it no more than half awake. To see
them slouching along the streets, or sitting in stupefied groups at the
doors of brandy-shops, passing a single bottle from mouth to mouth, is
to realize how low humanity may fall in its own esteem under the rule
of an alien government. To watch them at prayer in their little Catholic
churches is to feel that they have been made to think of themselves as
the least of God's creatures, unworthy to come to His footstool--always
ready to kiss the earth, and never daring to lift their eyes to heaven,
having no right, and hardly any hope.

Such are the poorer and more degraded of the Poles in the Austrian
crownland of Galicia, which has lately been swept by war (along the
banks of the Vistula, the Dniester, and the Bug), and is now perishing
of hunger, and being devastated by disease. And when I ask myself what
has been the root-cause of a degradation so deep in a people who once
laboured for the humanities of the world and upheld the traditions of
Culture, I find only one answer--the suppression of nationality! In that
fact lies the moral of Galicia's martyrdom. Let Belgium's nationality
be suppressed as Germany is now trying to suppress it, and her condition
will soon be like that of Austrian Poland. You cannot expect to keep
the body of a nation alive while you are doing your best to destroy its
soul.

THE SOUL OF POLAND

It is a fearful thing to murder, or attempt to murder, the soul of a
nation. The call that comes to a people's heart from the soil that gave
them birth is a spiritual force which no conquering empire should dare
to kill. How powerful it is, how mysterious, how unaccountable, and how
infinitely pathetic! The land of one's country may be so bleak, so bare,
so barren, that the stranger may think God can never have intended that
it should be trodden by the foot of man, yet it seems to us, who were
born to it, to be the fairest spot the sun shines upon. The songs of
one's country may be the simplest staves that ever shaped themselves
into music, yet they search our hearts as the loftiest compositions
never can. The language of one's country (even the dialect of one's
district) may be the crudest corruption that ever lived on human lips,
yet it lights up dark regions of our consciousness which the purest of
the classic tongues can never reach. Do we not all feel this, whatever
the qualities or defects of our native speech--every Scotsman, every
Irishman, every Welshma