The universal geography : earth and its inhabitants

CHAPTER IV.poland (polska).Historical Retrospect.LIE very name of this portion of the Russian Empire has becomea symbol of national calamity. Poland is no longer autonomous,and all that survives of her former independence is the privilege ofbeing separately named in the long record of the vast domainssubject to the Czar of all the Russias. But even this privilegethreatens to disappear, and for some years past she has been officially known as the" Vistula Province," the national name being merely tolerated in a land where itis still endeared to millions. Even the nation itself, bound politically to EasternSlavdom, is but a fragment of the people, torn from other fragments now annexedto Prussia and Austria. Hence the word Poland is now a purely historical andethnographic expression, void of all political significance.Yet there was a time when the Polish kingdom, embracing wide domains,ranked as one of the most powerful states in Europe. From Bautzen in Lusatia,and Riigen in the Baltic, westwards to Smolensk and the Dnieper rapids—fromthe Carpathians northwards to the Livonian Embach, there is no land whichduring the last eight hundred years was not held by the Poles either permanentlyor for a time. United with Lithuania, the kingdom stretched from the Baltic tothe Euxine right across the continent. But its limits were frequently shifted,and when Russia under Peter the Great and Catherine II., and Prussia underthe Fredericks, entered on a career of conquest and annexation, it became evidentthat Poland must sooner or later be crushed by her powerful neighbours. Thefirst partition of 1772, which caused so much remorse to Maria Theresa, deprivedher of a territory 77,000 square miles in extent, with a population of about5,000,000 ; in other words, one-fourth of the state and over one-third of its population,which then numbered 12,500,000.Twenty-one years thereafter Russia andPrussia seized each of them a tract still more extensive than the first, and this seconddismemberment was soon followed by a third, in which Austria was invited toshare. And then Poland ceased to exist as a political power. During the present