Lecture No. 4 Poland, Old and New, by Roman Dmavsky. From Russian realities and problems, lectures delivered at Cambridge in August 1916. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Part 1. 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 Vadys, would go with pleasure to Pateruski'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 civilization 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 reduced 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 reuniting 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 are her frontiers? What the number and strength of her people and what the role 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 role 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. One. 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 odour's chief confluent. This territory is divided up between Russia, kingdom of Poland, Austria, Western Galicia, and Germany, Poznania and West Tussia. The total area of these provinces is about 75,000 square miles and their population exceeds 20 million, its density approaching 260 inhabitants per square mile, a very dense population when it is remembered that France has only 190 per square mile. Two. 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 cheaply to Germany, Upper Silesia and the southern part of East Prussia, and to Austria, Austria and Silesia or Tessian, and they represent an area of about 9,000 square miles with almost 3 million inhabitants. Three. 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 southwestern provinces, is in the possession of Russia and which represents an area of about 200,000 square miles with 30 million inhabitants, the Poles form only a more or less considerable minority, 25% in Eastern Galicia and a very small percentage in the eastern most 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 civilization. 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 Russia and in some parts of Silesia, particularly in Tessian, Austria and Silesia, where Polish Protestants initiated the national renaissance in the 19th 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 10th century. In the 17th century, when the Uniat Church was established, the majority of the white and little Russians went over to the Roman Church, but in the 19th 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 in 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 51 million tonnes per annum. Those industries are wholly in German hands, the Poles supplying only the labour. Throughout the second half of the 19th century, Galicia, Austrian Poland, lived exclusively on its agriculture, being a country with the densest rural population in Europe. Laterally 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. French civilisation developed under Western influences. At first they were those of the Roman Church, then those of medieval Germany, later those of the Italian Renaissance, 15th and 16th century. In the 18th and 19th 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, these 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 16th century at the time of the Renaissance 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 19th 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 Europe's, 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 slobs, and even the Hungarian kingdom founded by the Turinian invaders in the Danube Valley. The Byzantine church had spread its teaching all over the Balkan peninsula, among the Greeks and southern slobs, and was converting the eastern slobs of Russia, whose great centre was Kiev. Of all slobs, 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 slob 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 12th century. It appears that Poland, before coming into contact with other European nations and adopting the Christian faith in the 10th 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 mentioned Poland in the 10th 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. This situation between two medieval civilisations determined the whole course of Poland's evolution. It may be mentioned here that the most recent investigations into the beginnings of Polish history show that these wars were preceded by those against the Norsemen and especially against the Danes. They represent the first stage of Poland's struggle for the Baltic. Hints about them are found in the old Norse and Icelandic sagas. It may be mentioned, too, that Shakespeare was somehow acquainted with the Scandinavian tradition of these wars, for when describing the vision of the dead king in the first act of Hamlet Horatio says, go frown he once when in an angry parl he smote the slated Pollux on the ice. This passage has long been the subject of contention, but recent investigations show that in the first half of the 10th century the Danes were the most dangerous enemies of the little kingdom of Poland. These wars, however, end very early in the middle of the 10th century because of the expansion of the German marks toward 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 medieval history. It is a great historical truth that nations trying to cope with their enemies submit to the strongest influences of the most dangerous neighbors whom they are obliged to fight. And so medieval Poland, after adopting the Roman faith introduced there from Bohemia, develops preeminently under the influence of German civilization and German institutions. When she appears in European history, Poland represents a primitive kingdom under the despotic rule of the Piest 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 a 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 15th 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 medieval custom of dividing the country among the sons of the ruler on his death was adopted in the 12th 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 pressure 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 medieval institution introduced from Western Europe, which in Poland attained 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 role. Towards the end of the medieval period, the close communion of Poland with feudal Europe resulted in undermining the despotic rule of the Piests. 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 war against each other, were obliged to reckon with the powerful lords in their dominions. When Poland in the 14th century was again reunited under the last rulers of the Piests dynasty, the kings, in spite of their despotic tendencies, did not attain to the unlimited power of the early Piests. They were obliged to consult the great lords in state affairs. In the end of the 14th century the last Piests died childless, and the successor to his throne, Louis d'Angiot 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 cooperate with the magnates than to struggle against them. And as both those elements occupied the same legal position, the power rested 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 14th 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 Krakow, 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 seafaring nations. This commercial growth and the industrial development of England and Flanders produced a rapid increase in the population of the countries of northwestern Europe, which became a great market for Polish grain. Thus Poland, having lost her commercial importance, gained very favorable conditions for agricultural development. The 15th century is in Poland a period when agriculture and landed property are organized 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 colonization, of the amalgamation of small units, and of expansion towards the southeast to the fertile territories of the ancient Grand Duchy of Kiev, which had been depopulated in the 12th and 13th centuries by the nomads of the steppes and which, under the protection of Poland's military power, were now again colonized. All this work was done by the Polish Gentry, which, availing itself of its newly one 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 Mozovia, 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 15th and 16th centuries to the Lithuanian house of Giacielu, and becoming in the second half of the 16th 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 15th and 16th centuries western universities, particularly those of Italy in the period of the Renaissance, were crowded with young Poles