PRINCE— SLAV AND CELT. 187 



German type left by the ravages of the Thirty Years War. The 

 Poles possess the most extremely individualized character of all the 

 Slavs. In other words, among them tribal feeling has developed 

 into a real national patriotism which was at first not evident in 

 their history. Welded together into a great European power by the 

 early Jagiello princess of Lithuanian origin, the Poles, as soon as 

 the Jagiello line died out, began unwittingly to plot their own ruin 

 by insisting in their parliament on the principle of the unanimous 

 vote for all measures (liberum veto), so that a single member might 

 veto a bill, or even demand an immediate adjournment, which the 

 rest of the Diet was powerless to prevent. During the past cen- 

 tury, however, during which this gallant and individualistic nation 

 passed through an ordeal of fire at the hands of Germans, Russians 

 and Austrians, a much deeper spirit of inherent solidarity has shown 

 itself among them, and this, it is to be hoped, may weld Poland once 

 more by internal force into as strong a European influence as she 

 became under the external pressure of the Lithuanian Jagiellos. 

 Strange to say, until recent times, the Poles, unlike their congeners, 

 have never felt the pressing need of a spiritually united Slavia. 

 Naturally hating the Russians, despising the more prosaic Czechs 

 and Slovaks, and ignoring the Serbs and Croatians, the Pole has 

 remained, and is unfortunately inclined to remain, splendidly aloof 

 from his Slavonic brethren. In spite of this wilful isolation, Polish 

 characteristics do not differ fundamentally from those of the other 

 Slavs. Finally in this connection, the Serbs and Croatians con- 

 stitute a strong race, of mixed stock, it is true, but of genuine 

 Slavonic spirit. Touched by Turkish on the east and south and by 

 Magyar on the north and west, this people through centuries of 

 darkness and oppression by Turks, Magyars and Austrian Ger- 

 mans have retained the spirit seen in all Slavia. 



The only Celtic tongued peoples extant to-day are the Gaelic 

 speaking Irish, Manks and Highland Scotch and their distant lin- 

 guistic cousins of Armorican speech, the Welsh and the Bretons 

 of France. The allied Armorican Cornish disappeared as a living 

 language about 1789.- These tribes are mutually incomprehensible 

 when using Celtic, for the Gaelic dialects of Ireland and Scotland 



2 H. Jenner, " Handbook of the Cornish Language," London, 1904, p. 21. 



