In this combined state the nobility and to a large extent the bourgeoisie of the non-Polish races came spontaneously to adopt the Polish language, customs, religion, nationality--became in fact quite Polonized. The institutions of Lithuania were assimilated in all respects to those of Poland; Polish culture became predominant from Kiev to Wilno, from Livonia to the Carpathians--in short, this composite and originally so heterogeneous state became essentially a Polish one. Thus, by statesmanship and tenacity, by the higher culture they could offer and the liberties they extended, the Polish race had peaceably conquered a great empire in the east, a realm twice the size of the modest Poland of the Piasts; and a vast field was opened up for colonization and the extension of Polish nationality. The hundred years of Russian rule since the Partitions and violent attempts at Russification have by no means destroyed, although they have in part impaired, the results of four centuries of Polonization in the eastern territories. Even today, in Lithuania proper and in large areas of White Russia and the western Ukraine, the country gentry and the non-Jewish population of the towns are predominantly Polish; Wilno, the ancient capital of Lithuania, is still almost as much a Polish city as Warsaw; Polish colonies are thickly scattered about in the rural districts; and socially, intellectually, and economically, the Poles remain the most important element in the population. It would probably be true to say that the average Pole has today, at the back of his head, the feeling that his country is not merely the modest area of ethnographic Poland, but the whole wide expanse of historic Poland--Poland as it was in 1772, just before the Partitions. This conception is based partly upon the principle that the Partitions, as acts of lawless usurpation, could have no legal validity, so that _de jure_ Poland still exists within her frontiers of 1772; partly upon the view that the lands between the Carpathians, the Baltic, the Dnieper, and the Dvina possess so high a degree of geographical, economic, and cultural unity that they deserve to be considered as one country. But above all, it is a matter of historic traditions, of time-hallowed associations and sentiments, of deeply rooted habits of thought. It would be difficult for Poles today to forget that for centuries their race has been as much at home in Wilno, Mohylew, Minsk, or Kamieniec, as in Cracow or Warsaw; and that half of the greatest figures in Polish history have come from these eastern lands beyond the pale of ethnographic Poland. Kosciuszko, their national hero, and Mickiewicz, their national poet, were both from Lithuania. The two men at the head of the Polish state in the past year, Pilsudski and Paderewski, come, the one from Lithuania, the other from the Ukraine. For generations Poland has spent an infinite amount of effort in organizing and civilizing these eastern territories and in defending