who were more numerous there than other foreigners. The University of Krakow, 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 the refinement of manners and which gave birth to the golden period of Polish literature in the 16th 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 Piests 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 Piests had incorporated some eastern Slavs into their dominions. In the 12th 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 organised 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 14th century, the last king of the Piests dynasty, Kazmir the Great, who gave Poland a great code of laws, the Statute of Wislika, based upon the principle of 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 14th and the beginning of the 15th 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 18th century, till the partitions of Poland. In the second half of the 14th century Poland had two powerful and dangerous neighbors, the Teutonic Order which barred her access to the Baltic and extended its conquests into Polish territories, and the Grand Duque of Lithuania, whose rulers of the Giedemind 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 Hungary, to the Lithuanian prince Giagiello, elected him king of Poland, and in this way realized a personal union between Poland and Lithuania. Lithuania proper, i.e. the northern part of Giagiello's empire, which was still pagan, was baptized by the Poles, converted to the Roman Catholic religion, and exposed to the influence of Polish civilization. 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 Giagiello, 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 civilization. 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 10th century, but belonging to the Eastern Church and to the Byzantine civilization. The close union with Lithuania in the second half of the 16th 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 civilization. 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 Renaissance. Polish civilizing 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 Southeast 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 16th 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 17th she gradually withdraws from Europe becoming more and more isolated in her life as well as in her institutions. In the 17th 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. Part two 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. Politically she had the most democratic constitution. The gentry, her ruling class, formed eight percent 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 western 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 northwest 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 and 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 Sassinianism. But towards the end of the century with the reign of Sigismund III 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 Breast 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 disuniats 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 civilization, with the former gradually absorbing the latter, Poland represented very different stages and types of civilized life. While in the west they lived on a more or less European level, in the southeast on the fertile plains of Ukraine, 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 organization of Cossacks appeared on the Nipur 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 northwestern 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 centers of civilization, 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 organized, bureaucratic and military power. On the other side the absolute kings of Prussia had organized 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 organization 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 18th 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 18th 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 duke 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 19th 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 center 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 to 31, when the Constitution of the Kingdom of Poland was destroyed and Polish educational institutions in Lithuania were suppressed, there appeared new centers of Polish thought, one abroad among the immigrants, chiefly in Paris, another in German Poland in Pozen. The continuity of this intense and independent intellectual life of the nation was never interrupted. In the second half of the 19th century Warsaw became its center and holds its place till the present time in spite of most unfavorable conditions, as the Polish University and Polish schools were suppressed and public education in Russia 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 19th century, the introduction there of Polish public education with two Polish universities in Kraków and Lwów, 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 50 years she could not surpass the Kingdom and Warsaw with all their traditions of the reforming movement of the 18th century, of the duke 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 18th and the first half of the 19th century. The same elements gave national strength the Posen which found itself in a very dangerous situation under Prussian rule. That part of Poland participated in the reforming movement of the 18th century as well as in the life of the duke 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 50 years in conditions most favorable 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 imposing and royal West Prussia, provinces annexed at the partition of Poland, her German territories in East Prussia and Cilicia 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 civilized world. Fortunately for the Poles Posen was the oldest part of the national body, the cradle of the Polish kingdom, with the Polish civilization 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 defense of their nationality, of their ideals and of their mother language, as well as in the economic struggle in the defense of Polish landed property and in industrial and commercial competition. In their economic progress they equaled 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, colonized the towns where the Germans and Jews, the latter supporting Germanism, had been very strong. In the last decades of the 19th century the percentage of Germans in their country was considerably reduced to 38% as against 45% in 1867, while the Jews pushed out by Polish traders emigrated to Germany and have nearly disappeared from the country. They now form only 1% of the population as against 7% 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 Russian methods. But the Kingdom of Poland was a large country with a homogenous Polish population, with fresh traditions of its modern and progressive state, from 1815 to 1831, with its solidly organized 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 proletariat 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 today is already the foremost social force in the country. The 19th 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 19th 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 favorable 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 colonization 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 agricultureists. 