# Russian Realities and Problems/Poland Old and New

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POLAND, OLD AND NEW
I
The present War has brought into prominence the name of Poland and the fact of the existence of the Polish nation, a fact which during the last two generations had been gradually sinking into oblivion. During the period preceding the outbreak of the War the people of this country would occasionally meet with some Polish name; would read a novel by Sienkiewicz, the author of Quo Vadis; would go with pleasure to Paderewski's concerts and enjoy his interpretation of Chopin's Polish music. To many of them these things did not even suggest the fact that somewhere, in a distant part of Europe, there existed a national life, a civilisation, whose literary and artistic products thus reached them in fragments. They were like fishermen who, having caught a fish close to the surface of the sea, were satisfied with it and did not even ask themselves what sort of life it was beneath the surface that had produced the specimen they caught. In the years just prior to the War the papers brought them occasional news about a desperate struggle for existence going on in German Poland, about the unheard-of measures ​employed by the Germans for the purpose of destroying the Polish nationality, about the law to expropriate Polish landed estates, about the Polish children being flogged because they insisted on praying in their mother tongue, and so on. But they knew very little of the nation engaged in the struggle and failed to realize what the contest meant for Europe. It was only after the outbreak of the War, when the Polish problem reappeared and when the idea of re-uniting the partitioned Polish territory was put forward in the proclamation issued to the Poles by the Grand Duke High Commander of the Russian Army, that questions began to be asked: what was the Polish problem, what was Poland herself, what her frontiers, what the number and strength of her people and what the rôle of this nation in Central Europe? It was not easy to find answers to these questions. Outside Poland itself, literature concerning that country, still pretty rich as late as fifty years ago, particularly in French and English, became in time worse than poor. The few modern books on the subject are very far from being exact and are accordingly unable to give a true picture of Polish reality. The average educated man, therefore, knew that in the past there existed a great Polish kingdom, that towards the end of the eighteenth century it disappeared from the map of Europe and that later the Poles tried to reconquer their independence by means of a series of insurrections. But what became of the nation afterwards, what was the life it lived and the rôle it played, he did not know. The Polish problem had apparently become an internal problem of the three empires which possessed Polish lands, of Russia, ​Germany, and Austria, and it therefore interested scarcely anybody outside those countries.
It falls to me to give the first of a number of lectures on Poland at this meeting and I therefore consider it my duty to begin by giving some elementary notions concerning the country and its people.
The territories on which the three empires have faced the Polish problem in recent times may be grouped into three categories:
(1) The provinces of the ancient Polish Kingdom where the bulk of the population is of Polish stock and speaks Polish. They stretch from the Carpathian Mountains to the Baltic Sea and comprise nearly the whole of the Vistula Basin as well as the Basin of the River Varta, the Oder's chief confluent. This territory is divided up between Russia (Kingdom of Poland), Austria (Western Galicia) and Germany (Posnania and West Russia). The total area of these provinces is about 75,000 square miles and their population exceeds 20,000,000, its density approaching 260 inhabitants per square mile (a very dense population when it is remembered that France has only 190 per square mile).
(2) The provinces to the west and north of Poland proper which did not belong to the Polish Kingdom at the time of its partition but where a large majority of the people are of Polish race and speak the Polish tongue. They belong chiefly to Germany (Upper Silesia and the southern part of East Prussia) and to Austria (Austrian Silesia or Teschen) and they represent an area of about 9,000 square miles with almost 3,000,000 inhabitants.
​(3) The provinces to the east of Poland proper which belonged to the Kingdom of Poland but where the bulk of the population is of non-Polish origin and speaks either Lithuanian or White or Little Russian. On this territory, only a small part of which (Eastern Galicia) belongs to Austria, while the chief portion (the so-called North- and South-western provinces) is in the possession of Russia, and which represents an area of about 200,000 square miles with 30,000,000 inhabitants, the Poles form only a more or less considerable minority—25 per cent, in Eastern Galicia, and a very small percentage in the easternmost districts belonging to Russia—but there are no reliable statistics concerning nationalities. This vast stretch of territory, whose inhabitants are non-Polish by race, is nevertheless to a certain degree a country with a Polish civilisation.
The national religion of Poland is the Roman Catholic, only a certain percentage of the nation being Protestants of either the Calvinist or Lutheran confession. Compact groups of Polish Protestants are to be found in the southern part of East Prussia and in some parts of Silesia (particularly in Teschen, Austrian Silesia, where Polish Protestants initiated the national renascence in the nineteenth century). In the Eastern non-Polish part of historical Poland the Lithuanian population is of the Roman Catholic faith; the White and Little Russian population had belonged to the Eastern Church since the tenth century. In the seventeenth century, when the Uniat Church was established, the majority of the White and Little Russians went over to the Roman Church, but in the nineteenth century the Uniats were incorporated ​into the Eastern Orthodox Church of the Russian Empire.
In the economic respect, German Poland is an agricultural country. Polish Silesia, however, which possesses the richest coal-fields on the European continent, is one of the most important mining and industrial districts in the German Empire. It is the country of the richest coal-fields in Europe, and produces coal to the amount of fifty-one million tons per annum. Those industries are wholly in German hands, the Poles supplying only the labour.
Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, Galicia (Austrian Poland) lived exclusively on its agriculture, being a country with the densest rural population in Europe. Latterly it began to develop industrially notwithstanding the fact that it has a very dense and poor rural population and that the country had to struggle not only against the competition of other parts of the Habsburg Monarchy but also against the policy of the Austrian Government, which in the past destroyed the country's industry and which even at present hinders its industrial development by means of taxation and differential tariffs on transport.
Industries have the most favourable conditions in the Kingdom of Poland, which has an open market for its industries in Russia and in Asia. This part of Poland may be called half-agricultural, its industry and commerce supplying the half of its revenues.
