Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/339

Rh system may be said to have been in complete working order. This system, for whose defects the Russians too had to pay, developed in such evil fashion that the best officials and administrators refused to serve in Poland.

In the complex of questions which make up the Russian problem, the Polish question is one of the most important, and it has therefore always been a matter of profound concern, not merely to politicians and partisans, but also to the philosophers of history. The Polish question is itself a complex of difficult problems. Should historical Poland or ethnographical Poland be granted independence within the Russian empire, and if so in what form and to what extent? The interests and aims of Russians and Poles, of Little Russians, Lithuanians, White Russians, and Jews, conflict in this matter. Socially and economically the relationship of Polish manufacturing industry to Russian manufacturing industry and to aristocratic landlordism is a burning question, especially in nonpolish areas. Culturally Catholicism is opposed to Orthodoxy, whilst the Uniats constitute a peculiar problem. Alike in Russia and in Poland the Jewish question is extremely thorny. Last of all there has to be considered the relationship of Russian Poland to Austrian and Prussian Poland, the panpolish problem in general.

It is upon the Polish question that Russian panslavism has been shipwrecked.

The reaction under Alexander II and still more under Alexander III endeavoured with increasing energy to realise the official nationalist program of Uvarov in accordance with which all the nonrussian peoples of Russia, Germans, Finns, Lithuanians, Letts, etc., as well as the rebellious Poles, were to be Russified. Administrative centralism, hitherto easygoing and intellectually sluggish, was transformed into a state-privileged linguistic aristocracy of the dominant nation, the language question becoming continually more acute, above all in the civilised frontier lands adjacent to Europe.

In Europe, the importance of Russian panslavism is greatly overestimated, especially by the German-Austrian, Polish, and Magyar press It is necessary to remember that the