Part 13

Socially and intellectually there is a striking contrast between the two rival races. The Ruthenians are almost entirely a peasant population, with only a small educated class of priests, lawyers, doctors, etc. The Poles are fairly evenly and normally divided among the various occupations and social classes. The difference may be shown by the fact that about 91% of the Ruthenian population is dependent upon agriculture for a living, and only 44% of the Poles; 39% of the Poles live by commerce and industry, but only 7% of the Ruthenians; 17% of the Poles are engaged in the liberal professions, but only 1% of the Ruthenians; 62% of the Ruthenians are illiterate, but only 23% of the Poles. In other words, the Poles are socially, economically, and intellectually the strongest element in the country, although in numbers they are considerably inferior to their rivals.

During the five or six centuries in which the two races have lived side by side, their relations have on the whole been relatively satisfactory and amicable. To a large extent they are so still, whenever the politicians do not intervene, as is shown, for instance, by the high percentage of mixed marriages. In the nineteenth century, however, a nationalist movement grew up among the Ruthenians, which assumed a marked anti-Polish tendency and which has led to the rather bitter racial feud that has raged in Eastern Galicia in the past thirty years. It is likely that this contest would never have assumed so fierce a character had it not been for the insidious activities of the Austrian government, which lost no opportunity to stir up the two races against each other, aiding now one and then the other in accordance with the traditional Austrian maxim, ‘divide and rule’. In the last twenty years the German government has also taken an active hand in the affair, secretly exciting and aiding the Ruthenians against the Poles; for the latter were always _the_ enemy for Berlin, and decades before Brest-Litovsk German statesmen appreciated the possibilities of the ‘Ukrainian idea,’ which might be used with equal effect against both Russia and Poland.

Nevertheless, the Ruthenian movement remained rather ineffective, both because the Galician Ruthenians were the poorest, most ignorant, and most backward of all the races of Austria, and because they were divided among themselves as to their goal. Two distinct national movements have really existed among them, in a population of three and a half millions. Part of them, the majority, apparently, maintained that they were a branch of the Ukrainian nation, and that their goal must be the ultimate formation of an independent Ukrainian state. The minority, on the other hand, asserted that there was no such thing as a Ukrainian nation: that the Galician Ruthenians and the people of the Russian Ukraine alike were simply a branch of the one great Russian nation, which stretched unbroken from the Carpathians to the Pacific. For these people, in theory at least, the goal was the union of Eastern Galicia with Russia.

For a nation so backward in its development, so divided against itself, and so accustomed to look to Berlin and Vienna for aid and direction, the World War arrived at the wrong moment: the World War and then the collapse of Austria and the crisis that was to decide the fate of Eastern Galicia.

At the moment of Austria’s spontaneous dissolution, one Ruthenian party hastened to set up a ‘Republic of the Western Ukraine,’ and, with the aid of certain Ruthenian units in the old Austrian army, attempted to seize possession of all Eastern Galicia. This led to a prolonged and unhappy struggle with the Poles, who were not disposed to submit to such a settlement of the question. For many months the fighting centred around the city of Lemberg, which long defended itself almost single-handed and with great heroism against superior Ukrainian forces. When at last the Polish government was in position to send large reënforcements, the issue was quickly decided: in June, 1919, the Ukrainian resistance collapsed, and the Poles occupied the whole country as far as the Zbrucz.

The fate of Eastern Galicia was thus more or less settled _vi et armis_, without the Conference and at times to the lively displeasure of the Conference. That the Allied and Associated Powers nevertheless finally sanctioned the Polish occupation of Eastern Galicia and are now apparently intending to place that country, provisionally at least, under the sovereignty of Poland, is a fact which has called forth no little criticism. It has been denounced as a craven surrender in the face of a _fait accompli_, a betrayal of principle, the sacrifice of three and a half million Ukrainians to the ravenous Polish imperialists, and much more to the like effect.

The chief justification of the Conference, I think, is to be found in the hard facts of the situation. The Ruthenians are indeed the majority in Eastern Galicia; the majority ought to rule; but it was very difficult to apply this principle in this particular case.

The Ruthenian majority was not at all agreed as to what it wanted. The Ukrainophiles among them were for an independent Ukrainian state; but the other party was altogether opposed to such an idea. This second party, however, had no more practicable program to offer than that the Allied governments should occupy and administer Eastern Galicia until such time as Russia was on her feet again and in condition to take over the country. If one might judge from the relative strength of the two Ruthenian parties as they existed before the war, the party which wanted an independent Ukrainian state might be a majority among the Ruthenians, but was only a minority in the total population.