Polish civilisation developed under Western influences. At first they were those of the Roman Church, then those of Mediaeval Germany, later those of the Italian Renascence (fifteenth and sixteenth century). ​In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there came strong French influences through close intellectual relations with France and the introduction of French institutions by Napoleon. Napoleon's Civil Code is the law of the Kingdom of Poland to the present day.
When compared with the neighbouring civilisations, viz. with that of Germany to the West and that of Russia to the East, Polish civilisation is prominently distinct in character. It had two great and flourishing periods. The first was in the sixteenth century, at the time of the Renascence and the Reformation, when Poland was one of the most active participants in the intellectual life of Europe, when she gave Copernicus to the world, when she produced her own distinct movement of the Reformation, and when, the Polish Protestants having supplanted Latin by the vernacular, Polish literature reached a high degree of beauty and power. This great period was called the Golden Age. Its second great period came in the nineteenth century, after the partitions, when Poland, in the period of Romanticism, produced a poetry which ranks with the greatest in history, but which is unfortunately little known in the West of Europe where only a very few people learn Polish. In spite of most unfavourable conditions this Polish civilisation lives and progresses at the present moment, and contemporary Polish literature and Polish art can by no means be classed with the poorest of Europe.
In her political constitution and in her social structure Poland developed in the past characteristics quite different from those of other countries, some of which ​were the cause of the decline of the Polish State. Those characteristics must be accounted for by the geographical situation of the country and the part played by it in European history.
In the tenth century, when Poland appeared on the historical arena, there were two Europes, the Roman and the Byzantine. The Roman Church had conquered all the West and centre of Europe, all the Latin and Germanic countries, some Western Slavs, and even the Hungarian Kingdom founded by the Turanian invaders in the Danube Valley. The Byzantine Church had spread its teaching all over the Balkan Peninsula, among the Greeks and Southern Slavs, and was converting the Eastern Slavs of Russia, whose great centre was Kiev.
Of all Slavs the Poles were the most distant from Rome as well as from Byzantium, and therefore the most isolated from the influence of ancient civilisation, either Roman or Byzantine. This is also the reason why of all Slav countries Poland was the least known to contemporary chroniclers and why even now we know nothing certain about the origin of the Polish State. Concerning the beginnings of Poland we have only legends preserved in Polish tradition and transmitted to us by the Polish chroniclers of the twelfth century. It appears that Poland, before coming into contact with other European nations and adopting the Christian faith in the tenth century, had had a long existence, perhaps of some two centuries, as a small kingdom isolated from the life of contemporary Europe, both Western and Eastern. At least, legendary history gives the names of a long series of rulers of two ​successive dynasties which reigned prior to the adoption of Christianity by the Poles in 965.
The chroniclers of other countries first mention Poland in the tenth century when she is carrying on wars against her neighbours, at first against the German Empire and its Eastern Marks, and later against the Russian rulers of Kiev; that is, against the Roman West and the Byzantine East.
So frowned he once when in an angry parle He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.
These wars, however, end very early, in the middle of the tenth century, because of the expansion of the German Marks towards the East. The German Empire became the only great danger to Poland in the ​West, and her struggles against it represent the chief moments of Poland's mediaeval history.
It is a great historical truth that nations trying to cope with their enemies submit to the strongest influences of the most dangerous neighbours whom they are obliged to fight. And so mediaeval Poland, after adopting the Roman faith introduced there from Bohemia, develops pre-eminently under the influence of German civilisation and German institutions.
When she appears in European history, Poland represents a primitive kingdom under the despotic rule of the Piast dynasty. She is a country of forests and marshes, with large oases of denser agricultural population scattered among the forests. The population consists of free husbandmen and slaves. Above them there is a class of warriors, very strong numerically, from which the ruler chooses his officials. There is no trace of feudalism in the country, the only important people in it being the king's officials who gradually accumulate wealth and give origin to a series of great families, rich and therefore powerful, which, however, remain legally on an equal footing with the mass of poor warriors. This military class was subdivided into clans, the members of each clan being bound together by strong ties of solidarity. Each clan had its name and crest. The Polish nobility, which sprang from this military class and which derived its family names from its landed properties (in the fifteenth century), had no family crests, of which there was only a limited number. Each of these bore a name which had been the old word of call of the clan. In many instances, one crest belonged to more than a hundred ​families. The clan system survived in this way throughout the whole of Polish history. It is evident that the warrior class in Poland had quite a different origin and a different legal and social position from that of the feudal nobility of Western Europe.
Owing to the adoption of the Roman faith and the struggle against the German Empire, which led the rulers of Poland to interfere in the affairs of Bohemia and Hungary, Poland entered into close communion with the West, particularly with the German Empire, and this resulted in the gradual penetration into the country of Western ideas and Western institutions. Thus among others the mediaeval custom of dividing the country among the sons of the ruler on his death was adopted in the twelfth century. It was most disastrous for a kingdom like Poland, which was surrounded by powerful enemies and which had not yet quite reached its natural frontiers and had not sufficiently strengthened its position on the Baltic.
The Slavonic populations on the Baltic coast, west of the Vistula, had only recently been incorporated into the Polish State, while to the east of the Vistula a Lithuanian tribe of Prussians had remained independent and pagans, the missionary work carried on among them from Poland having proved unsuccessful. Divided Poland was unable to complete the task of conquering the Baltic coast, and in this way the field was open for the Teutonic Order. The Knights of the Cross established there a German stronghold which later on became one of the foundations of German Prussia and the greatest danger to the independence of Poland.
​The election of kings, which played so unfortunate a part in the later history of the Polish kingdom, was also a mediaeval institution introduced from Western Europe, which in Poland attained to a stage of extreme development.
