Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/123

 cent, as against 45 per cent, in 1867), while the Jews, pushed out by Polish traders, emigrated to Germany and have nearly disappeared from the country. They now form only one per cent, of the population (as against seven per cent, in 1815). The energy, solidarity and discipline of the Poles in the legal and political struggle, as well as in economic competition, astonished the Germans and proved to them that the Slavs, when properly trained, are their equals and in some respects may even prove their superiors.

The country which, under the name of the Kingdom of Poland, was united to Russia in 1815 and which had its own constitution, government, and army till 1831; which, incorporated afterwards into the Russian Empire, was nevertheless governed by Polish officials till 1865, has since that date been subjected to a system of anti-Polish policy in which the Russian Government imitated Prussian methods. But the Kingdom of Poland was a large country, with a homogeneous Polish population, with fresh traditions of its modern and progressive State (from 1815 to 1831), with its solidly organised social and intellectual life, with its French laws (Napoleon's Code), and any attempt at the destruction of its national life was doomed to failure. In the last fifty years the Kingdom found a new source of strength in its industrial progress. With the abolition of the customs frontier between the Kingdom and the Empire in 1850, a large market in the Russian Empire was opened to that Polish country, rich in coal and minerals, with a fairly dense population composed, after the belated peasants' reform in 1864, chiefly of a strong and healthy class of small landowners and of