Despite all of these bitter political feuds, the Ukrainian population, even during the years of depression, continued to solidify its position in the state. Its co-operative organizations increased in numbers, in capital and in membership. They became steadily more important and that progress that had been noted during the last years of Austro-Hungarian rule proceeded at an even more rapid tempo. The self-consciousness that had come to the Ukrainians through their attempt at independence made them more aware of their role and influence in the country and especially in their special areas than they had been before the War. Attempts to divide them into Ukrainians and Ruthenians on the ground of religious and economic differences fell upon sterile soil. By 1939 the Ukrainians of the West were in a much better position than they had been at any time in the past. The situation in Western Ukraine aroused grave anxiety on the part of many sincere friends of Poland as the hour for the Second World War drew near, It presented many elements of danger to the Polish state and this danger was magnified by the policy that was adopted by every political party among the Poles. It seemed impossible for them to realize that conditions had changed with the abolition of serfdom. That same controversy which had broken out in the days when Galicia was still subject to Austria-Hungary continued as a mutual feud, especially in such areas as Lviv, where there was a large Polish as well as a Ukrainian population. The Poles fanned the flame of discord by their policy of antagonism and by their inability to see the justice of any of the Ukrainian demands. The restored Polish republic continued on the fatal path of the seventeenth century by overemphasizing on the one hand a supposed desire of the Ukrainians to join the Soviet Union as they had joined Russia earlier, and on the other, by underestimating the strength of the entire Ukrainian movement. They turned their attention and gave their confidence only to those people who had been completely Polonized and they ignored the long and unbroken struggle for equal rights which the Ukrainians had been carrying on for centuries in the old Poland, under the rule of the conquerors and later. An isolated and non-Communist Western Ukraine might have been brought into a Poland constructed on federal lines, but it could not feel happy as part of a unified state in which it was treated as inferior in every way and which was openly working for its complete absorption. After the failure of the Ukrainian Republic, the Poles regarded the question as closed, and their very insistence upon this only intensified that opposition which they fought constantly and affected to ignore. As a result Western Ukraine remained as a sore in the body politic of Poland, instead of becoming an element of strength and just as in the past, so in the present, the feud worked out to the marked disadvantage of both sides.