hip, and,
confessedly or not, they belong to the irreconcilables in the political
systems of Prussia and Russia, biding their time, knowing well that an
open resistance, instead of the policy of passive and latent opposition,
would be both unwise and untimely.

Sociological questions have become prominent in denationalized Poland,
and Polish women have been drawn into their discussion. The tariff
barrier between Poland and Russia having been abolished, commerce and
industry were turned into wider channels. The revolution of 1863, ill
prepared and ill executed, failed utterly, and the only hope left for
the nation was progress along economic lines. The great work of the
czar-liberator, Alexander II., who released the Russian peasantry from
servitude, also revolutionized the problems of economic sustenance in
Poland: the struggle for existence under the changed conditions. Poland,
placed as she is between Russia and her powerful western neighbors,
quickly became an industrial centre. Polish women came forward with
their legitimate claims to participate in this material movement. They
had no easy victory. The Russian government, as such, excluded Polish
women _ipso facto_, even more rigidly than Polish men. But the breadless
women forced their way into the factories, the offices, and the
workshops, _i. e._, into commerce and industry. Finally, even the state
recognized their punctuality, conscientiousness, and frugality, and all
this with consequent cheaper wages, and received them in the postal, the
telegraph, and even in the railway service, and as clerks in the courts.

The teaching profession is still most sought by women, though
instruction, in all the schools, is almost entirely in Russian, or other
modern languages, Polish being excluded. The demand for university
education, though granted to women in theory, is not so in practice. It
is very much restricted, as the University of Warsaw does not admit
women, though the stirring events after the Japanese war, the
constitutional conflict throughout Russia, and the struggle for autonomy
in Poland may change all this in the near future. The Austro-Polish
universities of Cracow and Lemberg have recently opened their doors to
them, a fact which drew the many earnest and studious Russian-Polish
women to those centres of learning, as they had previously been
attracted by the liberality of the Swiss universities and the University
of Paris. As Cracow and Lemberg admit only