VIII 
POLES, TSCHECHS AND GERMANS*° 

[New-York Daily Tribune, No. 3395, March 5, 1852] 

From what has been stated in the foregoing articles, it is already 
evident that unless a fresh revolution was to follow that of March, 
1848, things would inevitably return, in Germany, to what they were 
before this event. But such is the complicated nature of the historical 
theme upon which we are trying to throw some light, that subsequent 
events cannot be clearly understood without taking into account 
what may be called the foreign relations of the German Revolution. 
And these foreign relations were of the same intricate nature as the 
home affairs. 

The whole of the eastern half of Germany, as far as the Elbe, Saale 
and Bohemian Forest,’ has, it is well known, been reconquered 
during the last thousand years, from invaders of Slavonic origin. The 
greater part of these territories have been Germanized, to the 
perfect extinction of all Slavonic nationality and language, for 
several centuries past; and if we except a few totally isolated 
remnants, amounting in the aggregate to less than a hundred 
thousand souls (Kassubians in Pomerania, Wends or Sorbians in 
Lusatia), their inhabitants are, to all intents and purposes, Germans. 
But the case is different along the whole of the frontier of ancient 
Poland, and in the countries of the Tschechian tongue, in Bohemia 
and Moravia. Here the two nationalities are mixed up in every 
district, the towns being generally more or less German, while the 
Slavonic element prevails in the rural villages, where, however, it is 
also gradually disintegrated and forced back by the steady advance 
of German influence. 

The reason of this state of things is this. Ever since the time of 
Charlemagne the Germans have directed their most constant and 
persevering efforts to the conquest, colonization, or, at least, 
civilization of the East of Europe. The conquests of the feudal 

* Czech Forest.— Fad. 

nobility, between the Elbe and the Oder, and the feudal colonies of 
the military orders of knights in Prussia and Livonia only laid the 
ground for a far more extensive and effective system of Germaniza- 
tion by the trading and manufacturing middle classes, which in 
Germany, as in the rest of Western Europe, rose into social and 
political importance since the fifteenth century. The Slavonians, and 
particularly the Western Slavonians (Poles and Tschechs), are 
essentially an agricultural race; trade and manufactures never were 
in great favor with them. The consequence was, that with the 
increase of population and the origin of cities, in these regions, the 
production of all articles of manufacture fell into the hands of 
German immigrants, and the exchange of these commodities against 
agricultural produce became the exclusive monopoly of the Jews, 
who, if they belong to any nationality, are in these countries certainly 
rather Germans than Slavonians. This has been, though in a less 
degree, the case in all the East of Europe. The handicraftsman, the 
small shopkeeper, the petty manufacturer is a German up to this day 
in Petersburg, Pesht, Jassy and even Constantinople; while the 
money-lender, the publican, the hawker—a very important man in 
these thinly populated countries—is very generally a Jew, whose 
native tongue is a horribly corrupted German. The importance of 
the German element in the Slavonic frontier localities, thus rising 
with the growth of towns, trade and manufactures, was still’ Increased 
when it was found necessary to import almost every element of 
mental culture from Germany; after the German merchant, and 
handicraftsman, the German clergyman, the German schoolmaster, 
the German savant came to establish himself upon Slavonic soil. And 
lastly, the iron tread of conquering armies, or the cautious, 
well-premeditated grasp of diplomacy not only followed, but many 
times went ahead of the slow but sure advance of denationalization 
by social developments. Thus, great parts of Western Prussia and 
Posen have been Germanized since the first partition of Poland,”’ by 
sales and grants of public domains to German colonists, by 
encouragements given to German capitalists for the establishment of 
manufactories, &c., in those neighborhoods, and very often, too, by 
excessively despotic measures against the Polish inhabitants of the 
country. 

