Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/129

 bitterest struggle against the Germans for the control of the local market, and it produced a very numerous class of Polish tradesmen and small industrials who proved so successful in competition with the Germans that they drove many of the latter from the country and again Polonised the towns which to a great extent had already been Germanised. They also organised a very extensive system of Polish co-operative banks which an eminent German economist called "a State within the State," a system which is one of the model organisations of its kind and which is also the chief foundation of the economic independence of the Poles in German Poland.

In Russian Poland the Middle Class represents all stages of wealth, from the great industrials and merchants down to the small traders and craftsmen, and includes a very numerous class of people of liberal professions. Here the Polish commercial and industrial class feels cramped, particularly because of the herding together in cities with the Jews who, driven out of Russia by anti- Jewish laws, gather in Poland. This explains such facts as the commercial boycott of the Jews in Poland, which is partly a manifestation of the economic energy of the Polish middle class and partly of the tendency of the whole community to strengthen the Polish element in the town populations. The Jews in Poland, it must be mentioned here, in their mass do not belong to the Polish nationality: their language is Yiddish, a German dialect, and they are organised as a separate Jewish nationality against the Poles. In these conditions the struggle against the Jews is a national struggle. It must be firmly stated here that