Page:The New Europe - Volume 3.djvu/278

 have to fight in their own homes a most bitter struggle against the Germans, since 1867 no very serious conflict has occurred between the Poles and the Austrian Germans. In fact, the most extreme German Chauvinists in Austria demand that Galicia should be given the most complete self-government in order that its representatives should leave the Austrian Parliament. This would enable the Germans to gain a clear majority in that Parliament, and they could then reduce the other Austrian nationalities—the Czechs and Jugoslavs—to the same position to which the Magyars have reduced their “subject races.” As a well-known Austrian-German historian once put it, “Since 1867 the German centralising ambitions in Austria have always stopped at the frontier of Galicia.”

Nor had the Poles any conflicting interests with the Magyars. The Czecho-Slovaks, Jugoslavs and Little Russians suffer harsh oppression in Hungary, but there are but few Poles within the Magyar dominions. The Poles, therefore, do not share the hostility which the other Slavs feel against the Magyars. Indeed, as Count Stanislas Tarnowski put it, the Magyars are the only nationality of the Habsburg Monarchy which enjoys a wide popularity among the Austrian Poles. Historic traditions and similar social conditions and institutions are a link between them—there are hardly any other two nations in Europe whose constitutional and social histories are so much alike. Their States were democracies within a wide class of nobility, something like the citizen community of Athens which, democratic in its own circle, was an uncompromising, exclusive aristocracy against outsiders. In both countries the idea of the nation was limited to the nobility, which was not bound either by language or race, but by caste and the ownership of land. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Polish nobility assimilated the upper classes of the Lithuanians, White Russians and Little Russians, just as did the Magyar nobility the Slovak and Roumanian gentry. These noble communities developed a peculiar culture of their own and made Latin their official language. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries little would have stood in the way of a still wider political union embracing Poland and Hungary; and, indeed, such a union was several times near realisation, but geographical reasons prevented it.