CHAPTEE ly. 



POLAND (POLSKA). 

 Historical Retrospect. 



HE very name of this portion of the Russian Empire has become 

 a symbol of national calamity. Poland is no longer autonomous, 

 and all that survives of her former independence is the privilege of 

 being separately named in the long record of the vast domains 

 subject to the Czar of all the Eussias. But even this privilege 

 threatens to disappear, and for some years past she has been officially known as the 

 " "Vistula Province," the national name being merely tolerated in a land where it 

 is still endeared to millions. Even the nation itself, bound politically to Eastern 

 Slavdom, is but a fragment of the people, torn from other fragments now annexed 

 to Prussia and Austria. Hence the word Poland is now a purely historical and 

 ethnographic expression, void of all political significance. 



Yet there was a time when the Polish kingdom, embracing wide domains, 

 ranked as one of the most powerful states in Europe. From Bautzen in Lusatia, 

 and Eiigen in the Baltic, westwards to Smolensk and the Dnieper rapids — from 

 the Carpathians northwards to the Livonian Embach, there is no land which 

 during the last eight hundred years was not held by the Poles either permanently 

 or for a time. United with Lithuania, the kingdom stretched from the Baltic to 

 the Euxine right across the continent. But its limits were frequently shifted, 

 and when Eussia under Peter the Great and Catherine IL, and Prussia under 

 the Fredericks, entered on a career of conquest and annexation, it became evident 

 that Poland must sooner or later be crushed by her powerful neighbours. The 

 first jjartition of 1772, which caused so much remorse to Maria Theresa, deprived 

 her of a territory 77,000 square miles in extent, with a population of about 

 5,000,000 ; in other words, one-fourth of the state and over one-third of its popu- 

 lation, which then numbered 12,500,000. Twenty-one years thereafter Eussia and 

 Prussia seized each of them a tract still more extensive than the first, and this second 

 dismemberment was soon followed by a third, in which Austria was invited to 

 share. And then Poland ceased to exist as a political power. During the present 



