietly replied that, unfortunately, he did not think that they could do without such abuses. 1 The so-called "Brest elections "-general election of November 1930, which by means of terror and fraud gave Pilsudski and his followers a majority in the Polish Parliament. The outstanding event of the electoral campaign was the imprisonment of the Opposition leaders in the military fortress of Brest Litovsk; hence the name. 47 Biblioteca Gino Bianco
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