Page:The Position of the Slavonic Languages at the present day.djvu/21

 numerous tribal names, many of which have survived and are well known to-day, such as the Mazurowie and Kujawianie, have all been superseded by that of the principal central nationality, the Polanie, literally, the dwellers in the open fields, a name used at one time by several Slavonic tribes. The fact that in English the name Poland has come to be used to designate only Russian Poland causes it to be overlooked that the Polish provinces of Russia include little more than half of the territory over which Polish is spoken. In Germany the southern halves of the provinces of East and West Prussia, and the eastern half of Silesia are purely Polish, while of the total population of the German province of Posen, the country formerly known in Polish history as Great Poland, about 75 per cent, are Poles. In Austria the whole of Galicia west of the river San is solidly Polish, as is also the eastern half of Austrian Silesia.

The fortunes of the Polish language have been very different in each of the three empires under whose political control the Polish nation passed when it was arbitrarily trisected at the tragic culmination of its history as an independent state in the eighteenth century. They have been darkest in Prussia, where the policy of exterminating the Polish nationality has been consistently applied by an incorruptible bureaucracy. This is not the place to discuss political rights and wrongs, and the situation can be summed up by saying that the province of Posen is as far as ever from being Germanized, while the millions spent by the Prussian Colonization Commission have only served to strengthen the economic position of the people for whose eradication they were voted. Education is, however, an even more potent weapon than expropriation, and the fact that no primary or secondary schools exist in Germany where a word of Polish is spoken is inevitably having a fatal influence on the vocabulary and syntax of Polish in Prussia. The only province, however, where the German language is making real headway against Polish is that of East Prussia, where religious differences make