THE UKRAINE PROBLEM
which could not be ignored. The Galician capital, Lvov (or Lemberg) became the centre of an acute racial struggle. Situated in territory which is overwhelmingly Ukrainian, the town itself is mainly Polish, with a large Jewish minority, but is none the less a focus of Ukraine national feeling. It has found its patron in that very remarkable figure, Count Andrew Szeptycki, the Uniate Metropolitan of Lvov, who, himself a member of an ancient Ruthene family which had been Polonised till the present century, has long devoted all his energies to the task of spreading education, training up an active and keenly patriotic clergy, and fostering art, literature and political thought. The Museum which he founded and the “Ševčenko Society,” whose publications he helped to endow, exercised a profound influence beyond the Austnian border, despite all the frowns of official Russia.
The gross corruption by which the Szlachta—the ring of Polish conservative landowners—endeavoured to prop up their tottering power at the elections of 1907 (the first held under Universal Suffrage) created a very heated atmosphere in Galicia, and re-acted upon the relations of Poles and Ruthenes. The struggle raged most fiercely in the University of Lvov, which remained in Polish hands, although a limited number of Ruthene chairs had also been created for such distinguished scholars as the historians Hruševsky and Kolessa. To such an extent were passions roused, that a young Ukrainian student, Šyčinski, assassinated the Polish Governor of Galicia, Count Potocki. Reprisals followed from the side of the Poles, scores of Ukrainian students were arrested, and the great hunger-strike which they organised in prison became one of the political sensations of Austria. The magnitude and democratic character of the national revolt became apparent when a couple of years later Šyčinski was smuggled out of prison and across the Russian border, to emerge during the great war as the leader of the Ukrainian movement in the United States and Canada.
The Ukrainian party in the Austrian Parliament, though it has produced no outstanding personality who could be compared to the famous Czech leaders Kramař and Masaryk, has none the less proved its real worth as a firm bulwark of national claims, and is far from from negligible in the interplay of parties. Its democratic outlook—inherent in a race whose aristocracy has been assimilated by an alien race
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