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-organized 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 colonization, 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 favored 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 today 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 40 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 50 years of the country's autonomy it made the fostering of the education of the masses its cheap 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 outdistanced Russian Poland in the education of the masses as far back as 20 years ago, but in spite of considerable progress the unfavorable economic condition of the small landowner in this overpopulated 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 proletariat. Here lies the reason why the number of emigrants from Poland has been so great in recent times. Immigration 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 today numbers some three and a half millions, to which total must be added some hundreds of thousands of Poles in southern Brazil and other overseas 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 Westphalia, where in some localities the Polish population today 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 proletariat 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 cooperative 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 role here to foreplayed 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 19th 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 colonization 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 colonized 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. Part three with regard to the political situations 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 Ukraine 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. Cilicia 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 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 Russianize the Poles. The Polish culture showed great vitality against the Russians. The struggle in Russian Poland was for the progress of national civilization 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 renaissance of Polish civilization and realized that if Poland kept her power to struggle against Germany sooner or later they lose their position in the East. The second fact realized 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 realized 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 realized by the Poles is that Germany to a certain extent controls the Polish 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 civilization 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 realized that political situation they employed all their forces 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 neighbors the central empires was inevitable. So the Poles were in a hurry to organize 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 bloodshed in secular struggles and fresh memories of insurrection followed by oppression did not favor 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 considers 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 organization of Polish civilization 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 role 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 civilization that Russian civilization 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 civilization must be given freedom to develop and that this civilization 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 Dukes manifesto addressed to the Poles. End of Lecture 4 Lecture number 5 The Nationalities of Russia by Harold Williams from Russian Realities and Problems Lectures delivered at Cambridge in August 1916 This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. It would not be right to say that the nationalities of Russia are entirely unknown in England. During the last few years especially a great deal has been said and written about a number of the nationalities under Russian rule. The Finnish, Polish, Armenian, Jewish and Georgian questions have all been discussed in England. But there is one disadvantage in the mode of discussion that has hitherto prevailed in this country. These questions have been viewed not as a whole but in segments. They have been seen as moments, as phases in some great dim struggle of which the full meaning is hardly realized. Most of the questions have been dealt with from a purely political point of view. The sufferings of Finns, Armenians and other nationalities of Russia have been loudly proclaimed. We have heard of their grievances. We have heard the voice of their complaint. But we have rarely heard the voice of their joy or the accents of their daily life. Now I do not think we can fully understand the meaning of any one of these questions if it is rested entirely from its context. Appeals have been made to our human instincts. The generous sympathies of English men and English women have been enlisted on behalf of many causes. But if we were to put some of these causes side by side and compare them, we should find ourselves confronted by perplexing anomalies. Consider together, for instance, the Finnish and the Jewish questions or again the Armenian and the Georgian questions. You will discover strange contradictions that are at first sight startling and perplexing. You will ask questions and will probably arrive at broader and more general conclusions. Your humane instincts will be vindicated. The impulse of sympathy will still be strong, but it will be intelligent and clear. When I think of the nationalities of Russia, I do not think, first of all, of political struggles, of debates in the Duma, or of newspaper articles. I think of certain more intimate aspects of the lives of these very numerous and varied peoples, of certain episodes which show the way their thoughts are tending, without regard to the vicissitudes of political conflicts. Politics are necessary, whether we like or dislike them, but politics are a system of relations, and we cannot understand relations unless we, first of all, realize what bodies they are between which the relations subsist. I remember reading, two or three years ago, a book by a tartar mullah named Musa Bikiev, who is called by many admirers in Russia, the Luther of Islam. The book was on a very technical subject, the subject of fasting when the days are long. As you know, during the month of Ramadan, the Muhammadin must fast from sunrise to sunset, and this particular theological question was discussed by Musa Bikiev in this book. But the work is not wholly a dry theological treatise. The writer describes a journey he took in Finland. He had interesting conversations with a Finnish professor of the Mongolian language. He visited Tamerforce, the Manchester of Finland, and records his admiration for Finnish education, Finnish institutions, and Finnish industries. Then he took a journey further north still to Torneia, not very far from the polar circle at the head of the Gulf of Vothnia, and there with a party he ascended a hill and saw the midnight sun. The sight of the midnight sun evokes from Bikiev a very fine passage on the Majesty of God, and then he returns to his difficult theological question. How can Muhammad's precepts on fasting that had in view a hot country like Arabia with its long nights be observed in the land of the midnight sun? Bikiev was born in the Russian Empire at Kazan on the Volga. He saw the midnight sun also in the Russian Empire, and the fact that impressed me was that it was the extreme diversity of social and geographical conditions prevailing in the Empire that quickened in him this interesting process of thought that stimulated this fruitful work of theological inquiry. Then I think of a young Buryat scholar, a member of a semi-nomad tribe in the east of Siberia. One evening in Petrograd I walked with this young Buryat along the banks of the Neva and he described to me a very interesting visit he had made to the great Buddhist monastery of Lhasa in Tibet. He told me of the wonderful library of Buddhist works and of the magnificent image of Buddha Maitreya in the monastery, and then he went on to tell me of this very interesting attempt to transliterate his Buryat-Mongol mother tongue by means of Roman characters. That again was a curious instance of the varied mental processes that are going on among the nationalities within the Russian Empire. On the one hand a keen interest in Tibet, the home of that type of Buddhism which the Buryats profess, and on the other a hunger for Western civilization that led to an attempt to adopt the Latin alphabet to the Buryat language. I recall again a young Georgian who lived and studied in Petrograd and in order to earn a living he secured a post as proofreader on a Russian newspaper. But the chief interest of his life was to translate Sophocles from Greek into Georgian verse. These are the things I like to think about when I think of the nationalities of Russia. The number of languages spoken within the Russian Empire is something over a hundred and the number of languages spoken will give some idea of the very great variety of grades of culture and of civilization there are within the Empire. There are almost as many grades of culture and civilization as there are grades of climate upon that great plain. If you take for instance the alphabets of the various newspapers published in the Russian Empire you will see what an