Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/113

Rh undertakes a voyage of discovery in Africa, although he was not in a position to take possession of the smallest strip of land for Poland—since there is no Poland—and was even arrested and taken away on a German man-of-war by order of Bismarck.

So depressing is a foreign rule.

And nevertheless this persistent suppression is to the advantage of the nationality it would grind to powder. The peasants are waking up. They teach themselves to read in their Polish prayer-books. They club together and hire a teacher to give them privately all the necessary instruction in the correct writing of their forbidden tongue. Religious persecution especially rouses them and makes them conscious Poles. Before the Prussian Kulturkampf they did not feel themselves to be Poles in Posen; before the persecution of the "United" they did not feel themselves Poles in Russian Poland. When the police interferes against the United priests, as in Lublin, the national consciousness increases and rises in a whole province.

In the next place it is not wholly unfortunate that hardly any Pole can become an officer in the army. It has had the good effect of driving the Poles into paths so foreign to them as those of trade and industry, has contributed greatly to create the beginnings of a productive, working class of citizens. It has finally aided not a little in the advancement of agriculture.

And yet these good influences are manifestly of slight account in comparison with the depressing ones. It seems impossible that Poland should endure under such oppression for more than a hundred years longer. But when we see a people live materially and intellectually in the face of tremendous hindrances, when we follow with interest a course of life and intellectual development which takes place under such conditions—then we may well ask ourselves whether the nation to which we belong, and whose lot in life seems to the Poles to be so enviable, has used the comparatively heavenly conditions, in which it has lived, as it could and ought. And when we see how far the Poles succeed, we are amazed for a moment at a nation like the Danish, which has