The influence of Western ideas and institutions was shown chiefly in the formation of the Polish nobility and its political rôle. Towards the end of the mediaeval period the close communion of Poland with feudal Europe resulted in undermining the despotic rule of the Piasts. The wealthy magnates began to regard their position as being similar to that of the dukes and barons of the feudal West, and they opposed themselves to the power of the princes. On the other hand, the very numerous and mostly poor military class succeeded in securing in Poland the position of Western knighthood. The division of Poland was very favourable to these changes, for weak princes, waging wars against each other, were obliged to reckon with the powerful lords in their dominions. When Poland, in the fourteenth century, was again re-united under the last rulers of the Piast dynasty, the kings, in spite of their despotic tendencies, did not attain to the unlimited power of the early Piasts: they were obliged to consult the great lords in state affairs. In the end of the fourteenth century the last Piast died childless and the successor to his throne, Louis d'Anjou of Hungary, wanted to assure the crown of Poland to his daughter. The law did not admit of succession in the female line, and he succeeded in accomplishing his plan at the cost of great concessions to the magnates and of renouncing the most essential attributes of the crown. ​Poland then became more similar to the west-European feudal monarchy though she lacked a feudal organisation of society and though the primitive clan system still survived. Here lies the chief source of the degeneration of her political institutions. The kings, in their struggle for power against the magnates, could not, like the sovereigns of the West, look for support to the middle class, for that class was very weak in Poland. They therefore tried to find it in the powerful class of the knighthood or gentry (szlachta). But between the gentry and the magnates there was only a difference of wealth and culture. Both belonged directly to the same class of the community, both were members of the same clans, and the gentry by its social character was destined rather to co-operate with the magnates than to struggle against them. And, as both those elements occupied the same legal position, the power wrested from the king by the magnates became legally an acquisition of the whole of the nobility, the rich and advanced as well as the poor and uncultured. For a country like Poland, which had no feudal hierarchy in her social structure, the destruction of despotic rule meant gradual transformation into a democratic republic.
The end of the Middle Ages, when those constitutional changes are taking place in Poland, is at the same time a great landmark in Polish economic history. In the fourteenth century, when the sea-routes to the Levant, being harassed by the Turks, became very unsafe, trade with Asia was carried on in great measure by continental routes leading from Western Germany through Poland to the Greek settlements on the ​Northern coast of the Black Sea. In this way Poland became a commercial country, and the merchants of her cities, particularly those of Cracow, were famous for their wealth. With the conquest of Constantinople and the Black Sea by the Turks, those continental routes were cut and the trade of Poland was ruined. The cities, which had been rapidly gaining political power, lost it very soon. At the same time the great geographical discoveries then made opened up new sea-routes and gave a strong impetus to the commerce of the Western sea-faring nations. This commercial growth, and the industrial development of England and Flanders, produced a rapid increase in the population of the countries of North-western Europe, which became a great market for Polish grain. Thus Poland, having lost her commercial importance, gained very favourable conditions for agricultural development. The fifteenth century is in Poland a period when agriculture and landed property are organised on a large scale. Till that time she was a country of small husbandry intended only for local consumption. With the opening of foreign markets, large agricultural units were rapidly formed by means of clearing the forests, of internal colonisation, of the amalgamation of small units and of expansion towards the South-East to the fertile territories of the ancient Grand Duchy of Kiev, which had been depopulated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by the nomads of the Steppes, and which, under the protection of Poland's military power, were now again colonised. All this work was done by the Polish gentry, which, availing itself of its newly-won political power, grasped the entire profit made possible ​by the new conditions of agricultural development; they became a class of prosperous large and middle landowners. A large portion of that class, especially in Mazovia, where it was most numerous, remained poor and sat on small lots of land, many being even landless, but the majority became wealthy landed nobles. Economic prosperity strengthened the power of the nobility: they excluded from the Diet the representatives of the cities and reduced the free husbandmen to serfdom with the object of securing labour which they needed very much in the new conditions. From this time onwards the whole of Polish history is practically the work of the Polish landed nobility. They made the laws, they decreed the wars and they elected the kings, the election being limited throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the Lithuanian House of Jagiello, and becoming in the second half of the sixteenth century quite free. The nobility were free to choose from among foreign princes as well as from among themselves.
This ancient class of warriors which developed into the landed nobility had many great qualities, above all, chivalry, courage, a very severe code of honour and duty toward the country, great family virtues and a sense of decency in private life. But in the new conditions of prosperity they gradually lost their energy and their aggressiveness, lost to a great extent their ability for sacrifice and gradually substituted the cause of individual freedom for that of country. In the mass they were very ignorant. It is true that, after power and wealth had been acquired, there appeared a craving for enlightenment. In the fifteenth and sixteenth ​centuries western universities, particularly those of Italy in the period of the Renascence, were crowded with young Poles who were more numerous there than other foreigners. The University of Cracow, founded in the year 1400, became a great centre of science and intellectual culture not only for Poland but also for neighbouring countries. This movement, which rapidly raised the intellectual level of the ruling class, which led to refinement of manners and which gave birth to the Golden Period of Polish literature in the sixteenth century, came to a stop at the end of that century under the influence of new factors in Polish life.
Owing to her geographical situation and her social and political conditions, Poland was obliged to absorb many alien elements. The primitive kingdom of the Piasts was founded and expanded on a territory inhabited by kindred Western Slavonic tribes of Polish race. Only on its south-eastern border, in Red Russia, the Piasts had incorporated some eastern Slavs into their dominions. In the twelfth century, during the period of division, nearly the whole country was raided by the Tartars and to a great extent depopulated, a fact which caused the subsequent German immigration into the country. The princes encouraged German settlers, granted them privileges in the towns and in the country settlements and even gave them the right to be ruled according to German law. During that period Polish cities were organized on the basis of the Magdeburg law, and they even enjoyed the right of appeal to the High Court at Magdeburg. After the reunion of Poland in the fourteenth century the last king of the Piast dynasty, Casmir the Great, who gave ​Poland a great code of laws, the Statute of Wislica. based upon the principle "one king, one law, one coinage," abolished the right of appeal to Magdeburg and created conditions under which the German element was quickly absorbed by the Polish community. The end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century is the period during which German influence in Poland comes to an end and the expansion of Germanism towards the East is stopped for centuries. By the defeat of the Teutonic Order at the battle of Tannenberg (Grunwald) with the subsequent Second Treaty of Thorn, by which the Western possessions of the Order, including the mouth of the Vistula and the city of Danzig, were again incorporated into Poland, Germanism was even pushed back where it remained within the same frontiers till the second half of the eighteenth century—till the partitions of Poland.
