these men in the eyes of their countrymen across the Austrian frontier, but over there in Galicia the echoes of the Polish struggle against Tsarism assumed a predominantly national character. An anti-Russian feeling grew up among the Austrian Poles far more melodramatic than in Russian Poland itself. Irishmen resident in Great Britain see their own national problem as part of a wider question; Irishmen in Ireland have witnessed the profound changes in the attitude of Great Britain, but the children of Irish emigrants in America who have never been either to Ireland or Great Britain are liable to hold to the present day views which are merely a sentimental survival of the Fenian days. The case of the Poles is very similar. Those who live scattered in Russia proper or in Lithuania have co-operated to the full with the Russians in the common work for a better future. The Polish leader from Moscow, Mr. Lednicki, was among those who signed the manifesto of Viborg, and fought the battle of Russian liberalism through thick and thin; he is now the acknowledged leader of the Polish democrats in Russia. The Poles from the Kingdom, although in contact with a much poorer type of Russians—very largely representatives of the late reactionary Government—have yet known the human side of the question, and were able to grasp that it was both possible and desirable to act in conjunction with the Russian nation. But to a large majority of the Galician Poles Russia had become a bogey; her name reminded them of Siberia, prisons and the knout; she was the Apocalyptic beast of their legends. Vienna triumphed once more. In international affairs there was even less chance for co-operation between the Czechs and Jugoslavs and the Poles than in home politics.
On the outbreak of war the idea of the “historic mission of Austria” with regard to Poland became the common platform of the Polish leaders in Galicia. The fact that the war was not fought against both Berlin and St. Petersburg, though no doubt always painfully present to the minds of the Galician Poles, was yet passed over by them. To the Polish Radicals war against Russia was a revolution against Tsarism; to the Galician Conservatives it was the natural continuation of the “prætorian” policy which they had followed out for half a century. The Galician Poles were building on the Habsburg basis, whilst, to the Czechs and Jagoslavs, liberty
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