I gained, I think, a more intimate view of the peasant life in Poland than I did in any other part of Europe that I visited. For that reason, and because I hoped also that these seeming trivial matters would, perhaps, prove as interesting and suggestive to others as they were to me, I have set down in some detail in this and the preceding chapters the impressions which I gathered there. In the little village of Barany, in Russian Poland, I had reached the point farthest removed, if not in distance at least in its institutions and civilization, from America; but, as I stood on a little elevation of land at the edge of the village and looked across the rolling landscape, I felt that I was merely at the entrance of a world in which, under many outward changes and differences of circumstance, there was much the same life that I had known and lived among the Negro farmers in Alabama. I believed, also, that I would find in that life of the Russian peasants much that would be instructive and helpful to the masses of my own people. I touched, before I completed my European experiences, not only the Austrian, but the Russian and German Polish provinces, but I should have liked to have gone farther, to Warsaw and Posen, and looked deeper into the life and learned more of the remarkable struggle which the Polish people, especially in these two latter provinces, are making to preserve the Polish nationality and improve the conditions of the Polish people. In this connection, and in concluding what I have to say about my observations in Poland, I want to note one singular, and it seems to me suggestive, fact: Of the three sections of the Polish race, German, Russian, and Austrian, there are two in which, according to the information I was able to obtain, the people are oppressed, and one in which they seem to be, if anything, the oppressors. In Russian Poland and in German Poland the Polish are making a desperate struggle to maintain their national existence, but in these two countries the Poles are prosperous. Russian Poland has become in recent years one of the largest manufacturing centres in Europe, and the masses of the Polish people have become prosperous citizens and labourers. In German Poland the Polish peasants have, within the past forty years, become a thrifty farming class. The large estates which were formerly in the hands of the Polish nobility have been, to a very large extent, divided up and sold among a rapidly rising class of small landowners. In other words, what was originally a political movement in these two countries to revive and reëstablish the kingdom of Poland has become a determined effort to lift the level of existence among the masses of the Polish people.