extraordinary variety of forms of culture are intermingled there. You have the Gothic letters in the German, Swedish and Finnish papers. Then you have the Roman characters in Polish and Lithuanian. You have the Hebrew alphabet in the Yiddish and Hebrew press and literature. You have the black square Armenian characters and you have the beautifully rounded Georgian characters. You have the Arabic alphabet for the Tartar and the Kyrgyz languages. You have the Mongol characters for the Buryat language. You have Russian characters for great Russian, little Russian and white Russian. Each of these alphabets represents a very different type of culture. The Russian alphabet stands for the old Byzantine culture. The Gothic characters stand for the Germanic culture of the northwest of Russia. The Armenian and Georgian alphabets represent the ancient civilizations of Transcaucasia. The Arabic alphabet stands for the great Muhammedan culture which dominated the Middle East and still has great power there. The Mongol alphabet, which is ultimately derived from the Syriac alphabet, shows how the Semitic culture of Mesopotamia impinged at one time on the ancient civilization of China. Then you have an extraordinary variety of forms of speech. Several great families of languages are represented. You have the Indo-European family, including Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Latish, Swedish and also German so far as it is spoken in Russia. Then you have what is called the Finno-Ugric family including the Finnish of Finland and the Finnish languages of the east of European Russia and also the languages related to Hungarian on the borders of European Russia and Siberia. You have the Tartar or Turkish languages represented by Kazan Tartar, Azerbaijan Tartar, Crimean Tartar, Bashkir, Sart or Uzbek, Kyrgyz and Turkoman. You have the Mongolian family including Buryat and Kalmyk which latter is spoken near the mouth of the Volga. You have the Manchu family represented by the languages of Tonguses and other tribes in Siberia. You have the strange and curious languages whose origin and connections are yet hardly known in the far east of Siberia. Some languages apparently related to the languages of the North American Indians and others to the language of the Eskimo. Then in the Caucasus you have those extremely interesting languages related to Georgian and also to Armenian languages which are believed by the scholar who knows them best, Professor Mar of Petrograd, the son of a Scotch father and a Georgian mother to form what he calls a Geophetic group which is a kind of cousin to the Semitic group of languages. Thus the languages of the empire represent an extraordinary variety of linguistic tendencies and of lines of linguistic evolution. Within this broad expanse of Russian territory men have elaborated various forms of speech which mean various ways of thinking various ways of looking at the world various efforts to rise to a spiritual consciousness. All these tendencies have gone their own varied ways in the course of history. They have come into conflict. They have influenced each other. And now we find this wonderful variety of forms of speech and forms of thought of spiritual reaction all linked together in the vast territory of the Russian empire all linked together in one complex imperial organization. I think if we realize this we shall realize one very important fact. I wish we could at last get out of the way of thinking of Russia as a huge piece of the map as something flat and given and static and solid and stationary. Russia is not that. Russia is a process. Russia is one huge process of evolution in which all these various nationalities play a very important and very hopeful part. We hardly realize, I think, that Russia is only beginning to be. Russia has been forming. Russia has, during the centuries of her long struggle on the Great Plain, been gathering together the materials for a great existence for some great new experiment in human life in this world of ours. The materials have been gathered together by a long series of conquests, by a long series of struggles, by great efforts in trade and colonization. And now, as far as we can see, this part of the work is done. The materials are there and they are waiting for their elaboration. Russia has made her notes, she has outlined her plan, and now has come the time for her to write the great volume which she has destined to write in history. I have said there are over one hundred languages in the Russian Empire, but that does not mean that there are a hundred nationalities. A great many of these languages are spoken only by what we may call ethnic units which still linger in the region of mere folklore, which have not obtained any grasp upon civilization, which are liable to assimilation, which will probably in process of time disappear as separate ethnic communities. In this way, in the northwest of Russia, Finnish tribes are being assimilated and are gradually disappearing. Many of these tribes are extremely interesting in themselves, and few parts of the world are so interesting for the ethnologist as is Russia, with its great variety of local customs, its myths, its religions, the wonderful traditions of many of the tribes in the Caucasus, the many strange customs going back to ancient times, leading back to all kinds of strange and unexpected connections with older civilizations, so that in the far north of Siberia you may find curious reminiscences of the wisdom of the Ganges, all kinds of curious relics of customs, half familiar to us and half unknown. But on the other hand there are several ethnic units which have by various means in various ways grasped the apparatus of civilization for themselves and have attained the rank of nationalities and it is with these nationalities that I particularly wish to deal in these lectures. The position of the nationalities of the Russian Empire is not quite so strange, not quite so foreign as it seems at first sight to Englishmen. After all, there is a very close analogy with our British Empire. Take the ordinary Russian university, such Russian universities as those of Petrograd and Moscow. You will find there, in certain respects, a very close analogy even with Cambridge. I mean so far as the character of the students goes. Here in Cambridge there are, or were, English students from various countries. There are Scotchmen, Irishmen, South Africans, English and Dutch. There are Indians from various parts of India. There are French Canadians and British Canadians. There are many from the straight settlements from Australia and New Zealand, you will find something of the same kind of thing in Petrograd or Moscow. You will find not only Russian students there, but Poles, Armenians, Georgians, Tatars, and lately even Turkomans who in a work published in England about 30 years ago were called, quite rightly, the man-stealing Turkomans. The difference between the British Empire and the Russian Empire is that in Russia there are no dividing oceans. If we could think of the British Empire as being all of a piece with all its great variety of people jostling each other on a great plane, we should realize more clearly the national problems of the Russian Empire. Russia has, as it were, its Irish problem, its South African problem, its French Canadian question, its colonial question, and all these questions are juxtaposed and intermingled very closely and are all entangled in a most extraordinary way with the question of the Russian population which is spread all over the Empire and very often cuts through the territory occupied by other nationalities. You have this great plane which is in a sense a sea with the Russians as the great colonizers with the nomad tribes as the pirates who in the long run were subdued and tamed to Russian rule. How did this very complex organization called the Russian Empire with its great varieties of nationalities come to be what it is? I don't want to tell over again the story of Russian history which has been very ably set before you in several lectures during the week but there are two or three points to indicate which have a bearing on my subject. If you will remember first of all a number of loosely organized Slavonic tribes coalesced and formed at Kiev a state which for a time flourished and was then swept away by the Tartar invasion. Then these Slavonic tribes