In the second half of the fourteenth century Poland had two powerful and dangerous neighbours, the Teutonic Order, which barred her access to the Baltic and extended its conquests into Polish territories, and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, whose rulers, of the Giedymin dynasty, extended their dominion over Western Russian principalities at a time when Great Russia was still under the Tartar yoke. The Lithuanians were engaged in a struggle with the Teutonic Order, but they also frequently raided Polish possessions and struggled against Poland for the acquisition of Russian Southwestern territories. Poland was too small to fight both those enemies, and in these circumstances the Polish lords displayed a great genius for statesmanship. They married the heiress to the Polish throne, Hedwig, ​daughter of Louis of Hungaria. to the Lithuanian prince Jagiello, elected him King of Poland, and in this way realised a personal union between Poland and Lithuania. Lithuania proper, i.e. the Northern part of Jagiello's empire, which was still pagan, was baptized by the Poles, converted to the Roman Catholic religion and exposed to the influence of Pohsh civilisation. At a great meeting of Polish and Lithuanian nobles an Act of Brotherhood between the two countries was signed and a solemn oath taken by both parties. Thenceforth the hereditary grand dukes of Lithuania, of the House of Jagiello, were by principle elected to the Polish throne up to the reign of Sigismund Augustus, who died childless but during whose reign the Union of Lublin was concluded (1569), whereby the two countries were fused into one State and by virtue of which Lithuanian deputies began to be sent to the Polish Diet.
By the union with Lithuania the Polish State was more than doubled in territory and in population. That population was Polish neither by race nor by civilisation. In the north of the newly acquired country lived the Lithuanians, recently converted from paganism and still semi-barbarous. The southern and larger part of it was inhabited by West-Russian Slavs (White and Little Russians), Christians since the end of the tenth century, but belonging to the Eastern Church and to the Byzantine civilisation. The close union with Lithuania in the second half of the sixteenth century was bound to lower the general intellectual level of the Polish State. And after that time Poland was a very heterogeneous country in race, in language, ​in religion, and in civilisation. The Lithuanian nobility, which had obtained equal rights with that of Poland, and whose representatives took their place at the side of the Poles in the Diet, were far inferior in ideas as well as in customs and manners to the Polish nobles, refined pupils of the Italian Renascence.
Polish civilising influences spread very rapidly over those Eastern territories, but this success was paid for very dearly by the checking, and even the retrogression, of intellectual development in Poland proper. On the other hand, the union with Lithuania opened a new period in Poland's foreign policy. The destruction of the Teutonic Order and the internal disintegration of the German Empire gave Poland comparative safety in the West. But the new frontiers of the State in the East and South-east were very troublesome and a source of frequent wars against Muscovy, the Tartars, and the Turks. In this new period Poland has more and more intercourse with the East, and eastern influences become strongly felt in the country. In the sixteenth century Poland was a great European country, closely associated with western life and taking a very active part in western intellectual movements, among others in the Reformation.
In the seventeenth, she gradually withdraws from Europe, becoming more and more isolated in her life as well as in her institutions. In the seventeenth century also there comes into the life of the country a new alien element in a large mass. The Swedish invasion and the long period of wars caused by it in the heart of the country, resulted in a considerable depopulation and opened a field for immigration. Then a great ​Jewish wave came from Germany. Their settlement in the country was opposed by the middle class which was however very weak and had no influence. On the contrary, the ruling class of landed nobles favoured the new settlers, who, unlike the Polish middle class which had never reconciled itself totally to the new order of things, did not struggle against the exclusive rule of the country by the nobility. Poland had had Jews since the Middle Ages, but their numbers were no larger than in other European countries. They were Polish Jews speaking the language of the country, but now she became the home of the largest Jewish population in the world, and the new settlers brought with them and preserved a German dialect, called Yiddish, which they speak to the present time.
II
Such were the factors which contributed to the formation of the Old Poland of the second half of the seventeenth and the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century—of the Poland which was going to lose her independence towards the end of the eighteenth century. Territorially she was one of the largest countries in Europe. Pohtically she had the most democratic constitution: the gentry, her ruling class, formed eight per cent, of the population and represented all degrees of wealth, from the great magnates, whose properties were like kingdoms, down to the small landholders and even the quite landless and poor gentry. That gentry was nearly all Polish in language and ideas, for the nobles of Lithuania and the West Russian ​countries gradually adopted the Polish language, Polish manners and customs, the love of Polish freedom and of the Polish commonwealth. The weak middle class was also Polish, not only in Poland proper, but also in the Eastern territories. Only in the north-west, on the borders of Germany, the larger towns contained a considerable percentage of Germans. In the towns, side by side with the Poles, were the Jews, their numbers increasing from west to east. The chief mass of the population, the peasants, were reduced to serfdom, of different races, Polish in Poland proper, Lithuanian, White and Little Russian in the east. In her religion Poland was Roman Catholic. In the sixteenth century, the Reformation had spread powerfully among the nobility throughout the country in the form of Calvinism and Socinianism. But towards the end of the century, with the reign of Sigismund the Third of the Swedish House of Vasa, there came a Catholic reaction, drawing its strength chiefly from Lithuania where Catholicism was confronted by the Eastern faith and was therefore more fervent. Lithuania proper was also Roman Catholic, having been converted from paganism by the Poles. The West Russian provinces belonged in the beginning to the Eastern Church; but in the seventeenth century the larger part of their population was brought within the fold of the Roman Church by the Brest Union by which the Uniats accepted the Roman dogmas, acknowledged the supremacy of the Pope and retained only their ritual. There developed a struggle between the Uniats and the Dis-Uniats, i.e. those who remained in the Eastern Church.
