490 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



ideals of western civilization, can not be adequately treated without an 

 exhaustive review of the history of the nations of eastern Europe. 

 However, a short resume of Polish characteristics will suffice to give an 

 idea of the type of the race and result which may be expected from the 

 great wave of Slavic immigration now sweeping over us. 



For the two hundred years succeeding the close of the fourteenth 

 century, Poland was the leading power of eastern Europe. Her 20,000 

 square miles was the seat of what was, to all intents, a vast republic, for, 

 though her elective king was responsible only to her nobility, this 

 nobility was so large and so accessible and eager to maintain the political 

 equality of all its own members, that the constitution, though it con- 

 ferred rights only upon the privileged classes, carried out in reality the 

 idea of almost unlimited freedom for the individuals of that class. Had 

 this very numerous nobility of freedom born a still larger proportion to 

 the total population, the self government of the nation would have been 

 an accomplished fact, for the ideas of political reform and the exten- 

 sion of privileges to all classes were already beginning to make them- 

 selves felt when Poland was caught between the upper and nether mill 

 stones of foreign tyranny, and her national identity crushed out forever 

 by the treachery of Prussia and the soldiers of the Eussian throne. 

 Since the last partition of Poland in 1795, her people have not been 

 given the chance to exercise the capacity for self government which they 

 had undoubtedly developed to a high point when overtaken by the series 

 of misfortunes which resulted in the loss of national identity. There 

 are many reasons to think that this capacity is not wholly dead, but 

 only lies dormant, awaiting the propitious changes of fortune. At the 

 same time it must be conceded that the Pole possesses, in common with 

 all Slavs, a peculiar combination of eastern and western ideals that 

 makes his fitting into an Anglo-Saxon civilization a problem of great 

 complexity. Por, while he loves political freedom almost to the point 

 of insanity, he is easily caught by the glitter and pomp of a throne. 

 Confiding by nature, the mere promise of the unscrupulous Napoleon 

 was sufficient to make him offer up his life upon many a bloody battle 

 field. 



As the Poles are, individually, poor business men, easily imposed 

 upon by the commercially minded Hebrew, to whom the generosity of a 

 political asylum was time and again extended when he was driven and 

 harried from almost every other country in Europe, so are they, in the 

 aggregate, poor political economists, and have thus always been worsted 

 in the fields of diplomacy as well as in trade. Whereas they possess 

 the greatest intellectual gifts, being almost universal linguists, and con- 

 tributing great names to literature and science, they are apt to be 

 versatile rather than profound, and are prone to waste their efforts in 

 unpractical fields of endeavor. Though courteous and brave, their love 

 of individual freedom is sometimes carried to the point of anarchy, and 



