Morning journal and courier., 1892-04-16
wAKEmAN,s wANDRRINGs.

wAKEMAN'S wANDERINGs. In Galicia-The Poet Traveller Reach-
 es Remote Galicia-Historie Hints
 The Poles Under Austrian Rule
 Grand Highways and Numberless
 Roadside shrines-A Strange Moun-
 tain Peasantry.
 CRAcow, Austria, March 26. To the Editor of the JOURNAL AND COURIER:
 There are two European Galicias. Each of these in their peasant life possesses great interest to the traveller. Spanish Galicis, comprising the northwestern prov inces of Pontenedra, Lugo, Coruna and Orense, will ever hold for me the most tender recollections. Its Gallegan folk are the bravest, most patient and loyal in all the world. They love their rugged noun tain land with so passionate a devotion that they will suffer untold privation and even death before they will give it up. They become the "Gallegan dog" servants of all Spain, Portugal and Italy for half their lives, bearing inconceivsble contume- ly, sacrifice and suffering that they may finally come back to their dreary crags duu Hllu huu klcub lo tuc ownership of little cabin, tiny patch of land, and the to them blessed right to lay their bones in the same graves as those who have labored, sacrificed and died, in precisely the same way, for ages before them. They are dumb folk, but not even Spanish monarch has even dared attempt their achievement.
 The other Galicia is less tender and win some in any of its aspects. It is indeed immeasurably more sombre and tragic. It is Austrian Poland.
 Every one remembers the history of an- cient Poland; its line of warrior kings; it's splendid and unrewarded victories for Christianity over the Turks; its great uni erature; its kingly commoners and its peas ant kings; and the final treschery of Rus sia's Catherine, which led to repeated dis memberment and partition of old Poland by Russia, Germany and Austria; with the horrors of hundred years of insurrec- tion, murder, slavery and despotism that followed.
 It is all too horrible to dwell upon. Austria's portion out of the Polish mur- der and rapine, Galicia, comprises an area of over thirty thousand square miles, bounded north and east by Russia, on the south by Hungary and Bukovins, and on the west by Prussia and Austrian Silesia. Fully six million souls occupy this area.
 Of these about two and @ quarter mil s.ko Id Russinen, Ruthenens and Ruthenians, whom shall call Ruthenians in these pa- pers, and who are of Russian stock and tongue. A million and half are Jews. The remainder are about equally divided between Austrian and Russian Germans.
 Almost the entire nobility are of Polish extraction and are country loving and liv- ing people. The peasantry are all Poles and Ruthenians. It will therefore be read fly seen that nearly the entire inhabitants of Galician towns and cities are Polish Jews and Germans, the former greatly pre- dominating. To illustrate, this ancient city, whose population does not exceed if ty thousand souls. contains twenty. eight thousand Jews. Lemberg, commercially the leading city of Galicia, has sixty thou sand Jews among it's one hundred thou sand people. And have the word of a friend, a Canadian resident of Kolomes, that among the twenty y-eight thousand in- habitants of the latter city more than twenty-one thousand are Jews.
 Practically then Austrian Galicia pre- sents for study four classes-the Polish and Ruthenian peasantry who, while theo- reticslly free mon, are more slavish than slaves; the ancient Polish nobility who are either rich and great enough to live almost regally in Berlin, London or Paris, or home-loving enough to live upon their own estates something after the simple and pa triarchsl manner of Count Tolstoi, not very far to the north of them; the Jews who financially own both peasant and master body and soul, as we'll as all busi- ness affairs of every name and nature; and the military who relentlessly control them all.
 Poland, which for the first three-quarters of century after it's seizure was quite as cruel as that of the Russian plunder CTS to the north, has had the virtue of not having retained it's more barbarous iniquities. It is still impossible to es cape the clsng of the sabre, the jingle of the spur, the challenge of the sentry and the almost intolerable insolence of the omnipresent soldiery.
 railway carriage or station. They ac- company every coach. They dog the stranger from hotel to countryside and back again with imperturbable effrontery. They enter the home at will; and by their goddess presence sully every sanctuary and polute every shrine; while spies are so thick-swarming among all classes in the guise of officials, merchants, artesans, laborers, peasants and comprising in one form or other more than one-twentieth of the entire population-that the very air is said to 'listen" in Galicia.
 Despite all this the Austrian Poles of Galicis live sIm Paradisa'' in contrast with | their brethren ten miles north of the city, | in Russian Poland. The electoral reform law of 1873 gave Galician Poles direct cleo | tions to the Vienna assembly by districts, ! thus breaking down the old clannish na- I tional Polish interest. The government has wisely encouraged agricultural reforms | and awakened an cumulative spirit between native Poles and Ruthenians and many small but thriving German agricultural colonies. And among other sensible things it has done the one thing which should be first and best done in every farming com | munity in the world-built roads that will vie in their enduring qualities with the finest to be found in England or New Eng. land.
 Indeed, in wandering through Gslicis am not certain but that I would count
 these grand Galician roads as the greatest
 of all blessings of all time to the peasant
 Poles. Their general direction has been
 governed by the course of the great chain
 of Carpathian mountains which forms the
 Hungarian boundary on the south.
 | Away down in the southeast corner oi
 Bukovina, over against wild and untray.
 eraed Bessarabia and wilder Moldavis, this
 great artery of Galacian life and com
 merce begins. Thence to the northeast il
 passes through Kolomea, which has re
 gently come into prominence from being
 the base of operations in the new Gsliciar
 petroleum fields. Thence, through tht
 valley of the Pruth into the valley of tho
 Dniester, it touches ancient Stanislavov
 whence it bears north to Lemberg, tn,
 central and greatest city of Gslicia. From
 Lemberg it winds like the Carpathiani
 around to the west and passes through
 this ancient Polish capital, and thence or
 to Moravia and Vienna.
 On this mighty thoroughfare, fully sev
 en hundred English miles in length, art I oil fha eyreaf rnarkf-founa of Ga1ioia. apf