who by this time were known as Russians transferred their center to the Upper Volga and the Oka River and afterwards established a new center in Moscow where they began to collect the scattered fragments of the Russian people. The Russian ruler at Moscow subdued the various Russian principalities around him and gradually formed a strong national unit. Then using Moscow as a kind of fulcrum he began the great work of expanding over the Great Plain a very curious expansion which apparently by a strange historical necessity could not stop until the limits of the plane were reached. The Moscow rule extended southward and subdued the Tartars. Then it began to extend westwards and came into contact with the Poles. There was a great crisis. There seemed to be a danger of the Russian state disappearing entirely under the blows of the Poles and the Swedes. There was absolute anarchy and absolute disorganization and the Russian state was saved by the heroism of the Russian people who took the work of evicting the invaders into their own hands. Then the work of building up began again. It continued throughout the seventeenth century continued slowly with a tendency towards the west towards the Baltic and with a steady tendency towards the Black Sea. And then finally Peter the Great by a stroke of genius decided upon a new capital. He wanted a new fulcrum for the more critical leverage of the century that was to come. He founded Petrograd and using Petrograd as a lever Russia continued her work of expansion along the Baltic seaboard. First of all the Baltic provinces were secured. Then the northern shore of the Black Sea was secured by the annexation of the Crimea in the reign of Catherine the Great. Next the Kingdom of Georgia became annexed to Russia by the voluntary act of its own ruler. That was the beginning of the conquest of the Caucasus. Then after the shock of the Napoleonic wars during the nineteenth century Russia completed her great work of expansion by extending out to the far east of Siberia and by conquering Central Asia. Just before the Napoleonic wars there happened that very tragical and very strange and mysterious thing the partition of Poland the three partitions of Poland which placed a very large territory in the west and southwest under the rule of Russia. During the nineteenth century Russia became a very active participant in western civilization and there was an extraordinary development of civilization in Russia expressing itself in a very great variety of ways in literature, in art, in economic and social life and in the development of political forms. This new and energetic and growing Russia that was for the first time conscious of her great power and her great resources that through itself as a people heart and soul into the work of civilization had around it a great variety of nationalities and it is a very remarkable thing that during the nineteenth century in Russia there was not only a very great and very brilliant Russian national movement but several other national movements were either revived or began their work on the territory of the Russian Empire. You have heard of a magnificent Polish revival that gained its power and its pathos from the intense suffering of the Poles who had lost their inheritance. The nineteenth century saw the beginning and the rich development of the Finnish national movement. In the Caucasus the ancient civilizations of Armenia and Georgia which had sunk into decrepitude which had lost their vigor and their power were revived very largely because the contact of this old stream of civilization with the news stream of Russian civilization then little by little through the force of example or the force of local conditions there arose other national movements. Russia became the center of the very interesting and very manifold Jewish movement. Then there came the Lehish and the Estonian movements and in the Baltic region farther eastward arose a Mohammedan or Turkish movement. Then finally even some of the tribes of eastern Siberia were touched and there appeared the faint beginnings of a national movement among the Mongol Buddhists. All these movements are very varied. Some are very strong. Some have a very clear perception of their objects. Some have already produced very definite results and can show a record of bright achievement. Others are weak and feeble. Some of the movements draw their vigor from sources of their own. Others are dependent almost entirely upon Russian civilization drawing their material from Russian civilization translated into their own tongue and using it as a stimulus of the national force of their own people. Some are independent of Russian civilization. Some are more or less dependent. Some are dependent partly on Russian and partly on Western civilization. Some are dependent exclusively on Russian civilization for the material with which they are building their new national home. There is an extraordinary variety in these movements and where there is movement there is conflict. There is conflict with the dominant people with the Russians or rather less with the people than with the policy of the government. Then there are fierce conflicts of the various nationalities amongst themselves and the quarrels between the nationalities are very often much more violent than the conflict between Russia and any of the nationalities. There is conflict there is movement there is progress there is disappointment there is hope there is tragedy. In the vast process that is Russia we find as it were cosmical forces at work tremendous cosmical forces of good and evil on a scale that we in our quieter empire are hardly able to realize. And in this cosmical struggle there is tragedy deep tragedy and I think the note of tragedy will never be entirely absent from Russian history because of the greatness of Russia because of the tremendous task that lies before this group of peoples on the vast plain that stretches between the Baltic the Black and the White Seas afar to the Pacific and the frontiers of the Chinese empire and the borders of Persia. There is tragedy in this. We cannot eliminate the tragedy but at the same time in spite of conflict which comes from movement in spite of suffering which is due to participation in the very great very complex historical process in spite of baffling enigmas and crushing disappointments which we find ourselves unable to explain in spite of all this there is joy in Russia the joy of all these peoples of various origins of various hopes of various faiths uniting on that vast expanse to create new types of rich human lives to produce some new manifestation of the power of the human spirit which shall bring wealth and power and happiness to the world for the sake of that great joy the pain and the tragedy can be borne after the outbreak of the war there was a wonderful scene in the Russian Duma one after another deputies representing various nationalities of the empire arose to declare the devotion of their peoples to the great cause for which Russia had gone to war and their determination to make every effort and every sacrifice in order that Russia with the allies should secure the victory over Germany and Austria it was an amazing scene to me it was a revelation through study I had come to the conclusion the fixed conviction that underlying all the divergent interests of the nationalities there was a sense of unity for years we had heard of suffering and oppression for years we had heard of protests from all sides of the empire against police and government measures of all kinds and it appeared on a superficial view that there was no general interest at all that the various nationalities were simply waiting for an opportunity to break away from Russia that Russia at the first shock might fall asunder that I could not believe but these declarations in the Duma showed me as I had never realized before that Russia with all her variety was one and that in a great moment of history when she realized her purpose and her destiny her sons felt suddenly and with a great joy that they had a common aim much has happened since then many sad things many disappointing things in some cases the enthusiasm is not so strong as it was then but the fundamental fact remains the fact that we have to take account of today that all these various nationalities in spite of their divergencies constitute a unity in what