THE

WESTMINSTER

REVIEW.

JULY TO DECEMBER

(INCLUSIVE)

1904.

"Truth can never be confirmed enough, Though doubts did ever sleep."

SHAKSPEARE.

Wahrheitsliebe zeigt sich darin, daß man überall das Gute zu finden und zu schäßen weiß.

VOL. CLXII.

1

GOTHE.

NEW YORK:

THE LEONARD SCOTT PUBLICATION COMPANY.

7 & 9 WARREN STREET.

MDCCCCIV.

THE

WESTMINSTER REVIEW.

VOL. CLXII. No. 1.—JULY 1904.

A STRANGE GUIDE ON POLISH AND GERMAN AFFAIRS.

WHILST the war is going on in the Far East amidst increasing horrors, signs of sullen discontent among various nationalities that groan under Russian despotism are more and more to be heard. It is like the rattling at the bars of the vast Imperial prison-house, from which attempts of escape are made.

At Warsaw a sanguinary encounter recently took place between the owners of a secret Social Democratic printing-office and the police who had discovered it. On that occasion, two of the latter

-namely, the assistant of the Chief of the Gendarmerie Wintschuk, and the Adjunct of the Police Commissary Ordanowski-were killed. Several others of the police were severely, or mortally, wounded by shots. Though some of the Polish and Lithuanian "comrades" were captured, two of them succeeded in making their way through the crowd of Government agents with the aid of revolvers.

Since the overthrow of the great Polish insurrection of 1863-64 which had taxed the resources of the Czar's empire to an almost incomprehensible degree, the very language of a nation more highly cultured than that of the Muscovite masses has been subjected to the most unbearable restrictions. This is a grievance which binds all classes of Russian Poland together as against the foreign oppressor. Of late years an active social propaganda has, moreover, succeeded in gaining adherents both among the peasantry and the working classes of the towns. This gives the national movement, which was formerly mostly supported by the nobility and the middle class, quite a new aspect.

Among the cultured section of the Russians, too, a rising VOL. 162.-No. 1.

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dissatisfaction with an autocratic Government, as corrupt as it is inefficient, is clearly perceptible. Some of the more moderate malcontents already begin to throw out significant feelers. They dwell on the necessity of internal reforms by expressing a hope that the Czar himself must now see, at last, the danger in which the country as well as the throne might be placed if a parliamentary representation, such as the Japanese possess, were any longerrefused. These hints have appeared in the Italian press. But it

is well known that, owing to the lack of freedom from which Russian journalism suffers, a roundabout procedure of that kind is often employed for the purpose of a possible subsequent quotation in papers at St. Petersburg and Moscow.

As to Poland, the Russian General Fadeyeff wrote some years ago, long after the rising of 1863-64 had been vanquished:

"Nobody can imagine that the Polish question is in reality solved. All its component parts are to-day still as lively as before. The western provinces of Russia, and not the kingdom of Poland alone, but also Volhynia, where the Catholics form only 10 per cent. of the population, will become completely Polish and hostile to Russia at the first appearance of a foreign enemy."

General Fadeyeff has been known as a persistent preacher in favour of the establishment of a great "Slav Empire under the supremacy of the Czar, with Constantinople as its capital." In Fadeyeff's opinion, Austria-Hungary and Turkey have to be annihilated, in order to bring about the fulfilment of his grand plan. All the more noteworthy is what he said about the irreconcilable attitude of the Poles-a really Slav race, which, as has been shown by other writers, fiercely contests the title of the Muscovites to be regarded, in their vast majority, as Slavs by blood. When Genera} Langiewicz was at the head of the Polish rising in the 'sixties, he issued a proclamation in which he actually described the Muscovite invader, the "eternal enemy of freedom and civilisation," as "the Asiatic enemy." This is a view prevailing among the Poles up to the present day. It sheds a curious light on the pretension of the Government of the Czar in its war with Japan.

The national feeling in Poland continuing to be of so marked a kind, one may well wonder to find the exploded statement about Kosciusczko's alleged exclamation: "Finis Poloniæ," repeated at the present day as a so-called historical fact. This assertion is one of the many extraordinary achievements of an author with a German name, who, writing in English, offers himself as a guide on history ancient and modern, but who commits, in his frequent, brilliantly superficial articles and books, the most astounding, or rather comic, blunders. It is Dr. Emil Reich. Professing to discourse learnedly on The Slav and his Future, and more especially on Poland, he actually mixes up-as has been shown in a London journal-the

events of the Polish Revolution of 1794 with those of the Revolution of 1830-32. He speaks of Kosciuszko as having fallen on the field of Ostrolenka, and having uttered there "the famous exclamation: Finis Poloniæ!'" Neither of these statements is

true.

The battle of Ostrolenka-to quote an amusing correspondence on that subject took place in 1831; that is, fourteen years after the great Polish patriot's death! It was in the century before, in 1794, that Kosciuszko, apparently mortally wounded, sank down on the battlefield, not of Ostrolenka, but of Macieo wice. And " Freedom shrieked when Kosciuszko fell." After a while he recovered from his wound and lived until 1817.

Meanwhile the false news had been spread of his having exclaimed: "Finis Poloniæ!" This fabricated saying got into the work of the French Count Ségur. Thereupon Kosciuszko wrote a long letter to that author, in which he declared that only ignorance or malevolence attributed to him a word which would be inconsistent and criminal in the mouth of any Pole, but still far more so in his own. He branded the statement in question as a downright "blasphemy against the future of his fatherland, and expressed a hope that such a calumuy would no longer be repeated. The letter, the full text of which is given at the end of this article, is dated from Paris, the 20 Brumaire of the year XII; that is, October 31, 1803.

Its contents the correspondence alluded to says are well known to those who are acquainted with the modern history of Poland, and who are really entitled to write about it. More than once this protest has been mentioned in public, here and abroad. Yet the false saying is again attributed to the great Polish patriot. To cap the confusion, he is made to utter the fictitious exclamation seventeen years after his death, thirty-seven years after the battle in which he had become a prisoner of war!

Other historical information supplied by Dr. Reich to English readers is of equal value. He describes the Margraves of Brandenburg, the predecessors of the Kings of Prussia and of the present Geraan Emperors, simply as the vassals of the Polish Kings. This is as correct as if one were to say that England, up to the accession of Queen Victoria, had been the vassal of the old German Empire, or been subject to the Diet of the subsequent German Buad, because the English Kings, as Prince Electors of Hanover, were, in that latter quality, also rulers in a part of Germany. From the loose statement of Dr. Reich, no English reader would gather that the Margraves of Brandenburg were appointed by the Kaisers, and were responsible to, even legally depusable by, the authority of the German Empire.

Again, this strange instructor of Engl.sh public opinion has been