the word of salvation. God has spoken it in heaven; you speak it on earth. . . . The Treaty of Vienna is broken all over Europe. War appears inevitable.”
“Galicia, that province of ancient Poland, whose acquisition is acknowledged to have been illegal,” runs a resolution passed by the German Estates of Lower Austria on 20 April, 1848, “. . . aims at a reunion with the parts which have been appropriated by Prussia and Russia. It is not for Austria to repress the national aspirations of the Poles. . . .”The “universal war for the freedom of nations” for which the Poles prayed in 1848 failed to come. But during the eventful period of international politics, which extends between 1848–1871, the talk never subsided about “the historic mission of Austria,” and schemes were continually spun by Poles for a universal war against Berlin and St. Petersburg. These schemes usually presupposed the co-operation of France and Italy, sometimes also of Great Britain, and they ranged the entire gamut from the Vatican to Garibaldi. To some it was a Roman Catholic League which was to liberate Poland, to others a Young Europe. Even such a sober and cautious politician as Count A. Goluchowski (the-father of the Count Goluchowski, who was Austro-Hungarian Foreign Secretary 1895–1906) is known to have entertained such plans, and it ought to be mentioned in his honour that he, for one, kept in closer touch with the Czech and Jugoslav leaders than with Magyar pseudo-Liberals of the Kossuth type.
By 1871 the Polish schemes for a war against both Prussia and autocratic had passed into “the land where the dead dreams go.” Where was an ally to be found equal to such an enterprise? Great Britain kept aloof from Continental entanglements; France and Austria-Hungary, still staggering from the defeats of 1866 and 1870, had themselves to seek stronger allies; official Italy, equally afraid of republican revolution and clerical reaction, was no longer to be counted on. Thus the most which the Austrian Poles could reasonably attempt was to preserve to the full their national liberties in Galicia. There was, in fact, only one force in Europe with which the Poles could have thrown in their lot, had they been able to believe in its power and face the light of its burning fires—the Russian Revolution. It alone could work the miracle of Poland’s liberation. But even in Russian Poland itself could a landed gentry, an ultra-conservative aristocratic Church hierarchy, and the
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