Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/53



, and for Poland a decidedly happy, result of the foreign rule has been the welding and uniting of everything Polish. All provincial differences have vanished in this unity; the different parts of Poland, Austrian, Russian, and Prussian Poles feel that they are without exception one people. In these later days, Austrian Poland has become the centre about which the others cluster, since the Poles in Galicia have a parliament, where their language may be spoken, besides two national universities, and whole towns where many things may be printed, which the Russian censor would forbid.

And like the provinces, so all the religious sects are merged in the national unity.

Poland was once an exclusively Roman Catholic land. Now mixed marriages are of frequent occurrence in Warsaw. In the two homes with which I was most familiar, in one the husband was a Protestant and the wife a Catholic; in the other the husband was a Catholic and the wife a Protestant. It must be added that in neither of these homes did the religious faith play an important part.

As to the Jews, who are so numerous in Poland, because the kingdom of Poland offered them an asylum during their long persecution, that form of hatred of the Jews, which has been decorated with the affected name of Antisemitism, and which certain sections of Danish society with their inclinations to cultivate German reaction and German rudeness have imported, has not struck root at all in Russian Poland. Of course the far-reaching mutual aversion of Jews and