The views of Poles and Russians coincide absolutely in emphasizing one statement: “There is no such country as the Ukraine; no such people as the Ukrainians; there are only Poland and Russia; a Polish nation and a Russian nation.” This complete agreement of both nations, whose giant states fought for two centuries for domination in Eastern Europe, may be easily understood. The Ukraine has always [152]been the richest region of Eastern Europe in natural resources, the Ukrainians the second largest nation, the Ukrainian question the most important problem in every state commanding Eastern Europe. Now the Ukrainian nation was completely exhausted by half a thousand years of Tatar oppression and an equally long period of serfdom. So that it seemed an easy matter to the mighty neighbor nations to even deny the existence of the Ukrainian nation, to hold up its development, and gradually to absorb it. The Poles, since their country lost its independence, have made heroic attempts to win back their freedom by armed uprisings. Despite all defeats, they have never given up their hopes of re-establishing the Polish Kingdom. But these hopes were never confined to the ethnographic territory of the Polish nation. The future Polish Kingdom was to have the old boundaries of the historic Poland—the Baltic and the Black Sea. Hence, the geographical conception of Poland, even to the scientific Polish geographers, still includes, besides the entire Polish ethnographic territory, Lithuania, White Russia and all of the Ukraine, as far as the Dnieper River and the Black Sea. How could this historico-geographical conception of Poland be made to harmonize with the ethnographic conception of the Ukraine? The solution of this question seemed very easy to the Polish scholars and politicians. They simply proved that the Ukrainians constituted a part of the Polish nation, that their language was a provincial dialect of the Polish language, and that only the religious faith, a number of manners and customs, songs, etc., were slightly different from those of the Poles; these slight differences the common country folk might retain, likewise the educated Ukrainian might be permitted to keep his language and customs in private life, but in his political sentiments, in his culture, in his literary language, he must be and remain a Pole. [153] This Polish solution of the Ukrainian question is derived from the Polish “state-idea” of a Polish Empire extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Despite the fact that the history of the national relations of Eastern Europe clearly proved this solution false in the second half of the 19th Century, the opinion prevails in all important Polish circles, that the Ukrainian people merely constitutes an ethnographic mass which shall make a good foundation for the expansion of Polish culture and power.