In the ferment that was to come, the very existence of the Sich would have served as a rallying point for Ukrainian national sentiment. All those classes of people who could appreciate the meaning of the new movements would have found a definite centre, and even though the Sich had lost its old time power and independence, it would still have been a living connection with the great past. With the Sich gone, the link with the great days was broken and the new movement was compelled to start from the beginning without any existing juridical basis. For this reason it may be well to pause a moment and look at the conditions as they existed in Ukraine at this crucial period. For all intents and purposes the noble class had either been Russianized or Polonized. In the sixteenth century a large part of the old noble families had definitely adopted Polish culture and the Roman Catholic Church. The newer nobles and landowners who had arisen from the ranks of the Kozak officers had nearly all been Russianized. They felt that it was beneath them to use the language of their peasants and serfs and they endeavored to carry on their daily activities in either one of the more fashionable languages. Many of them used French almost exclusively in their relations with members of their own class. These people sometimes preserved some relics of the past. They dearly loved to have serfs and attendants dressed in Kozak costume, as did the Engelhardts, the owners of the young Shevchenko, early in the nineteenth century. They enjoyed hearing Ukrainian folksongs sung by peasant choirs but they looked upon them as an inferior form of amusement and had that superior attitude that was so bitterly attacked by Shevchenko in his introduction to the _Haydamaki_. All in all, these people found the present situation to their personal interest and they did not care to jeopardize their own fortunes by challenging the power of the government or to injure their social standing by associating with people of the lower classes. In the same way the townsmen who had played such a large part in the cultural revival of the sixteenth century were no longer so influential. The towns had lost much of their importance, the leading classes, like the landowners, had fallen under the spell of the conquering cultures and those who still maintained the Ukrainian tradition had been so subjected to political disabilities that they were unable or indisposed to play their old role.