​Situated on the borders of the Western world and containing countries of both Roman and Byzantine civilisation, with the former gradually absorbing the latter, Poland represented very different stages and types of civilised life. While in the West they lived on a more or less European level, in the south-east, on the fertile plains of Ukraina, frequently raided by the Tartars, the Poles carried on their pioneer work amidst constant warfare with the Nomads. A most adventurous, wild life, and most troublesome types of citizens developed there. And there arose great magnates who, like kings, had their own armies which they employed against the invaders, but sometimes also in the intestine troubles of the Republic. There also, in face of constant Tartar danger, a peculiar military organisation of Cossacks appeared on the Dnieper which, growing in strength and independence, itself became a great danger to the Republic.
The economic life of the country was very simple. Its commerce and its middle class having been ruined, the country lived almost exclusively on agriculture and on the export of grain through Danzig to North-western Europe. The community was composed practically of two classes: of free nobles and peasant serfs, its structure being thus simplified and reduced to a more primitive state. National education had at the end of the sixteenth century fallen into the hands of the Jesuits and its level had been gradually lowered. The mass of the gentry were brought up in ignorance and in very backward ideas. The ruin of the cities, which are everywhere productive centres of civilisation, contributed to the general abasement. The gentry had ​preserved many virtues in private and family life, but they were not enlightened enough to have the right ideas concerning the needs of the State and the methods of public life. In this way the constitution of the country was doomed to degeneration. From the sixteenth century till the fall of Poland more enlightened minds tried to forward ideas of reform and produced a very rich political literature on the "Amendment of the Republic" as well as a long series of active attempts at improvement. But all those attempts were powerless against the ignorance of public opinion.
Meantime to the east and the west of Poland there arose two great military powers. Peter the Great, being a despotic ruler, had transformed by force the Old Muscovy, with her growing anarchy, into a modern, strongly organised, bureaucratic and military power. On the other side the absolute kings of Prussia had organised their state and their army, and this army became, under Frederick the Great, the first military force in Europe. Because of their absolute rule neither of those powers needed any preparation of public opinion to introduce reforms. Quite different was it in Poland with her liberties and with her democratic rule by the gentry. There intended reforms had to be passed by the Diet, and it was necessary to overcome not only the conservatism of ignorant public opinion and the opposition of powerful magnates, who were often led by personal and family ambitions, but also the foreign intrigues which worked in the country.
Nevertheless, after the first partition, a strong reform party appeared. It began its work by reforming public education in the modern western sense and it ​gradually formed a majority for the new constitution (of the 3rd May, 1791), which gave political rights to the middle class and admitted their representatives into the Parliament, took the peasants under the protection of the law, introduced a hereditary monarchy, a modern organisation of government, and a standing army.
There was no time for the completion of the great work. Taking advantage of the French Revolution which engaged the western and eastern European powers, Prussia and Russia, with the collaboration of Austria, completed the destruction of the Polish State. But the reforming movement of the eighteenth century was the beginning of a New Poland that lived, struggled and progressed after the partitions.
This movement strengthened the ties between Poland and other European nations and laid the foundations of new national life. The reformed schools of the second half of the eighteenth century produced a new generation of enlightened men standing, in their knowledge and in their ideas, on the highest western level. Those men led Poland through the Napoleonic era, and they ruled her in the Duchy of Warsaw founded by Napoleon, and in the Kingdom of Poland established by the Congress of Vienna—which kingdom, in spite of its difficult conditions, was one of the best governed and most rapidly progressing countries in Europe. The first decades of the nineteenth century are a period of the greatest upheaval, not only as regards Polish political efforts, but also in the intellectual life of the nation. Outside of the Kingdom, the Polish university of Vilna, the capital of Lithuania, becomes ​a great centre of learning and intellectual activity, and its pupils open the greatest period of Polish literature, a period when Polish poetry, in the era of Romanticism, reached summits accessible only to the richest literatures of the world. After the insurrection of 1830–31, when the constitution of the kingdom of Poland was destroyed and Polish educational institutions in Lithuania were suppressed, there appeared new centres of Polish thought, one abroad among the emigrants, chiefly in Paris, another in German Poland in Posen. The continuity of this intense and independent intellectual life of the nation was never interrupted. In the second half of the nineteenth century Warsaw became its centre and holds its place till the present time in spite of most unfavourable conditions, as the Polish University and Polish schools were suppressed, and public education, in Russian and by Russians, was forcibly introduced into the whole country. The change in the political situation of Austrian Poland in the second half of the nineteenth century, the introduction there of Polish public education, with two Polish universities, in Cracow and Lwow, gradually gave the Austrian Poles a prominent place in the intellectual life of the nation. But Galicia throughout the whole preceding period of 100 years was the most backward part of Poland and, in spite of all her progress in the last fifty years, she could not surpass the Kingdom and Warsaw with all their traditions of the reforming movement of the eighteenth century, of the Duchy of Warsaw and of the half-independent Kingdom of the Congress, and with their modern spirit, developed chiefly under French influences which were potent in ​the country throughout the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century.
The same elements gave national strength to Posen which found itself in a very dangerous situation under Prussian rule. That part of Poland participated in the reforming movement of the eighteenth century as well as in the life of the Duchy of Warsaw, while Galicia, annexed by Austria at the first partition (1772), stood apart during the period of the greatest activity of Polish thought.
Thus it happened that the weakest part of the national body, Austrian Poland, lived throughout the last fifty years in conditions most favourable to the progress of national culture, which it needed most. But, on the other hand, being the poorest part of Poland, with the densest agricultural population, it found itself in very difficult economic conditions, had no chance of industrial development, and was exploited by other more advanced countries of the Hapsburg monarchy. Nevertheless, the existence of national institutions and Polish schools raised the level of intellectual life and strengthened the national spirit. Galicia has in the most recent times been less and less Austrian, and Polish ideals have dominated the political life of that province more and more.
