to exercise an undue influence on governments, acquires excessive importance. By the monopoly which the Magyars have fraudulently established for themselves in the Budapest Parliament, they have excluded the other nationalities of Hungary from all influence on foreign policy. In Austria the Germans have achieved the same result by wrecking Parliament.
They were able to do so because the Austrian Slavs failed to work together; there was practically no political connection between the Poles on the one hand and the Czechs and Jugoslavs on the other. They stood in different relations to the Austrian State and cherished different aims. “There is one striking fact in the life of our province (Galicia),” wrote, in 1866, Count Stanislas Tarnowski, one of the greatest statesmen of Austrian Poland, and now one of the few surviving actors of those fateful days, “and that is that, during all the time that we have been part of the Austrian State, we have established no connection with any of the other nations which form that State. . . . Apart from a fairly common sympathy for the Magyars, one would search in vain for any feeling for the other nationalities subject to the same rule as ourselves. . . . We have exercised no influence on any of them; we have been, and remain to the present day, strangers to them—they do not know us. . . . It is easy to understand why we have taken so little interest in those nationalities. They have a different past, different conditions of life, and, finally, a different centre of gravitation. Yet it is a pity, a great pity, that such are our relations.” These words can be repeated at the present day without any change. If anything, the relations between the Poles and the Czechs and Jugoslavs have become even less intimate than they were half a century ago.
In 1866 the Poles in Austria were dissatisfied irredentists, and their dissatisfaction with the Viennese Government and their desire to rid themselves of its interference in the affairs of Galicia formed a link between them and the other non-German nationalities of the Habsburg Monarchy. During the decade which followed on the establishment of the Dual System in 1867, and of constitutional government in Austria, they obtained a very large measure of home rule in Galicia. But they never thought of their inclusion in Austria as anything but provisional; a re-united Poland remained
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