Poznan or Posen

At the first partition of Poland, in 1772, the districts to the north of the river Notec (German, Netze) fell to the share of Prussia. The rest of the province followed in 1793 and 1795, and was united with the territory acquired in 1772 to form the prov ince of South Prussia. In 1807, after the peace of Tilsit, the province was incorporated with the grand duchy of Warsaw, but in 1815 it reverted to Prussia as the grand duchy of Posen.

The Prussian regime, during the first decades after the Con gress of Vienna, was conciliatory : a Polish nobleman, prince An thony Radziwill, was appointed lieutenant-governor of the prov ince ; there was a provincial assembly, and there were local representative bodies. About 183o, however, a new current set in with the presidency of Flottwell: the experiment of settling subsidized German colonists on Polish soil—started by Frederick the Great in the 18th century—was resumed, and the Polish language deprived of its position of equality with German in the Government offices, the law-courts, and the schools. In the '4os, the revolutionary movement spreading throughout Europe, mani fested itself in Prussian Poland and an armed rising in 1848 was suppressed by military force. A highly reactionary Prussian Government arose out of the turmoil of the revolutionary year, and measures of repression against Polish organizations followed.

But a resolutely anti-Polish policy on a large scale was only origi

nated by Bismarck, and was carried out in earnest after the crea tion of the new German empire in 1871. To the landed gentry and the clergy, who had been the mainstay of Polish nationalism so far, there were now added a body of increasingly prosperous and enlightened peasants in the country, and a growing, wealthy Polish middle class in the towns,—all these ranks of society being united in organized opposition to the policy of Germanization. Bismarck aimed cruel blows at the Polish clergy in conducting his Kulturkampf against the Catholic element in the Reich; but the effect was only to rally the Polish masses more effectually round the clergy, who became their leaders in economic as well as in political organization. More success was achieved by the measures in the field of education which gradually made the school system of the province thoroughly German while rendering it at the same time democratic, progressive and highly efficient. Similarly, in the

development of the administrative system, improved efficiency and thorough Germanization went together. The powers of re sistance of the Polish element, however, rapidly increased with its numbers and its prosperity; and the Prussian Government soon realized that only economic means would serve its ends. In 1888, the Colonizing Commission was established for the purpose of buying up Polish land for German colonists, and it was equipped with ioo,000,000 marks (i5,000,000). The Polish element coun tered the attack by co-operative credit organizations, in which both the peasants and the middle class of the town took a promi nent share ; and soon the Poles succeeded in buying more land than they lost. The creation of a subsidized society—the Society of the Eastern Marches (known as the H.K.T. from the initials of its founders)—for the promotion of German advance in the east, the great increase of the funds at the disposal of the Colonizing Commission, the creation of a special fund of nearly half a million marks a year towards a campaign against the Polish middle class in the towns—all proved insufficient, and Billow, Bismarck's most zealous successor, brought new legislative means into play : a bill in 1904 forbidding Poles to establish new peasant farms on soil of their own, and one in 1907 authorizing the Government to dis possess Polish landowners by force. These measures were accom panied by no less drastic ones in the field of education and administration : in 1901, much scandal was roused by the dis cussion in the Prussian parliament of the incidents at Wrzesnia (Wreschen), where Polish children had been beaten by German schoolmasters for refusing to say the Lord's Prayer in German; and in 1906, the Prussian Government was made somewhat ridicu lous by the strike of some 1 oo,000 Polish school-children, which, in spite of severe proceedings against their parents, continued for nearly a whole school year. In 1908, the notorious "Gagging bill" limited to a minimum the right of Polish citizens to form societies, and altogether forbade the use of Polish at public meetings.