In the last century the greatest danger threatened the national existence of German Poland, exposed as this country was to the direct attacks of Germanism carried out methodically by the Government with the collaboration of the German nation. To Prussia the destruction of Polish nationality in her Polish provinces presented itself as a national necessity. With ​Polonism strong in Posen and Royal (West) Prussia provinces annexed at the partition of Poland, her German territories in East Prussia and Silesia were partly isolated and exposed to great danger in case Poland should recover her national strength and reconquer her independence. To ensure retention of those territories Prussia is bound to aim at the destruction of Polish nationality, not only in her own provinces- but also in a large part of Russian Poland.
That is why the Prussian State spared neither efforts nor funds in the work of exterminating the Poles and did not hesitate to adopt measures which provoked the indignation of the whole civilised world. Fortunately for the Poles, Posen was the oldest part of the national body, the cradle of the Polish Kingdom, with the Polish civilisation deeply rooted in the mass of the population, with the national character most developed and tenacious. They rapidly learned German methods of work and adopted them in defence of their nationality, of their ideals and of their mother language, as well as in the economic struggle, in the defence of Polish landed property, and in industrial and commercial competition. In their economic progress they equalled and in some respects even surpassed the Germans of the country. In agriculture, they reached the level of most of the progressive countries of Europe, and at the same time they developed a strong middle class and to a great extent Polonised the towns where the Germans and Jews, the latter supporting Germanism, had been very strong. In the last decades of the nineteenth century the percentage of Germans in their country was considerably reduced (to 38 per ​cent, as against 45 per cent, in 1867), while the Jews, pushed out by Polish traders, emigrated to Germany and have nearly disappeared from the country. They now form only one per cent, of the population (as against seven per cent, in 1815). The energy, solidarity and discipline of the Poles in the legal and political struggle, as well as in economic competition, astonished the Germans and proved to them that the Slavs, when properly trained, are their equals and in some respects may even prove their superiors.
The country which, under the name of the Kingdom of Poland, was united to Russia in 1815 and which had its own constitution, government, and army till 1831; which, incorporated afterwards into the Russian Empire, was nevertheless governed by Polish officials till 1865, has since that date been subjected to a system of anti-Polish policy in which the Russian Government imitated Prussian methods. But the Kingdom of Poland was a large country, with a homogeneous Polish population, with fresh traditions of its modern and progressive State (from 1815 to 1831), with its solidly organised social and intellectual life, with its French laws (Napoleon's Code), and any attempt at the destruction of its national life was doomed to failure. In the last fifty years the Kingdom found a new source of strength in its industrial progress. With the abolition of the customs frontier between the Kingdom and the Empire in 1850, a large market in the Russian Empire was opened to that Polish country, rich in coal and minerals, with a fairly dense population composed, after the belated peasants' reform in 1864, chiefly of a strong and healthy class of small landowners and of ​a numerous proletariate representing cheap labour for the industries. Textile and metallurgic factories grew rapidly, and there arose large mining and industrial centres living mostly on their export to the East. At the same time Warsaw, because of its geographical situation on the route from the West to the East and at the crossing of the lines from Vienna to Petrograd and Berlin to Moscow, at a point where the Western narrow-gauge ends and the Russian broad-gauge begins, became a commercial city of great importance. The Polish community, which had been exclusively agricultural for centuries, was not prepared to profit by the new favourable conditions, and the growth of great industries and commerce was in the beginning chiefly the work of the Germans and the Jews. At first the Poles supplied only the unskilled and part of the skilled labour. Gradually, however, the progress of technical and commercial education enabled them to appear in the field of competition and they began to gain ground rapidly. In this way the Kingdom produced a very numerous and well-to-do middle class—recruited from remains of the ancient town populations, from the gentry, and from the peasantry—which to-day is already the foremost social force in the country.
The nineteenth century brought with it great changes and these resulted in the fundamental social reconstruction of Poland. In Old Poland the great mass of the population consisted of peasants who were chiefly serfs and owned no land; these the Napoleonic era made free. Later, at first in Prussia and Austria in the first half of the nineteenth century, then in Russian Poland in 1865, they were endowed with land ​and became a class of independent small landowners. This great peasant reform was not carried out solely to satisfy the social needs of the times. In German and Russian Poland particularly the reformers were inspired by the political purpose of breaking the power of the Polish landed nobility, which in the eyes of the governments represented the Polish national tendencies and which could not be reconciled with foreign rule. The ignorant peasant had no national aspirations, and it was hoped that, satisfied with his economic condition, he would prove a loyal subject and might even be employed against other sections of the nation. In a sense, therefore, the reform was carried out in a manner very favourable to the peasants; and it produced a strong class of small landowners, a class which, with the progress of education, with the improvement in the methods of land culture, and with the internal colonisation of the country (in all parts of Poland during the last decades), gradually grew still stronger. Many large landed properties disappeared, having been sold out to peasants in small lots.
This reform proved most beneficent to the Polish nation. The healthy, industrious and thrifty class of small landowners became the strongest foundation of Poland's national existence. It manifested its qualities best in German Poland where education has made the largest strides, where everybody can read and write and where the industrial development of the empire and the protection of agrarian interests by the State produced a most prosperous situation for the agriculturists. The small landowners of German Poland are a very prosperous class. Their savings supply the ​Polish banks of the country with money. In the cultivation of land they rank with the most progressive farmers in Europe. At the same time, as education among them progressed, they became conscious members of the Polish nation, got inspired with the Polish national idea and with Polish patriotism. They became a well-organised and disciplined army of citizens struggling against aggressive Germanism for the cause of Poland. It may be said that it was the Polish peasant who stopped the progress of Germanism in the country and frustrated all the efforts of the Prussian Government to dispossess the Poles of their land, to buy it out of Polish hands through the Government's Committee of Colonisation and to settle Germans on it.
