Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/87

Rh be subordinate to this first and most important: the preservation of the nationality. But at a time like this, when it is absolutely forbidden to establish Polish schools, or to give peasants or the lower classes national instruction of any kind, a comprehensive free-thinking agitation, which would paralyse the Catholic faith, would also paralyse Polish national feeling. Unquestionably there are Protestant Poles in Posen and scattered in Russian Poland numerous united churches, which (in spite of the fact that their priests are married and their relations with Rome looser than those of the Roman Catholics) feel themselves to be very good Poles; but this is the consequence of the power of a tradition.

A rupture with the religious tradition at this period, if it could be brought about among the masses, would always be a victory for the Russian principle.

To be called a democrat has no sound meaning either, unless the word expresses the opinion that the masses of the people ought to rule. It is rather fruitless to cherish this opinion so long as nobility and peasantry are in an equal degree under the whip of the foreigner. All that the democrats are able to accomplish is to oppose the influence of the large landed proprietors, by election of the parish council in the country, and of the managers in private undertakings, a good and useful thing, in so far as it arouses a feeling of independence among the people, a cause of less undoubted profit, in so far as it lightens for the Russians the labour of breaking the power of resistance of the higher classes.

A dreadful dilemma presents itself to the Polish intelligence: it seems condemned either to choose progress, with the danger of playing into the hands of its own worst enemy, and the worst enemy of all progress, or to choose stagnation, with the danger that the nationality which is thereby preserved, and of which its sons were and are so proud, should drop behind in the culture of Europe, becoming antiquated and outstripped.

There is something really tragic in this situation. More than one man, who represents the Polish intelligence in its highest development, sees himself—like the proud Count Henrik in Krasinski's tragedy—condemned to defend the