ir Ally, Austria?

In the fateful year 1892 I travelled much in Galicia, and saw something
of the effects of Austrian government. My impressions of both were
unfavorable. From points of natural wealth and beauty, Galicia is
perhaps, of all countries, the least favoured of God. Shut out from
the warm southern winds by the Carpathian mountains, and exposed to the
northern blasts that sweep down from the broad steppes of Russia, the
long and narrow stretch of Galician territory is probably the most
inhospitable region in the western world Flat and featureless; with
swampy and ague-stricken plains, unbroken by trees and hedges; with
roads like canals, dissecting dreary wastes, black in the south, where
the loam lies, light in the north where salt is found; with rivers
without banks fraying into pools and ponds and marshes; with soppy
fields in formal stripes like the patches of a patchwork quilt; with
villages of log-houses, each having its cemetery a little apart, and its
wooden crucifix like a gibbet at a space beyond--such is a great part of
Galicia, the Polish province of Austria.

But little as Nature has done to cheer the spirits of the Poles, who
live under Austrian rule, what man has done is less. It is nothing at
all, or worse than nothing.

Thickly-sown on the eastern frontier are many densely populated
manufacturing towns, ugly and squat, and giving the effect of standing
barefoot on the damp earth. As you walk through them they look like
interminable lines of featureless streets, full of those sweating,
screaming, squabbling masses of humanity that take away all your pride
in the dignity of man's estate. The prevailing colour is yellow, the
dominant odour is noxious, the thoroughfares are narrow, and often
unpaved. In the busier quarters the shops are sometimes spacious, but
more frequently they are mere slits in the monotonous facades. When
closed, as on Sunday, these slits give the appearance of a row of prison
cells. When open they present crude pictures on the inner faces of
their doors--pictures of boots, caps, trousers, stockings or corsets, a
typology which seems to be more necessary than words to inhabitants who
have not, as a whole, been taught to read.

And then the people themselves! Perhaps there is not in all the world
a more hopeless-looking race, with their lagging lower lips, their dull
grey eyes, their dosy, helpless, exanimate expression, suggesting that
the body is half asleep and the spir