The peasants in Russian Poland developed in the same direction, only there the progress was much slower. Their economic condition is not bad, yet it is not as favourable as that of the peasants in German Poland. Russia is a great agricultural country and Russian grain competes the more easily with that of the country even on the Polish market, as it is favoured by special tariffs. With respect to the education of the masses, on the other hand, Russian Poland is the most backward of all the three parts of the country. Even to-day nearly half the population of the country is illiterate. But in Russian Poland also it is the rule that with the progress of education the peasant becomes an ardent Pole attached to the national cause and ready to struggle in its defence.
The peasant class of Austrian Poland found itself in the worst conditions. Even before the peasant reform Galicia had a denser agricultural population ​than any other part of Poland, and this reform left the peasants owners of abnormally small lots of land. As late as forty years ago Galicia's population was also the most ignorant in all Poland, though it must be said to the credit of the Galician Land Diet that during the last fifty years of the country's autonomy it made the fostering of the education of the masses its chief aim. Two-thirds of the country's expenditure throughout this period were applied towards the improvement of public education, particularly of the primary schools which were Polish in the Polish and Ruthenian in the Ruthenian part of the country. In this way Galicia out-distanced Russian Poland in the education of the masses as far back' as twenty years ago. But in spite of considerable progress the unfavourable economic condition of the small landowner in this over-populated country remained a very unhealthy source of political fermentation. The peasant reform produced not only a class of small landowners but also a very numerous landless proletariate. Here lies the reason why the number of emigrants from Poland has been so great in recent times. Emigration in large masses began in German Poland in the seventies and was rapidly followed by emigrations from the Russian and Austrian parts of the country. As a result the Polish population in the United States to-day numbers some three-and-a-half millions, to which total must be added some hundreds of thousands of Poles in Southern Brazil and other oversea countries. The rapid development of German industries attracted a large portion of the emigrants from German Poland to the German mines and factories in the west of the Empire, particularly in ​Westphalia, where in some localities the Polish population to-day forms a majority.
Recent decades have developed a system of temporary emigration. Polish peasants go for a time to the States, to Germany and even to Denmark, England and France. Many of them buy land in Poland with their savings and become farmers. This temporary emigration is financially of great importance, especially to Austrian Poland where the country's budget is made solvent only by the earnings of the emigrants.
The Kingdom of Poland alone, with its rapidly growing industries, was able to absorb a considerable part of its rural proletariate into the mining and industrial centres, thus transforming it into an industrial working class. This class, very strong in numbers but mostly very ignorant and badly organised because of the backward institutions and the bad administration of the country, became not only a very important element of the community but also a source productive of trouble. In this respect the system of administration introduced by the Russian Government, with its extensive methods adapted to the vast and sparsely populated territories of the Russian Empire, proved most fatal when applied to an industrial country with a very dense population and situated in the centre of Europe where it is directly exposed to Western influences. The condition of the working class in Russian Poland is certainly the most unhealthy in all Europe.
One of the chief changes in the structure of the Polish nation was the rapid growth in the second half of the nineteenth century of a strong middle class. In German Poland this class developed in the midst of the ​bitterest struggle against the Germans for the control of the local market, and it produced a very numerous class of Polish tradesmen and small industrials who proved so successful in competition with the Germans that they drove many of the latter from the country and again Polonised the towns which to a great extent had already been Germanised. They also organised a very extensive system of Polish co-operative banks which an eminent German economist called "a State within the State," a system which is one of the model organisations of its kind and which is also the chief foundation of the economic independence of the Poles in German Poland.
In Russian Poland the Middle Class represents all stages of wealth, from the great industrials and merchants down to the small traders and craftsmen, and includes a very numerous class of people of liberal professions. Here the Polish commercial and industrial class feels cramped, particularly because of the herding together in cities with the Jews who, driven out of Russia by anti- Jewish laws, gather in Poland. This explains such facts as the commercial boycott of the Jews in Poland, which is partly a manifestation of the economic energy of the Polish middle class and partly of the tendency of the whole community to strengthen the Polish element in the town populations. The Jews in Poland, it must be mentioned here, in their mass do not belong to the Polish nationality: their language is Yiddish, a German dialect, and they are organised as a separate Jewish nationality against the Poles. In these conditions the struggle against the Jews is a national struggle. It must be firmly stated here that ​this commercial boycott is carried out without any manifestations of violence on the part of the Poles, and that everything written about the use of brutal force by the Poles is pure invention.
One of the results of these fundamental social changes is the limitation of the social rôle heretofore played by the great landowner class. In the past the nobility in Poland constituted the nation itself. It ruled the country without competition on the part of any other class, the middle class being small in numbers and wealth, and the peasants being serfs. In the second half of the nineteenth century the area of great landed property was considerably reduced, at first by the peasant reform and afterwards gradually reduced still more by the selling out of bigger units in lots to peasants. This process of internal colonisation progressed rapidly down to the most recent times, and it is to be expected that after this war, owing to destruction and financial ruin, a great part of the large landed properties will disappear and be colonised by peasants.
Thus on the one hand the class of great landowners lost very much of its power and on the other hand new social elements appeared on the arena and developed great strength. In this way the Polish community lost its old character, and became like other European nations.
III
With regard to the political situation of Poland, there are three divisions of the country. First, there is Austrian Poland, which enjoyed until the outbreak of the war some national freedom and had national ​institutions. Its schools were Polish and so on. Here the chief struggle was for a position of influence in Austria. This struggle became more and more intense and the position of the Poles in Austria became more and more threatened, first, because of the development of the Ukraina nationality in the Eastern part of the country, whose language is the Little Russian dialect, and then by the alliance of Austria with Germany. The Austrian-German alliance gave the Germans more and more influence on the whole of Austrian affairs, and the new tendency was to reduce the importance and influence of the Poles in the Empire.
