Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/31

Rh meant the adherents of the Roman Catholic creed in old Poland, and that the prohibition would not be extended to others. But on inquiry as to who the Poles were, the answer was: "The Governor-General decides the nationality," an answer which left no hope.

No blow could have struck the Polish national cause more severely than this ukase; for no country lies nearer to the hearts of the Poles than Lithuania, which since the days of Jagiello and Jadwiga (since 1386) has been united with Poland, and in spite of the difference of language, has felt itself to be a Polish land. Many of the leading men of Poland—natives of the region—have echoed the celebrated words of Mickiewicz:—

Lithuania, like health art thou my fatherland! He who has never felt the want of thee has never known thy worth.

It was natural that when possible they evaded the law by occupying and cultivating as tenants the land they did not dare to possess as owners, a course which was facilitated by the fact that the principal Russians, who had government donations of Lithuanian estates, soon felt themselves so isolated and so much out of place in the country, that they were content to abandon their new possessions, or at least to leave the care and cultivation of them to others. The danger that after a while the Russians would buy up all the land and soil of Lithuania thus seemed to be warded off. But a short time ago a new ukase of December 27, 1884, which set Warsaw in a blaze, ordered that no Pole—and the Governor-General determines the nationality—should be allowed to lease, act as steward for, or manage the estates in any of the parts of the country specified in the previous order, and—which seems still more rigorous to Western Europeans—this ukase has a retrospective force, so that all the earlier contracts of lease or stewardship were declared by it to be null. Effective power cannot be denied to a decree of this kind.

And of similar import are several of the regulations which have been made of late to strike at those who have some intellectual object in view.