Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/124

 a numerous proletariate representing cheap labour for the industries. Textile and metallurgic factories grew rapidly, and there arose large mining and industrial centres living mostly on their export to the East. At the same time Warsaw, because of its geographical situation on the route from the West to the East and at the crossing of the lines from Vienna to Petrograd and Berlin to Moscow, at a point where the Western narrow-gauge ends and the Russian broad-gauge begins, became a commercial city of great importance. The Polish community, which had been exclusively agricultural for centuries, was not prepared to profit by the new favourable conditions, and the growth of great industries and commerce was in the beginning chiefly the work of the Germans and the Jews. At first the Poles supplied only the unskilled and part of the skilled labour. Gradually, however, the progress of technical and commercial education enabled them to appear in the field of competition and they began to gain ground rapidly. In this way the Kingdom produced a very numerous and well-to-do middle class—recruited from remains of the ancient town populations, from the gentry, and from the peasantry—which to-day is already the foremost social force in the country.

The nineteenth century brought with it great changes and these resulted in the fundamental social reconstruction of Poland. In Old Poland the great mass of the population consisted of peasants who were chiefly serfs and owned no land; these the Napoleonic era made free. Later, at first in Prussia and Austria in the first half of the nineteenth century, then in Russian Poland in 1865, they were endowed with land