Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/86

74 So dangerous is it to have socialistic writings in one's custody.

However, no Pole ought to hazard freedom and life for the sake of socialistic ideas. For in general it may be said, though young men with socialist sympathies in Warsaw are, strangely enough, surprised to hear one maintain it, that there is no sense in a Pole being a Socialist. For what does Socialism mean, shortly expressed? What else than directly or indirectly, the expropriation of private rich men, capitalists and landed proprietors, for the advantage of the State? But translate this into Polish, and it becomes under the conditions that prevail now, and have long prevailed, absolutely nothing else than the expropriation of Polish rich men for the advantage of the Russian State. But whatever the Russian State has once annexed may be called a thing of the past. It would require a strong faith to think that it would ultimately profit the Polish common people, when one lives in a city like Warsaw, where there is no municipal government, and where the revenues of the municipality go straight to St. Petersburg and only an extremely small portion thereof is used for the city's own advantage.

The only thing the Polish Socialist actually can do is therefore to excite the workmen against their employers, arouse their discontent, and lead them on to strikes which almost always end in defeat. Since election does not exist, so to speak, and a real party can never be formed, all socialist action on a larger scale is impossible, wholly apart from its ruinous effect upon the individuality of the Polish people.

A similar consideration to that which ought to prevent a thoughtful and prudent Pole from placing himself on the side of the Polish Socialists, even if he is otherwise inclined to socialistic theories, should prevent him from giving his full support to the free-thinking group in Poland.

One can be as good an European as any one, one may despise all the chauvinism, which as national conceit merely stupefies a people, and still regard the forcible annihilation of a rich and valuable national individuality as a misfortune for the whole of Europe.

It seems to me as if all other questions in Poland must