reated at the great settlement of political accounts in
1815 has been officially styled "The Cis-Vistula Provinces," ever
since the absolute incorporation with the Russian empire in 1868.
The provinces in question, ten in number, have an aggregate area
of 49,157 English square miles, and a population of eight millions,
composed to the extent of sixty-five per cent. of Poles, the remainder
being Jews (in the proportion of thirteen per cent., and settled
chiefly in towns), Lithuanians, Russians, Germans, and other aliens.

The Poles (the Polacks of Shakespeare), are a branch of the Sclav
race, their language differing but little from that of the Russians,
Czechs (Bohemians), Servians, Bulgarians, and other kindred remnants.
Contact and co-operation with Western civilization, and escape
from Tartar subjugation, permitted the Poles to work out their
own development on lines so widely apart from those pursued by
their Russian brethren, that the complete amalgamation of these
two great Sclav branches has long been a matter of practical
impossibility.

Polish history begins, like that of Russia, with Scandinavian invasion;
Szainocha, a reliable authority of the present century, asserted
that the Northmen descended on the Polish coast of the Baltic,
and became, as in Russia, ancestors of the noble houses. On the
other hand, it is on record that the first Grand Duke of Poland
(about A. D. 842), was Piastus, a peasant, who founded a dynasty
that was superseded only in 1385 by the Lithuanian Jagellons.
Christianity was introduced by the fourth of the Piasts, A. D. 964,
and it was a sovereign of the same House, Boleslas I., the Brave,
who gave a solid foundation to the Polish State. He conquered Dantzig
and Pomerania, Silesia, Moravia, and White Russia, as far as the
Dnieper. After being partitioned, in accordance with the principle
that long obtained in the neighbouring Russian principalities,
the component territories of Poland were reunited by Vladislaf
(Ladislaf) the Short, who established his capital, in 1320, at
Cracow, where the Polish kings were ever after crowned. Casimir
the Great, the Polish Justinian (1334-1370), gained for himself
the title of _Rex Rusticorum_, by the bestowal of benefits on the
peasantry, who were _adscripti glehoe_, and by the limitation of the
power of the nobles, or freeholders. On his death, Louis, King of
Hungary, his sister's son, was called to the throne; but in order
to insure its continued