Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/40

 28 continues to be, that of a grand seigneur. The aversion to counting and saving, to reckoning and computing and keeping accounts, is universal. In all places where Germans and Poles compete in the domain of trade and industry, the Poles get the worst of it. The great manufacturers in Russian Poland, who, thanks to the enormous protective duty, enrich themselves at the expense of the purchasers, are almost without exception immigrant Austrians or Prussians. Nay, in this century, a whole manufacturing town (Lodz) has sprung up and grown with American speed; a town, which, lying in the middle of Poland, was founded and is inhabited by Germans only. The Poles are, and continue to be, an aristocratic race; the middle class, which has been gradually wedged in between the nobles and the peasants, is yet comparatively small, and, for a long time to come, for the educated Pole of distinction, the life of the burgess will mean a life passed in eating and drinking, or, as the Count says in Krasinsky's Godless Comedy, in "sleeping the sleep of the German Philistine with his German wife."

But we must not forget that the Szlachta in its constitution was something very different from the nobility in most of the countries of Europe. It was never a separate caste. After the victorious defence of Vienna John Sobieski ennobled all his cavalry. Even in our century whole regiments of infantry have been ennobled. There are thus at this moment in the different parts of Poland not less than 120,000 noble families. The nobility thus corresponds here most nearly to what elsewhere in Europe is the upper middle class. It must also be noted that the titles, prince, marquis, &c., are not originally Polish, but were first conferred upon the most important families by the foreign conquerors, for which reason they are not much used in the country. In Warsaw in speaking French they address a countess as madame and not as comtesse. Even on making introductions I never heard any titles given among the aristocracy—an agreeable thing when one comes from Germany.

At the same time the relations between people of rank