Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/120

 a great centre of learning and intellectual activity, and its pupils open the greatest period of Polish literature, a period when Polish poetry, in the era of Romanticism, reached summits accessible only to the richest literatures of the world. After the insurrection of 1830–31, when the constitution of the kingdom of Poland was destroyed and Polish educational institutions in Lithuania were suppressed, there appeared new centres of Polish thought, one abroad among the emigrants, chiefly in Paris, another in German Poland in Posen. The continuity of this intense and independent intellectual life of the nation was never interrupted. In the second half of the nineteenth century Warsaw became its centre and holds its place till the present time in spite of most unfavourable conditions, as the Polish University and Polish schools were suppressed, and public education, in Russian and by Russians, was forcibly introduced into the whole country. The change in the political situation of Austrian Poland in the second half of the nineteenth century, the introduction there of Polish public education, with two Polish universities, in Cracow and Lwow, gradually gave the Austrian Poles a prominent place in the intellectual life of the nation. But Galicia throughout the whole preceding period of 100 years was the most backward part of Poland and, in spite of all her progress in the last fifty years, she could not surpass the Kingdom and Warsaw with all their traditions of the reforming movement of the eighteenth century, of the Duchy of Warsaw and of the half-independent Kingdom of the Congress, and with their modern spirit, developed chiefly under French influences which were potent in