Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/99

 Germany, and Austria, and it therefore interested scarcely anybody outside those countries.

It falls to me to give the first of a number of lectures on Poland at this meeting and I therefore consider it my duty to begin by giving some elementary notions concerning the country and its people.

The territories on which the three empires have faced the Polish problem in recent times may be grouped into three categories:

(1) The provinces of the ancient Polish Kingdom where the bulk of the population is of Polish stock and speaks Polish. They stretch from the Carpathian Mountains to the Baltic Sea and comprise nearly the whole of the Vistula Basin as well as the Basin of the River Varta, the Oder's chief confluent. This territory is divided up between Russia (Kingdom of Poland), Austria (Western Galicia) and Germany (Posnania and West Russia). The total area of these provinces is about 75,000 square miles and their population exceeds 20,000,000, its density approaching 260 inhabitants per square mile (a very dense population when it is remembered that France has only 190 per square mile).

(2) The provinces to the west and north of Poland proper which did not belong to the Polish Kingdom at the time of its partition but where a large majority of the people are of Polish race and speak the Polish tongue. They belong chiefly to Germany (Upper Silesia and the southern part of East Prussia) and to Austria (Austrian Silesia or Teschen) and they represent an area of about 9,000 square miles with almost 3,000,000 inhabitants.