does this unity consist first of all in all this apparent chaos and welter of things and races there are certain harmonizing facts there is a certain proportion there are definite regions which are mutually complementary economic regions geographical regions the basins of the great rivers the mountains and various parts of the plain all constitute separate regions which in a curious way balance each other or interlacent supplement each other but the chief factor in the unity of the Russian empire is the Russian people first of all because of its numerical preponderance of the 170 millions of inhabitants of Russia nearly 100 millions are Russians of one kind or another and this fact constitutes one of the great differences between Austria and Russia in Austria there is no one nationality that very largely outnumbers the others whereas in Russia you have this tremendous numerical preponderance of the Russian element the influence of the Russian element is felt everywhere because of the activity of the Russians because the administrative organization is in their hands because their language is spoken in all the ends of the empire it is the language of administration it is the main language of trade of intercourse between the various nationalities and you will find that the Russian language influences very deeply the present day languages of nearly all the nationalities of the empire just as English strongly influences present day Welsh then again most of the nationalities of the empire are very largely led by Russian civilization they get their knowledge of modern European civilization through Russian channels the civilized values that they handle are derived very largely from Russian sources are very often direct translations from the Russian and this powerful combination of physical and moral factors in a very curious and subtle way binds these nationalities together in spite of their great divergencies and in spite of features of Russian administration that very often arouse irritation indignation and protest on the one hand you have Russian administration a very complex organization a very deep rooted organization which is now undergoing a change is very slowly and with great pain adapting itself to new economic and social conditions is being loosened so as to allow greater space and room for economic and national development this administrative organization does as a matter of fact hold to a large extent the nationalities together on the other hand partly aided by this administrative organization partly thwarted by it you have the extraordinary energy of Russian civilization which has very quickly outrun the political organization which is developed by leaps and bounds which by an innate vigor of its own does most constantly affect every inhabitant of the empire and catches all the nationalities in the sweep of one great historical tendency then again Russian civilization while it has an assimilating effect while it seems to mold the various peoples of the empire after one type has at the same time the effect of creating a new variety first of all you have an apparent assimilation you find the old customs disappearing and people becoming simply modern you find a dreary monotony in dress in habits in amusements you see the cinematograph in all corners of the empire flashing out the same pictures that are shown in Paris and London and New York the gramophone in the Urals drones out tartar songs and it all looks very melancholy and very depressing but at the same time under this appearance of assimilation there are stimuli which provoke to new action all the elements of variety the first stage is the new fashion the second stage is the new initiative in each region and in each nationality there is first of all mere imitation and then a growing realization that these new civilized values can be adopted by the particular nationality can be made their own by the various nationalities of the empire and can be used as elements of entirely new creations that is the marvelous fact that while the old varieties are disappearing a very wonderful new variety is arising taking up into itself all the most vital elements of the old variety and carrying them on to an entirely new era of civilization the Russian people then constitutes the chief factor in the unity of the empire now I have a very difficult task before me I have to describe in the very short time that remains at my disposal some of the nationalities that compose the Russian empire I must admit that this summer school has filled me with deep admiration during the past week I have seen you ladies and gentlemen taking in a knowledge of Russia in rapid deep breaths and the keen interest you are displaying in a country to which I am deeply attached has touched me enormously I may say the same on behalf of my Russian friends who have come here to lecture to you still the task I have before me is very difficult and the number and variety of the nationalities of Russia is so great that I cannot hope to do more now than to note some of the leading features in a few typical national questions look first of all at the Russians of whom there are nearly 100 millions in all of all types the great Russian the little Russian and the white Russian the three great divisions of the Russian people you have heard in other lectures the history of the elements that made up the Russian people of the wandering Slav tribes which gradually assimilated a great many of the peoples of the plain thus in the north and center in great Russia there is a very large admixture of Finnish blood whilst in the south among the little Russians there is a large admixture of Turkish blood the white Russians of the west are considered by many scholars to be the purest specimens of the Slav race now living I shall not dwell at length on the great Russians of whom a great deal has been written and been said but I should like to say something about the little Russians you have perhaps heard something of the Ukraine movement you know that the Austrian government during this war and before it has published maps indicating that as the result of a German victory they hoped for the creation of a Ukrainian state comprising a part of Galicia and a very large part of southern Russia I have seen pamphlets written by little Russians or Ruthenians or Ukrainians as they are variously called which advocate plans very much of the same kind I must admit that the Ukraine movement is a very puzzling movement because if you look at the great Russian and little Russian languages you will see that practically there is hardly more difference between them than between English and Scotch when I was in Galicia last year I spoke with Ruthenian peasants I spoke Russian with slight modifications and they spoke their own language and we understood each other perfectly I had much more difficulty in understanding a cabman in Newcastle the other day than I had in understanding these people although their language is declared to be a distinct language from Russian and a distinct literature is being created in this language the fact of this difference in language is used as an argument sometimes by extreme Ukrainians for the establishment of a separate Ukraine state and sometimes by the more moderate Ukrainians as a plea for the establishment at any rate of a separate administrative region for the whole of the Ukraine or the greater part of southern Russia it is a very difficult question there are certain differences of tradition very powerful differences between the great Russians and the little Russians their folk songs are different their music is different and their temperament is different in some respects the southern Russian is the Irishman of Russia then again there are differences of historical tradition there never was an actual distinct little Russian state in the complete sense of the word in the middle ages when the tide of tartar invasion began to recede the southern steppes were overrun by Cossacks some of whom were great Russians and some of whom were little Russians that is they spoke the southern Russian dialect they formed a military organization whose allegiance swayed between Moscow and Poland they lived a very free and interesting life they were altogether a most interesting people but there never was a little Russian state in the full sense of the word there were differences in the development