The universal geography : earth and its inhabitants

242 EUSSIA IX EUROPE.century a Duchy of Warsaw and a Republic of Cracow had doubtless a shadowof independent life, but the illusion was soon dispelled before the hard realities.Warsaw 1" conies a Russian stronghold, and Cracow sinks into an Austrian provincialtown. The Vistula provinces, arbitrarily parcelled out, have henceforth apurely administrative and military significance in the eyes of Russian bureaucracy.The imperial treasury regards Poland as the most populous, industrious, wealthy,and heavily taxed division of the empire, and the Russian staff sees nothing in itexcept the most formidable quadrilateral of Central Europe.It is easy to detect the main causes that brought about the collarjse of the Polishstate. Her fate is partly explained by the geographical conditions of the land.Nature had denied her a well-defined frontier, or any compact upland tract whereshe might have perhaps established a solid nucleus of power. Nevertheless theoutlines of the region occupied by the bulk of the Polish race proper are mostlydrawn with sufficient clearness. On the south the ridge of the Carpathiansforms a natural barrier, never at any time crossed by the Poles, as it has been bythe Little Russians. In the north the lacustrine table-land, whose northernslopes are peopled by Germans or the Germanised Prussians, also presented alimit which the Poles scarcely succeeded in overcoming. The Vistula also,intersecting the land from north to south, and fed by affluents on both its banks,converts the whole country into a fairly regular geographical basin possessed ofgreat resisting force. But eastwards and westwards the land is open, exceptwhere masked by extensive swamps and almost impenetrable woodlands. Thevast depression whence the inhabitants of the Vistula basin take the name ofPoles, or " Lowlanders," is continued on either side into Germany and Russia.But it was in this direction that the great migrations chiefly took place, thepressure of each succeeding wave being felt most forcibly along the parallels oflatitude. Through these two broad openings the Polish frontier began to fluctuate,as it were, on the side of Germany and Russia at once, wars and inroadsceaselessly displacing the equilibrium of races here struggling for the supremacy.More than once Poland rose to the first rank amongst Slav states, and mightalmost have claimed by right the name of Slavonia. Still two distinct periods ofexpansion may be observed in her history, each followed by an epoch of weakness,and ending in territorial loss. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries enlargementtook place, chiefly westwards, Poland now representing the van of Slavdomagainst Germany. Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries the directionof her growth was shifted to the east against the oriental Slavs. About thetime of the earliest national records the kingdom—comprising Polska proper,that is, the Vistula and "Warta " plains," the present Poland, and Poznania—wasengaged in the attempt to absorb the kindred tribes occupying the region stretchingwestwards to the Elbe. At one time foes of the Germanic emperors, atothers yielding to the fascination of the " II oly Roman Empire," and proud ofranking among its vassals, the Polish kings succeeded in subduing nearly allthe western Slavs. In the beginning of the eleventh century Bolislas the Greatheld Moravia, Slovak-land, Lusatia, and for a short time even Bohemia. His