In this manner, the last seventy years had entirely changed the line 
of demarcation between the German and Polish nationalities. The 
revolution of 1848 calling forth, at once, the claim of all oppressed 
nations to an independent existence, and to the right of settling their 
own affairs for themselves, it was quite natural that the Poles should 
at once demand the restoration of their country within the frontiers 

Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany 45 

of the old Polish Republic before 1772. It is true, this frontier, even 
at that time, had become obsolete, if taken as the delimitation of 
German and Polish nationality; it had become more so every year 
since by the progress of Germanization; but then, the Germans had 
proclaimed such an enthusiasm for the restoration of Poland, that 
they must expect to be asked, as a first proof of the reality of their 
sympathies, to give up their share of the plunder. On the other hand, 
should whole tracts of land, inhabited chiefly by Germans, should 
large towns, entirely German, be given up to a people that as yet had 
never given any proofs of its capability of progressing beyond a state 
of feudalism based upon agricultural serfdom? The question was 
intricate enough. The only possible solution was in a war with Russia; 
the question of delimitation between the different revolutionized 
nations would have been made a secondary one to that of first 
establishing a safe frontier against the common enemy; the Poles, by 
receiving extended territories in the east, would have become more 
tractable and reasonable in the west; and Riga and Mitau* would 
have been deemed, after all, quite as important to them as Danzig 
and Elbing. Thus the advanced party in Germany, deeming a war 
with Russia necessary to keep up the Continental movement, and 
considering that the national re-establishment even of a part of 
Poland would inevitably lead to such a war, supported the Poles; 
while the reigning liberal middle-class party clearly foresaw its 
downfall from any national war against Russia, which would have 
called more active and energetic men to the helm, and therefore, 
with a feigned enthusiasm for the extension of German nationality, 
they declared Prussian Poland, the chief seat of Polish revolutionary 
agitation, to be part and parcel of the German Empire that was to be. 
The promises given to the Poles in the first days of excitement were 
shamefully broken; Polish armaments, got up with the sanction of 
the Government, were dispersed and massacred by Prussian 
artillery; and as soon as the month of April, 1848, within six weeks of 
the Berlin Revolution, the Polish movement was crushed, and the old 
national hostility revived between Poles and Germans.” This 
immense and incalculable service to the Russian Autocrat was 
performed by the liberal merchant-ministers, Camphausen and 
Hansemann. It must be added, that this Polish campaign was the first 
means of reorganising and reassuring that same Prussian army, 
which afterward turned out the Liberal party and crushed the 
movement which Messrs. Camphausen and Hansemann had taken 

* Lettish name: Jelgava.— Ed. 
> Polish names: Gdansk and Elblong.— Ed. 

such pains to bring about. “Whereby they sinned, thereby are they 
punished.”’* Such has been the fate of all the upstarts of 1848 and 
49, from Ledru-Rollin to Changarnier, and from Camphausen 
down to Haynau. 

The question of nationality gave rise to another struggle in 
Bohemia. This country, inhabited by two millions of Germans, and 
three millions of Slavonians of the Tschechian tongue, had great 
historical recollections, almost all connected with the former 
supremacy of the Tschechs. But then the force of this branch of the 
Slavonic family had been broken ever since the wars of the Hussites 
in the fifteenth century *’; the provinces speaking the Tschechian 
language were divided, one part forming the kingdom of Bohemia, 
another the principality of Moravia, a third, the Carpathian 
hill-country of the Slovaks, being part of Hungary. The Moravians 
and Slovaks had long since lost every vestige of national feeling and 
vitality, although mostly preserving their language. Bohemia was 
surrounded by thoroughly German countries on three sides out of 
four. The German element had made great progress on her own 
territory; even in the capital, in Prague, the two nationalities were 
pretty equally matched; and everywhere capital, trade, industry, and 
mental culture were in the hands of the Germans. The chief 
champion of the Tschechian nationality, Professor Palacky, is 
himself nothing but a learned German run mad, who even now 
cannot speak the Tschechian language correctly and without foreign 
accent. But as it often happens, dying Tschechian nationali- 
ty—dying according to every fact known in history for the last four 
hundred years—made in 1848 a last effort to regain its former 
vitality—an effort whose failure, independently of all revolutionary 
considerations, was to prove that Bohemia could only exist, 
henceforth, as a portion of Germany, although part of her in- 
habitants might yet, for some centuries, continue to speak a non- 
German language. 

London, February, 1852