Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/158

 the bulk Little Russian, there is a big streak of Great Russian population amongst the Ukrainians. Sometimes there are islands of Great Russians, sometimes they are to be found in broad strips, and the language spoken in the towns is not the Little Russian but rather a variety of Great Russian with Jewish and occasionally Polish and Little Russian elements. It is a harsh language. It is a kind of new dialect of Great Russian, and you will find that as economical development progresses, as the industrial centres in Southern Russia increase, as the population migrates and mingles with other elements, the confusion will grow greater—you will find a sort of admixture between Great Russian and Little Russian, and the process of assimilation will develop more rapidly. And all this makes it difficult to determine how far any independent Ukrainian civilisation is possible in Southern Russia. I think the natural tendency is for the Russian literary language to gain the upper hand, even if all the present administrative restrictions were removed, because the removal of administrative restrictions would give Russian civilisation even greater power than it has now. At the same time it is perfectly obvious that if there is a genuine demand for instruction in Ukrainian in the schools, if it is found that Ukrainian children grow more rapidly into intelligent citizens if they receive primary instruction in their mother-tongue, if there is an increasing development of Ukrainian literature—it seems to me perfectly obvious that no administrative obstacles should be put in the way of the movement; and then my opinion is that ultimately, after very considerable vacillations, this Southern Russian language