It was rather doubtful, moreover, whether the Ruthenians were capable of taking over the government of the country. They had had no independent state for nearly six hundred years, and their national development had been so retarded and unsatisfactory that it was not easy to believe that they were fitted for independent statehood today. Where were the elements on which a solid state could be constructed? Such elements were not to be found in the ignorant and inarticulate masses of the peasants nor in the small class of intellectuals. These intellectuals had already given the measure of their ability: for six months they had tried to run a government, and the result--nearly all the many Allied officers who were sent in to study the situation were unanimous in the opinion that this Ukrainian government had been, to put it mildly, a sorry failure; and that the majority of the population--Poles, Jews, and Ruthenians alike--were relieved when this government collapsed and the Polish troops came in.

Eastern Galicia had been fought over for four years by Austrians and Russians, and then for a fifth year by Poles and Ukrainians. The country had suffered more than any other part of Eastern Europe. The Conference was anxious to assure to this war-racked and desolated region a return to orderly government and stable conditions as quickly as possible. This could not be effected by handing back the country to the local Ukrainian politicians, who had tried and failed; nor by handing it over to the so-called Republic of the Great Ukraine, represented only by the will-o’-the wisp government of the peripatetic Petlura. The Russian solution was practically out of the question for the present. The plan of international occupation and administration was indeed discussed, but none of the powers felt able or willing to undertake such a burden in that remote and inaccessible corner of Eastern Europe. Hence, the only practical solution seemed to be to entrust the Poles with the occupation and administration of the country, subject to certain guarantees to be stipulated in favor of the Ruthenians. The country had belonged to Poland for four hundred years; the Poles were politically and economically the most active, experienced, and capable element of the population; they were actually in possession of the country; and their occupation seemed to meet with the rather general approval of the inhabitants.

The final settlement of this question has not yet been made, however. There have been long negotiations between the Allies and the Polish government as to the terms under which Poland may be entrusted with the administration of Eastern Galicia, the autonomy which that province is to enjoy, and the special guarantees for national rights to be insured to the Ruthenians. No definitive agreement has yet been reached.

* * * * *

The eastern frontier of Poland is also still undefined, for reasons already indicated. At any rate, the Polish armies are now occupying a very wide area in the east. A year ago the Bolshevik forces had advanced almost to the borders of Congress Poland: today, after a certain amount of fighting, the Poles have thrust them back almost to the Dnieper. The Poles are now in possession of most of the old Russian provinces of Grodno, Wilno, Minsk, and Volhynia: i. e., of a very large part of those eastern territories which belonged to the old Polish republic and which have been the object of an age-long dispute between Poland and Russia.

What the ultimate fate of these regions will be, it would be difficult to forecast. The various nationalist movements which have sprung up in this area are of such recent date and such uncertain strength, that it would require much boldness to prophesy the outcome. Will Lithuania, for instance, consolidate itself as an independent state, or renew its old federal union with Poland, or return to Russia? Will the Ukrainians unite once more with Russia or establish themselves as a new state of 40,000,000 people? What will become of the White Russians, of all the peoples in this region the most enigmatic? The western section of them, being Catholic, may perhaps gravitate towards Poland; the eastern section, being Orthodox, may perhaps cleave to the side of Russia. Or will they develop a national movement of their own? When and in what fashion will a reorganized Russia be able to reassert her voice effectively in these questions? Such are some of the uncertainties in the case.

At all events, for the time being the Poles are again in possession of a larger part of their ancient heritage, of the Poland that existed before the Partitions. They are in possession of territories which, taken together, must contain a population of over thirty millions. And whatever fluctuations may still take place in her frontiers, Poland is likely to remain the largest and in many respects the most important of the new states produced by the war, the sixth most populous state in Europe.

While it would doubtless be premature to hail in this state, restored only yesterday and still in process of construction, a new Great Power, it is not impossible that Poland may in time become one. For, assuming that Upper Silesia comes to her by plebiscite, her economic resources are magnificent. The richest coal reserves on the Continent; zinc, lead, iron, petroleum in abundance; highly developed industries in the Congress Kingdom, which was the Lancashire of the Russian empire, and in Upper Silesia, which was the Black Country of eastern Germany--such are some of the assets with which Poland resumes her national life.

The greatest problem lies in the people themselves. Of them a writer by no means prejudiced in their favor has recently declared:

“In all Europe there is no other people, with the possible exception of the French, which is naturally so gifted. No one can study Eastern Europe without feeling that they are infinitely the most attractive of the peoples with which he has to do. They are the only ones in whose composition there is included that subtle _differentia_ which marks off the ‘big nation’ from the ‘small.’”[49]

On the other hand, it must be admitted that in the past the Poles have shown themselves deficient in organizing and administrative ability, in economic enterprise, in cohesion, solidarity, and discipline. A century and more of servitude to foreigners has not been the best of schooling for orderly and efficient self-government, nor has it permitted the nation to keep altogether abreast of the West in intellectual and economic progress. And Poland, wedged in between a vindictive Germany and a presumably none too friendly Russia, occupies what may fairly be called the most exposed and dangerous position in Europe.

