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half Russian or Lithuanian. In this eastern half theLithuanians were Catholic, but the Russian element(Ukrainian and White Russian) had been until the sixteenthcentury almost solidly Orthodox; after the Unionof Brest-Litovsk (1596) which created the Uniat churchas a half-way house to Catholicism the Russian elementwas divided (c,'. p. 225).The union with Lithuania did not represent conquest,nor on the other hand was it accompanied or followedby any considerable eastward colonizing movement ofthe Polish people, except eventually in the Lvov andVilna districts. In this respect Polish eastward expansionwas strikingly different from Russian eastward expansion,founded both on conquest and on colonization. Theupper classes of 'the western lands,' and the centres ofVilna and Lvov, became Polish or polonized, and from thesixteenth century onwards the culture of the Lithuanianand White Russian regions was Polish, though this was less |so in the south-eastern, Ukrainian regions.The polonization of ' the western lands' represented aremarkable achievement in assimilation, but it wasvitiated by the fact that it was for the most part confinedto the magnates and country gentry, while the greatmass of the people remained a subject people of serfs forwhom the benefits of Polish civilization meant almostnothing. As late as 1811 a friendly French observerlamented: "A great many more years will be necessaryfor people here to learn to consider peasants as humanbeings and to treat them as such." And this was writtenof purely Polish Poland, not of 'the western lands' ruledby the Polish landowner minority. Polonization was, inthe second place, vitiated by the immense extension ofthe Polish-Lithuanian state to the east, especially southeastinto the steppes, where direct Polish rule after 1569succeeded only in violently antagonizing the Ukrainians,as will be seen later (pp. 225-227). Finally, the wholeeastward drive of the Poles was not accompanied by anydiminution in their struggle for the Baltic or accommodationwith the Germans on the west and north.From the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries thedisputed lands were even larger than those described202