of civilization there were differences in the church organization which in southern Russia was much more democratic there were and are very great differences in land tenure and there were certainly very great differences in spirit and all these factors have created a marked distinction between the great Russian and the little Russian but again after the southern steppes had been conquered by Russia and after the region had been gradually drawn into the general life of the Russian empire a certain unifying a certain assimilating process went on and the southern regions began to feel themselves more and more a part of a larger whole then in the early part of the last century arose a movement to promote the literary development of the little Russian language and the movement received a very powerful stimulus in the work of a very talented poet called Taurus Chevchenko whose poems have almost become folk songs among the little Russians of today this movement did not constitute any danger to the Russian empire it might have developed into a movement like the Provençal movement in France but when reaction set in after the great reforms of the early 60s the Russian government took alarm and the language movement in little Russia was very largely suppressed it was only permitted to print and publish in little Russian fiction or poetry and that not in the orthography chosen by the people themselves but in the orthography of the great Russian language this aroused strong protest among the Ukrainians the leaders of the movement were arrested and exiled then the movement passed to Galicia where the eastern section of the population is little Russian or Ukrainian Lemberg became the new center and Galicia became what the Ukrainians called the Piedmont of the Ukrainian movement this development found favor with the Austrian government which saw in it partly a bulwark against Russia and partly a means of checking the growth of Polish power in Galicia then later on it was taken up by Germany as a means of impairing the unity of Russia in 1905 the embargo on the Ukrainian language was removed in Russia great activity was developed various works appeared newspapers novels histories poetry translations and so on in great quantities and the Ukrainian movement gained a new life in Russia demands were presented for the autonomy of Ukraine but the conception of the boundaries of the new state varied considerably moreover in the last 50 years the great Russian language has made great progress over the whole of southern Russia and although the population of southern Russia is now in the bulk little Russian there is a big streak of great Russian population amongst the Ukrainians sometimes there are islands of great Russians and sometimes they are to be found in broad strips and the language spoken in the towns is not the little Russian but rather a variety of great Russian with Jewish and occasionally Polish and little Russian elements it is a harsh language it is a kind of new dialect of great Russian and you will find that as economical development progresses as the industrial centers in southern Russia increase as the population migrates and mingles with other elements the confusion will grow greater you will find a sort of admixture between great Russian and little Russian and the process of assimilation will develop more rapidly and all this makes it difficult to determine how far any independent Ukrainian civilization is possible in southern Russia I think the natural tendency is for the Russian literary language to gain the upper hand even if all the present administrative restrictions were removed because the removal of administrative restrictions would give Russian civilization even greater power than it has now at the same time it is perfectly obvious that if there is a genuine demand for instruction in Ukrainian in the schools if it is found that Ukrainian children grow more rapidly into intelligent citizens if they receive primary instruction in their mother tongue if there is an increasing development of Ukrainian literature it seems to me perfectly obvious that no administrative obstacles should be put in the way of the movement and then my opinion is that ultimately after very considerable vacillations this southern Russian language movement might in the great complexities of the Russian Empire again assume largely a Provençal form and as for the questions of administration local government and so on I think they might be solved in connection with the general tendency of decentralization within the Empire I do not wish to say anything absolutely definitive about the Ukrainian movement because I am not entirely convinced by the very strong arguments of my friend Dr. Struve and at present I should like to leave the question open as to the white Russians their dialect is so little different from great Russian that it is hard to imagine that a white Russian movement of any considerable extent could arise there is an incipient movement which is now being used by the Germans as a means of propaganda in Vilna because the Germans wish to emphasize even minor distinctions between the Russian nation coming to the non-Russian nationalities in the northwest we have Finland I simply cannot discuss at length the Finnish question in the short time we have this morning but there are two or three things I should like to say first of all Finland is mainly populated by the Finnish people who are composed of three Finnish tribes who driven there by the northern movement of the Slavs in their turn drove the laps to the far north the Finnish people of Finland are not isolated their territory is geographically and geologically distinct from the neighboring Russian territory but they themselves as a people are by no means wholly isolated in fact they became a unity as a result of the competition between Sweden and Russia around the Gulf of Finland in the early days of Russian history the Russians fought constantly with the Swedes and the Finnish tribes passed sometimes under Russian rule sometimes under Swedish rule until finally Swedish rule was established in the whole of what is now Finland and overall but a certain portion of the Finnish people who were left outside in the governments of Archangel and Olinetz these were orthodox whilst the Finns in Finland were first of all Catholics and then when the reformation came became Lutherans thus the main body of the Finns were almost exclusively under the influence of Swedish civilization and there was practically no Finnish movement until after the Finns came under Russian rule the very peculiar conditions under which Finland became incorporated into the Russian empire with complete internal autonomy with a kind of ring fence separating the Finns from the rest of the peoples of the empire made it possible to develop within Finland a very interesting and a now very strong national movement which first of all fought very hard against Swedish predominance Swedish was the dominating language of the state the language of the aristocracy of the towns of culture and of civilization generally and then when the Finns suddenly discovered in the 30s through the labors of the scholar Elias Launrott that they had a great national epic there was a sudden up rush of national pride amongst the Finns a great many people in the towns who had hitherto called themselves Swedes suddenly discovered that they were Finns adopted the Finnish language and adapted it to literary purposes and then began the great contest for equal rights for the Finnish language within Finland it was won by the Finns and Swedish and Finnish gained equal rights in public life the Finnish movement rapidly developed and during the last 30 years its progress has been most extraordinary and so the Swedes who were once predominant find themselves being elbowed out of the land in which they were masters the new Finnish literary language is in spirit though not in structure or vocabulary Scandinavian it has produced literature not great perhaps but very interesting with a number of talented authors of whom the novelists Johani Aho and Arvid Jörnefeldt are probably the best some excellent poetry some very interesting art and also an extraordinarily effective scientific apparatus an apparatus of learning of which the University of Helsingfors is the active center in the last few years the autonomy of Finland has been limited