In German Poland, there was a desperate struggle for national existence against the German system which is very well known. The Polish community here had a position of great strength. For instance, the banking corporations of German Poland had been developed to such perfection that the famous German economist called them a danger to the State. The position was strengthened also by some territorial acquisitions of the Poles, who had acquired parts of the country which did not belong to the Poles at the time of the partition, but whose population is Polish by origin and speaks Polish. All the force of Poland was directed to penetrating that part of the population with Polish ideas, and to a great extent it has succeeded. Silesia began to send to the German Parliament Polish members who belonged to the Polish Club some fifteen years ago, and even in the south of Eastern Prussia, where they were most isolated from the Polish influence and, owing to their religious confession, because they are Lutheran, all their clergy are Germans and the ​work in the schools is done in German—even in that country Polish ideas gradually developed, and so long ago as 1900, in the elections to the German Reichstag the Polish candidate got 6000 votes against his German opponent who obtained 8000.
In Russian Poland the struggle was neither for a position in the Empire, because there was no chance of getting any influential position, nor for national existence, because the national existence of the Poles in Poland proper was not threatened by Russia. It is true that the institutions were Russian and the schools were Russian, but they were unable to Russianise the Poles. The Polish culture showed great vitality against the Russians. The struggle in Russian Poland was for the progress of national civilisation, which was stopped by the policy of the Russian Government before the present war.
All three parts of Poland had their own political struggle, but a close analysis of the political situation of the whole of Poland revealed to the Polish leaders the following facts: first, that the greatest danger threatening the national existence of the Poles came from Germany; for the German view was that, if they wanted to assure for themselves their position on the Baltic coast, they must destroy not only the Poles in German Poland but must look to the future destruction of the kingdom of Warsaw. That means the total destruction of the Polish nation, and that struggle between Poland and Germany is a struggle for life and death. The Germans knew of the renascence of Polish civilisation and realised that, if Poland kept her power to struggle against Germany, sooner or later they must ​lose their position in the east. The second fact realised by the Poles is this: the German policy is the only policy which considers the Polish problem as a whole, which has some logical solution of the Polish problem. Neither Russia nor Austria has such a system, but the Germans have, and German statesmen have already realised that their Polish problem is not limited to the frontiers of the German Empire. Their Chancellor in one of his speeches in German Poland said, "We are struggling not only with our Poles in German Poland, but with the whole Polish nation." The third fact realised by the Poles is that Germany to a certain extent controls the Pohsh policy of the other two Empires. The German tendency in Austria has the effect of reducing the Polish influence in Austria. In Russia, German influence works strongly in the anti-Polish direction. Germany seeks to destroy Polish nationality. She knows that it would not be sufficient to annex a large part of Poland, because that would only strengthen the position of the Poles in Germany. It is much more convenient to keep them as they are and gradually to destroy them, to assure that on neither side of the frontier shall Polish civilisation flourish. So she employs every possible influence in Russia to destroy any policy which supports Polish progress. I may remind you that, when the Polish members in the second Duma brought forward a Bill for the introduction of Polish teaching in the schools of the kingdom of Poland, all the organs of the German semi-official Press published articles in which they said quite openly that Polish teaching introduced into Russian Poland would be a provocation against Germany, ​When the Poles realised that political situation, they employed all their force to come to a reconciliation with Russia. They saw their only salvation was in the defeat of the German power. But that work of reconciliation with Russia was not easy, especially after the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, when it was evident that a war between Russia and her western neighbours, the Central Empires, was inevitable. So the Poles were in a hurry to organise as quickly as possible Polish influence in Russia against the Central Empires. But there was a very great difficulty because of the Poles and because of the Russian Government. The Poles had the long-standing tradition of a struggle against Russia. Between the Poles and the Russians there was a sea of blood shed in secular struggles, and fresh memories of insurrection followed by oppression did not favour the movement of reconciliation. A yet stronger difficulty was the policy of the Russian Government, which was anti-Polish until the outbreak of the present war. There was a curious contradiction between the foreign and home policy of the Russian Government in the period preceding this war. The foreign policy was anti-German, because Russia in her foreign interests was threatened by Germany; but the home policy was pro-German, and, in Poland on the western frontier, supported the Germans against the Poles, owing to the peculiar situation of the Polish Protestants. The Russian authorities, represented chiefly by men with German names, considered the Polish Protestants Germans, and enforced the German language in their schools. The Poles were obliged to fight desperately for the retention of the Polish language in ​their schools, and then came the occupation, of Poland by the Germans in this war. The Germans published an order that German teaching should be introduced into the schools because the Protestants were assumed to be Germans. I was told an interesting story about that. The Protestants of Warsaw sent a deputation to the Governor-General of Warsaw. At the head of them was a Doctor of Protestant Theology of a German University. The deputation told the Governor-General, "We are Poles and we want Polish teaching in our schools." Then the Governor-General said, "Allow me to say, my Government consider all Protestants in Warsaw as Germans," whereupon the Doctor of Protestant Theology answered, "Oh! if that is so it will be very easy for us to become Roman Catholics"; and the German governor made the concession asked for. On that struggle for the organisation of Polish civilisation, public opinion against the Central Empires was at one. In this war, four-fifths of the public opinion of the Poles is on the side of Russia and against Germany and Austria, as can be proved by the experience of the Russian army in Poland. The Poles understood, first, that their national existence is threatened by Germany and that the only chance for their future is the German defeat, and, secondly, that their national rôle is that of a barrier against the progress of Germany in the east. The power of Germany comes not from the west but from the east, from Prussia, from the country built nearly on the Slavonic side, and every progress in the east means a new increase of the German power, and the first thing for Europe to do in the future if she wants to have Germany ​less dangerous is to stop the progress of Germanism in the east.
By what means may it be stopped? In the country of Polish civilisation, that Russian civilisation which is such a great progressive force in the east—it is sufficient to mention its work in the Caucasus and Central Asia—has no constructive power. Therefore, if the country is to be saved from German conquest, if Poland is destined to present a barrier against German progress, Polish civilisation must be given freedom to develop, and that this civilisation is able to fight against German aggression is proved by the struggle of the German Poles. The truth is understood by many enlightened and thoughtful men in Russia, and at their head we see the august person of the Russian Emperor, who gave his approbation to the ideas of the Grand Duke's manifesto addressed to the Poles.