Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/126

 Polish banks of the country with money. In the cultivation of land they rank with the most progressive farmers in Europe. At the same time, as education among them progressed, they became conscious members of the Polish nation, got inspired with the Polish national idea and with Polish patriotism. They became a well-organised and disciplined army of citizens struggling against aggressive Germanism for the cause of Poland. It may be said that it was the Polish peasant who stopped the progress of Germanism in the country and frustrated all the efforts of the Prussian Government to dispossess the Poles of their land, to buy it out of Polish hands through the Government's Committee of Colonisation and to settle Germans on it.

The peasants in Russian Poland developed in the same direction, only there the progress was much slower. Their economic condition is not bad, yet it is not as favourable as that of the peasants in German Poland. Russia is a great agricultural country and Russian grain competes the more easily with that of the country even on the Polish market, as it is favoured by special tariffs. With respect to the education of the masses, on the other hand, Russian Poland is the most backward of all the three parts of the country. Even to-day nearly half the population of the country is illiterate. But in Russian Poland also it is the rule that with the progress of education the peasant becomes an ardent Pole attached to the national cause and ready to struggle in its defence.

The peasant class of Austrian Poland found itself in the worst conditions. Even before the peasant reform Galicia had a denser agricultural population