Panther

“ Whilst the most vital national interests of the Czecho-Slovaks and the Jugoslavs clash with those of the Austrian Germans or of the Magyars, those of the Poles nowhere are in conflict with them. On the contrary, the Austrian Poles have their own imperialist status possidendi to maintain in Eastern Galicia, and if their merely provisional connection with Austria rendered a compromise tolerable for them, if the absence of interests clashing with those of the Germans and Magyars rendered it possible, the imperialist and class interests of the Polish gentry in Galicia rendered it necessary. ”

“ The rise of democracy undermined Polish and Magyar imperialism. But the Poles and the Magyars do not intend to give in without a struggle; landed gentry do not commit harakiri for the benefit of their peasantry. The nationality of East Galicia is Little Russian, but the Polish nobility, which owns practically all the big landed estates in the country, has no intention of conceding its government to the Little Russians, just as the Magyar nobles and their new bourgeois associates refuse to submit to democratic Slav and Ruman majorities in the non-Magyar parts of Hungary. ”

“ Yet, whatever German intrigue has managed to do against the Czechs and Jugoslavs in Petrograd (even during this war) , Russia, under any form of government, remained to them the one Great Power with a Slav interest—their “big brother.” But the Poles had nothing to hope for from the pro-Germans at the old St. Petersburg, and even the just claims of nationality raised against Austria-Hungary for the Little Russian provinces ran counter to Polish Jingo-Imperialism in East Galicia. In recent years the position in East Galicia had become more complicated. ”

“ In the slow, everyday fight against the Germans, the Poles of Posnania have acquired the virtues of hard labour and good management, and have gained in determination; they have become economically sound and vigorous, and have achieved a degree of democratic development unequalled in any other part of Poland. But, unfortunately, men learn from their enemies almost more than from their friends. ”

“ Intellectual leaders and heroes arose to fight and suffer in common with the Russian revolutionaries. The glamour of an heroic legend has surrounded these men in the eyes of their countrymen across the Austrian frontier, but over there in Galicia the echoes of the Polish struggle against Tsarism assumed a predominantly national character. An anti-Russian feeling grew up among the Austrian Poles far more melodramatic than in Russian Poland itself. Irishmen resident in Great Britain see their own national problem as part of a wider question ”

“ The Czechs see their entire nation united within the Habsburg Monarchy; could they have transformed that Monarchy in a way which would have realised their national and constitutional claims they would not to-day be working for its destruction. ”

“ But the Poles must also understand to the full their responsibility to the world at large and to the liberty of other nations, and give up the game of reactionary Realpolitik through which, in the past, the honourable name of Pole has only too often been unworthily associated in the political life of Austria and Russia, with the sad activities of the unprincipled politician. ”

“ The Treaty of Vienna is broken all over Europe. War appears inevitable.” “Galicia, that province of ancient Poland, whose acquisition is acknowledged to have been illegal,” runs a resolution passed by the German Estates of Lower Austria on 20 April, 1848, “. . . aims at a reunion with the parts which have been appropriated by Prussia and Russia. It is not for Austria to repress the national aspirations of the Poles. ”

“ They lived in Austria but never felt themselves part of it. Their spiritual centre was not in the Habsburg Monarchy; it lay beyond the frontiers of their own province, in Warsaw, the capital of the kingdom of Poland. The political transformations of Russian Poland have been the determining factor in the history and politics of Galicia. The key to its life is a knowledge of the course of events in Warsaw just as the cause of the-movements of a satellite is revealed in those of its sun. The main political movements in Galicia have received their stimulus from Warsaw ”

“ Irishmen in Ireland have witnessed the profound changes in the attitude of Great Britain, but the children of Irish emigrants in America who have never been either to Ireland or Great Britain are liable to hold to the present day views which are merely a sentimental survival of the Fenian days. ”

“ Historic traditions and similar social conditions and institutions are a link between them—there are hardly any other two nations in Europe whose constitutional and social histories are so much alike. ”

“ In the crisis of 1897 the compact minority of German Nationalists proved stronger than the composite and loosely-knit Slav majority, and, by sheer violence, overthrew the Cabinet supported by the Slav and Roman Catholic majority. ”