in many ways there has been a conflict between the Finns and the Russian government I cannot enter into the details of this conflict now but I can only say that amongst the nationalities of the empire the Finns occupy a very peculiar and so far distinct place and as to their assimilation by the Russians or any other people in the world there is no question whatever because there is no people in the world so tenacious of their nationality as the stubborn hard-headed Finns then south of Finland you come to the Baltic provinces which include three nationalities the Germans who are in the great minority but hitherto have had nearly all the power in their hands the Estonians and the Lats the Estonians and the Lats have in common their general subjugation to the Germans who by means of the order of the sword a branch of the Teutonic order conquered them in the 13th century and after fierce battles subdued them and held them in serfdom until the beginning of the last century but there is a great deal of difference between the Estonians and the Lats in spite of the community of their historical experience and their long subjugation to German culture the Estonians are related to the Finns and the common people of Estonia and the Finns understand one another perfectly well although the educated Finns and Estonians understand one another with greater difficulty the Lats are an entirely different people and are akin to the Lithuanians who live farther south the Estonians and the Lats owe the beginnings of their own culture to their hard training under the Germans there are no people in the world who hate the Germans more than the Estonians and Lats do because of the bitterness of their serfdom the hatred is simply elemental if you look into the past history of the Lats and Estonians you will find that occasionally the Barons were on excellent terms with their serfs treated them kindly provided education for them and helped them in various ways but the general effect of serfdom was so cruel that what it was can only be realised by seeing the vindictive hatred of the Lats and the Estonians for their former masters the hatred of the Lats was expressed in the most violent form in the Lattish Revolution of 1905 which was followed by cruel repression in the early part of the following year the new civilisation of the Lats and the Estonians is partly of German origin and partly Russian but the intercourse of both peoples with the Russians is growing closer and they are subjected more and more to the influence of Russian civilisation and culture then south of the Lats you have the Lithuanians in the governments of Vilna and Grotna and the Suvalki government in the Kingdom of Poland I wish I had more time to tell you about the Lithuanians they are one of the most interesting peoples in the Russian Empire their language is extremely old with forms as old as Sanskrit and I have an idea that the Lithuanians have stayed near their original home during the whole course of their existence there is a curious feeling about them their neighbours call them sorcerers and wizards up to the 17th century they worshipped their gods in groves and had an institution of vestal virgins who kept the sacred fire burning there were prophets and soothsayers and there were curious manifestations of tree worship then the history of Lithuania and its contact with the Teutonic Order is extremely interesting but all that wonderful story I have no time to tell now the Lithuanians too have lately developed their national movement with its newspapers, novels, poems and its apparatus of propaganda I have left myself hardly time to speak of one very important question that of the Jews but I must ask your very careful attention to this for just a few moments longer I have not spoken of the Polish question for two reasons in the first place it has been already admirably expounded to you by Mr. Roman Tomowski and other lecturers during the week and in the second place the Polish question stands on a quite distinct plane from the question of the other nationalities of the Russian Empire the question of which I have now to speak is one of which very much is heard in England it is a burning question and indeed I think it the most difficult question in the whole Russian Empire and that is the Jewish question the greater part of the Jews came into the Russian Empire with the partition of Poland and the region they were compelled by law to inhabit comprises the western and southern provinces of European Russia the so-called Pale of Settlement which through the vicissitudes of the war has been abolished I hope forever now the Jewish question is so very difficult it is such a tragic question that it cannot be discussed only in terms of current politics it cannot be understood if it is made the subject of invective on either one side or the other it is too deep it cannot be treated casually or flippantly and one thing I should like to establish is that while the Jewish question is most acute in Russia it is not only a Russian question but a world question and even if the present political disabilities of the Jews in Russia are removed the Jewish question will not have been finally solved the Jewish question constantly present and ever-evading solution is one of the very strange experiences by which the human race in persistent self-questioning is finding its way to a clearer knowledge of itself it is a difficult question the finest of the Jews realize this difficulty and it has led some of them to adopt as their ideal Zionism or the establishment of a Jewish center of civilization in Palestine but in Russia the Jewish question is most acute first of all because nowhere else are there so many Jews in a compact mass and in the second place because of the marked inadequacy of Russian administrative methods as they are brought to bear on the complex necessities of the case these are the two elements which make the Jewish problem in Russia so acute and perplexing on the one hand you have the cruel and intolerable oppression of the Jews you have the perpetual humiliation and irritation of the Jews in the small towns who have no room for expansion who live poor and miserable lives you have the long long tale of their bitter suffering and at the same time you have such facts as the growing power of the Jewish element in finance in Petrograd and Moscow in banking and commerce and industry and the very powerful influence of the Jews in the intellectual life of the Russians you have these two sides and both these sides must be clearly born in mind but the interesting thing in Russia is that the very intensity of Jewish suffering in Russia stimulates the efforts of the Jews and of those who understand who the Jews are and what they are to find a real solution these efforts go in various directions on the one hand there is a constant fight to secure elementary rights of existence in Russia on a level with the other inhabitants of the Great Plain and at the same time there is an effort which is now largely crowned with success to bring about a new Jewish national revival and the inner life of the Jews in Russia is extremely interesting because of this conflict of aims and ambitions and because in the long run this movement is illumined by a spiritual light I believe that after the war after the great struggle not only with the enemy but with ourselves with our own limitations is fought through after the war is won not only will the Jews secure in Russia the conditions for a tolerable existence but I believe that other nationalities including many of whom I have had no time to speak those 20 millions of Russian Turks who are now awakening to a new national life the Armenians the Georgians and all the rest who are struggling towards a new civilization that all these nationalities will secure liberty for themselves and liberty to cooperate to the full extent of their powers and with a complete confidence in the value of their own contribution in the great work which this enormous and complex Russian empire is called to accomplish in this strange adventure of spiritual discovery in the great march of these manifold groups of men into the unseen future I believe that all the nationalities of the Russian empire will combine as a choir of many voices with many wonderful instruments to sing a joyful song of conquest over the mystery which surrounds us all End of lecture five