Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/98

 employed by the Germans for the purpose of destroying the Polish nationality, about the law to expropriate Polish landed estates, about the Polish children being flogged because they insisted on praying in their mother tongue, and so on. But they knew very little of the nation engaged in the struggle and failed to realize what the contest meant for Europe. It was only after the outbreak of the War, when the Polish problem reappeared and when the idea of re-uniting the partitioned Polish territory was put forward in the proclamation issued to the Poles by the Grand Duke High Commander of the Russian Army, that questions began to be asked: what was the Polish problem, what was Poland herself, what her frontiers, what the number and strength of her people and what the rôle of this nation in Central Europe? It was not easy to find answers to these questions. Outside Poland itself, literature concerning that country, still pretty rich as late as fifty years ago, particularly in French and English, became in time worse than poor. The few modern books on the subject are very far from being exact and are accordingly unable to give a true picture of Polish reality. The average educated man, therefore, knew that in the past there existed a great Polish kingdom, that towards the end of the eighteenth century it disappeared from the map of Europe and that later the Poles tried to reconquer their independence by means of a series of insurrections. But what became of the nation afterwards, what was the life it lived and the rôle it played, he did not know. The Polish problem had apparently become an internal problem of the three empires which possessed Polish lands, of Russia,