Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/100

 (3) The provinces to the east of Poland proper which belonged to the Kingdom of Poland but where the bulk of the population is of non-Polish origin and speaks either Lithuanian or White or Little Russian. On this territory, only a small part of which (Eastern Galicia) belongs to Austria, while the chief portion (the so-called North- and South-western provinces) is in the possession of Russia, and which represents an area of about 200,000 square miles with 30,000,000 inhabitants, the Poles form only a more or less considerable minority—25 per cent, in Eastern Galicia, and a very small percentage in the easternmost districts belonging to Russia—but there are no reliable statistics concerning nationalities. This vast stretch of territory, whose inhabitants are non-Polish by race, is nevertheless to a certain degree a country with a Polish civilisation.

The national religion of Poland is the Roman Catholic, only a certain percentage of the nation being Protestants of either the Calvinist or Lutheran confession. Compact groups of Polish Protestants are to be found in the southern part of East Prussia and in some parts of Silesia (particularly in Teschen, Austrian Silesia, where Polish Protestants initiated the national renascence in the nineteenth century). In the Eastern non-Polish part of historical Poland the Lithuanian population is of the Roman Catholic faith; the White and Little Russian population had belonged to the Eastern Church since the tenth century. In the seventeenth century, when the Uniat Church was established, the majority of the White and Little Russians went over to the Roman Church, but in the nineteenth century the Uniats were incorporated