Nevertheless, the brilliant and original genius of the Polish people; their ardent and unsurpassed spirit of patriotism; the lessons which they may be presumed to have learned from their misfortunes; the reassuring evidence supplied by their conduct during these last two critical years--all this affords ground for hope, not only that Poland has permanently recovered her independence, but that she is capable of becoming again what she was for so many centuries in the past: a bulwark of liberty, republicanism, and Western civilization in the troubled East of Europe.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

One of the most useful aids to the study of questions relating to Poland is Professor E. Romer’s admirable _Geographic and Statistical Atlas of Poland_, published in Polish, French, and German: Warsaw and Cracow, 1916. An English edition is soon to be issued.

Almost all sides of Polish life today, political, economic, intellectual, and artistic, are described in compendious and scholarly fashion, and with an abundance of maps, statistics, and historical information, in the works published during the War by the Committee for Encyclopaedic Publications on Poland. This Committee has published _La petite Encyclopédie polonaise_, Paris-Lausanne, 1916 (translated into English under the title: Poland, her People, History, Industries, Finance, Science, Literature, Art, and Social Development); and the larger _Encyclopédie polonaise_, Fribourg-Lausanne, 1917-19, of which vols. i (geography and ethnography), ii, pt. 3 (territorial development of Polish nationality--in four volumes), iii (economic life), and iv (political and administrative regime) have hitherto appeared.

A very convenient handbook of statistical data about Poland is the _Annuaire statistique polonais_ by E. Romer and I. Weinfeld, Cracow, 1917.

E. H. Lewinski-Corwin’s _Political History of Poland_, New York, 1917, is perhaps the best account of the subject available in English, although marred by a certain amount of patriotic exaggeration and party prejudice.

Among works dealing with the several territories which have been in dispute, the following are notable:

On Prussian Poland: Ludwig Bernhard, _Die Polenfrage_. Leipzig, 1910. (A moderate German view.) Joseph Partsch, _Schlesien_, pts. 1-2. Breslau, 1896-1911. “Liber” (C. Andrzejewski), _Das Deutschtum in Westpolen (Preussisch-Polen), seine Zahl, seine Gliederung, sein Stärkeverhältniss gegenüber den Polen_. Posen, 1919.

On the Galician question: W. Lutoslawski and E. Romer, _The Ruthenian Question in Galicia_. Paris, 1919. H. Grappin, _Polonais et ruthènes. La question de Galicie_. Paris, 1919. Both these works are partisan statements from the Polish side. M. Lozynsky, _Les “Droits” de la Pologne sur la Galicie_. Lausanne, 1917. E. Levitsky, _La Guerre polono-ukrainienne en Galicie_. Berne, 1919. This and the preceding represent the Ukrainian point of view.

On the question of Poland’s eastern frontier: L. Wasilewski, _Die Ostprovinzen des alten Polenreichs_. Cracow, 1916. By all means the most complete and illuminating survey of Poland’s past relations with Lithuania, White Russia, and the Ukraine, and of the recent growth of nationalist movements in those regions. K. Verbelis, _La Lituanie russe_. Geneva, 1918. (Lithuanian views and claims.) T. Savtchenko, _L’Ukraine et la question ukrainienne_. Paris, 1918. (Views of a Ukrainian nationalist.)

FOOTNOTES:

[43] Here and in the ensuing chapters the word ‘race’ is used in its popular sense, as virtually equivalent to ‘people’ or ‘nation,’ rather than in the strict sense in which the word is employed by ethnologists. R. H. L.

[44] The Peace Conference appears to have adopted last autumn some sort of a provisional boundary for Poland on the east. As far as I understand the matter, however, this boundary represents only a minimum line. Whatever lies to the west of it is indisputably Polish, and henceforth in the opinion of the Conference should belong unconditionally to Poland. It is not implied, however, that Poland may not have valid claims to additional territories farther east--claims which can only be settled by negotiations between Poland and Russia.

[45] If the territory of the Free City of Danzig be included in this reckoning, the number of Germans that may be separated from the Empire would rise to 2,400,000 in round numbers.

[46] This figure refers to that part of East Prussia which will unquestionably remain to Germany. If the Mazurian and Marienwerder plebiscite areas vote to remain with Germany, the number of Germans cut off from the _Reich_ by the Polish couloir will be a little over 2,000,000.

[47] The total population of the city and its district in 1910 was 324,000, of which number only 16,000 were entered in the census as having Polish as their ‘mother tongue.’

[48] I owe the comparison to Mr. L. B. Namier’s excellent article on “Poland’s Outlet to the Sea,” in _The Nineteenth Century_, Vol. 81 (1), Feb. 1917.

