Page:The New Europe - Volume 3.djvu/277

 their ultimate ideal. Hence the profound difference between the Poles, Czechs, and Italians in their attitude towards the Habsburg Monarchy. The Italians have a national State of their own, and no settlement in Austria could ever satisfy them; their natural aim is immediate separation from Austria. The Czechs see their entire nation united within the Habsburg Monarchy; could they have transformed that Monarchy in a way which would have realised their national and constitutional claims they would not to-day be working for its destruction. The Poles did not wish to break off immediately like the Italians, nor did they ever think of working out for themselves a final constitutional settlement in Austria as the Czechs did for several generations—the Polish question cannot find its solution within the limits of Austria. Provided the Poles were given what they considered the necessary conditions for their national development in Galicia, they were willing to remain part of the Austrian State—only so long, of course, as there was no chance of their being re-united in an independent Poland. They lived in Austria but never felt themselves part of it. Their spiritual centre was not in the Habsburg Monarchy; it lay beyond the frontiers of their own province, in Warsaw, the capital of the kingdom of Poland. The political transformations of Russian Poland have been the determining factor in the history and politics of Galicia. The key to its life is a knowledge of the course of events in Warsaw just as the cause of the-movements of a satellite is revealed in those of its sun. The main political movements in Galicia have received their stimulus from Warsaw; in many of them the leaders were, and are, actually Russian Poles, frequently political refugees. All the windows of Austrian Poland opened in one direction: against Austria stood a blind wall. Thus the very conditions of their intellectual and political life predisposed the Austrian Poles to indifference towards the other nationalities of the Habsburg Monarchy.

But there were still other powerful factors which worked against a closer connection between the Poles on the one hand and the Czechs and Jugoslavs on the other. Within Austria the Poles have hardly any interests conflicting with those of the Germans. Galicia contains practically no German population; the German provinces of Austria contain no Polish minorities. Whilst the Czechs and Jugoslavs