28 MARCH 1846, Page 15

THE PRESS IN POLAND.

NOT the least anomalous of the many anomalies in the Polish provinces, is the state of the press. Its condition and its influence serve more than any other phasis of society in those countries to show that perseverance in the present mode of governing them can only work for evil. In the Russian and Austrian portions of Poland, every effort is made to denationalize the Poles ; and to this end a jealous censor- ship is established over the press ; and the educational insti- tutions, from which the writers for it are supplied, are carefully regulated. The educational institutions in Galicia are avowedly organized for the purpose of Germanizing the Poles : the con- sequence is, that they are almost exclusively used by the German colonists. The Polish families either send their children to be educated abroad, free from the influence of a denationalizing propaganda, or allow them to grow up with little or no education. The same is the case to a still greater extent in Russian Poland. The educated reading public is thus narrowed in number. Its range of thought is also limited : politics, religious discussion, abstract speculation on social and moral inquiries, everything that despotic governments regard with suspicion, is discouraged. The educated reading public of Russian and Austrian Poland is a mere novel-reading public : its literature is something like our own Minerva Press novels, dribbled out in daily distillations of half a page.

But wherever the art of printing is known to exist, a demand for books spreads. Books take the place of the itinerant min- strels of ruder ages. They who cannot read get others to read for them. And the conventional mawkishness of the modern European novel school is odious to all whom habit has not taught to like it. Hard-handed workin&r, men, traders in their few mo- ments of leisure, country squires in the ennui of a rainy day, re- quire something stronger, something that speaks to their senti- ments. With the uneducated class in all countries, polities— that is, criticism of the laws and those who administer them—is the favourite reading. The pupils of our own original Church- of-England Schools, set up to check the progress of Joseph Lan- caster and Dissent, were no sooner taught to read than they em- ployed their new accomplishment in reading Cobbett and Wooller. To this day, the only kind of reading cared for in the agricultural districts is the Chartist newspaper found at the beer-house. One of the most profitable employments of the earlier Continental printers was the.printing of popular controversial pamphlets to be smuggled into England and Scotland. The uneducated masses in the Polish provinces have the same tastes. The fade literary journals of Warsaw and Lemberg have no attractions for them : they have a craving for more stimulating matter. And it is supplied to them through the smuggler ; partly from Posen, where the restrictions on the press have hitherto been less stringent, and the war against Polish nationality less inveterate ; but to a far greater extent from Paris. Books on poli- tical topics, in the Polish language, printed at Paris, often with titlepages quite alien to their contents, are to be found in every village, and almost in every cottage throughout Galicia and Rus- sian Poland. They are characterized by the embittered passion to be expected from exiles well nigh lost to hope, and the crude theories to be expected from persons who have enjoyed no regular training of the mind,. and who in a state of highly-excited feeling have been brought into contact with the most visionary and fanatical members of the European Revolutionary party. The strenuous efforts of the Russian and Austrian Governments have proved unavailing to keep their Polish provinces from being inun- dated with such works ; and as they will tolerate no political press, and as these mischievous and misleading publications are kept and studied in mysterious secrecy, they could employ no press to counteract them.

The destruction of the public political press in the Polish pro- vinces of Austria and Russia has called this secret press into existence and power. It can be counteracted only by a free pub- lic political press. But such a one can only exist under a na- tional government. The fruits of the popular literature created in Poland by the Russian and Austrian censorship of the press are to be traced in the excesses of the Galician peasants, as well as in the visionary struggles of rash revolutionists. The Jack Cedes of Galicia have their John Balls in the shape of books from Paris. Their hatred to the nobles is not love to the throne. Like Wat Tyler, they may begin by asking. the heads of nobles, but they will end by defying the King himself.