[49] Ralph Butler, _The New Eastern Europe_, p. 4.

VI

AUSTRIA

The Prince de Ligne, dying in the midst of the carnival of revelry that marked the Congress of Vienna, declared that he was preparing a new amusement for the jaded appetite of that assembly: the obsequies of a Field Marshal, a Knight of the Golden Fleece. A no less unique, but far graver, spectacle was provided for the Peace Conference of Paris: the obsequies of a great empire, the oldest and proudest in Europe.

Even without deploring that event, one cannot be altogether untouched by the spectacle of the collapse of the Hapsburg monarchy, with its stirring historic past and its illustrious traditions, the state which in one sense could trace its genealogy back to Charlemagne and Augustus Caesar, the realm of Charles V, the Ferdinands, Maria Theresia, Joseph II; the old indomitable

“Oesterreich, An Ehren und an Siegen reich,”

of Wallenstein and Prince Eugene.

Austria had a raison d’être, had she only known how to live up to it. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, she rendered a real service to the peoples of Central Europe in uniting them into one realm capable of checking and repelling the Turkish flood. And later on, when the Turks had ceased to threaten, she might have acquired a new right to existence by educating her various races to self-government, offering them the advantages of membership in a large political and economic union combined with local autonomy and due respect for the rights and individuality of each race, anticipating in this realm, which, with its medley of nationalities, was a kind of miniature Europe, the solutions which the League of Nations will have to seek. After all, it was a Czech patriot who declared that if the Austrian monarchy did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.

But Austria has seldom risen to her opportunities. According to Napoleon’s well known saying, she was always just behindhand with an army or an idea. There was always something strangely inefficient, ill-adjusted, factitious, unhealthy, or fundamentally dishonest about her. As has often been remarked, Austria was not a nation, it was only a government--a dynasty, an aristocracy, a bureaucracy, and an army. A dynasty, which had an extraordinary passion and talent for acquiring land--“the most successful race of matrimonial and land speculators known to history,” someone has called them[50]--but which has shown very little constructive or executive ability in the tasks of internal government, and whose policy has been defined as simply one of “exalted opportunism in the pursuit of the unchanging dynastic idea”;[51] a kind of permanent camarilla about the throne, made up of sixty or seventy archdukes and archduchesses and a group of great aristocratic houses, so influential and exclusive that Mickiewicz described Austria as “an East India Company exploited by two hundred families”; a bureaucracy, dull, pedantic, arbitrary, and inefficient, whose ideal of government seldom rose above the typical Austrian motto “fortwursteln”--muddle along someway--; an army whose degree of internal cohesion is shown by the fact that its recruits swore allegiance to the emperor in nine languages, and which had an unequalled record for the number of its defeats; such were the chief forces that held this “ramshackle empire” together.

The task of maintaining and consolidating so motley a realm was, after the rise of the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century, increasingly and desperately difficult; but perhaps it would not have been an impossible undertaking, if the dynasty had only honestly carried out the principle of the equality of all the Austrian races, and if it had gone over, while still there was time, to a genuine federal state organization. But the Hapsburgs did neither. Instead they repudiated both ideas by adopting and for fifty years maintaining the Dualist system of 1867, which meant the division of the monarchy into two halves, each of which was to be ruled by a minority--the Germans in the one case, the Magyars in the other--at the expense, and in defiance of the wishes, of the Slavic and Latin majorities. That system has been called “the ruin of modern Austria.”

Of the workings of the system in Hungary something will be said in the next chapter. In the Austrian or Cisleithan part of the monarchy, Dualism led to incessant struggles, immense embitterment, and finally the virtual breakdown of constitutional government, and a return to a but slightly disguised absolutism.

The one thing that saved the system from total shipwreck was the antagonisms that existed, not only between the Germans and the majority opposed to them, but also between the various races of which that majority was composed. These antagonisms were sedulously fomented by the government itself. It is one of the worst sins of the Hapsburgs that, far from acting as peacemakers or even as impartial arbiters between their discordant races, they deliberately and systematically strove to aggravate national animosities and to fan the flames of discord, hoping to be able to play off one race against another in the authentic Turkish fashion, and seeming to imagine that Austria could subsist through internal dissensions, just as Poland was once thought to subsist through her anarchy. The Emperor Francis I congratulated himself that his peoples were aliens to each other and detested one another: each race could therefore be used as a jailer for some other race. “From their antipathies springs order,” he declared, “and from their mutual hatred the general peace.”[52] Francis Joseph might adopt as an official slogan _Viribus unitis_, but his practice was based much more upon the traditional maxim, _Divide et impera_. He and his agents are very largely responsible for that violent series of nationality conflicts which have raged in almost every province of the monarchy--that _bellum omnium contra omnes_, which has disgraced and poisoned the political life of Austria and paved the way for her complete disruption.