Rensselaer Republican, Volume 21, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 July 1889 — Obliteration of Poland. [ARTICLE]

Obliteration of Poland.

The woes of Poland are not so entirely a matter of ancient history as people are apt to imagine. Persecution, of a certain modern kind, still goes on in that unhappy country, the more cruel that it is not of the sort that can be met as a general issue. In Russian Poland people of all classes are forbidden to speak Polish. Servants, coachmen, and artisans are Urged by the Russian officials to wateh for and report any case in which their employers use tha. forbidden . tongue.

even in private, and in every case the offender is fined and the in former-is.-.re-warded. So rigid is the rule that a poor old woman who knelt -on the pavement before, a chapel in Wilna and said her prayers aloud in Polish was “rim in’’ to the guard-house and only discharged after as evere reprimand. Old men who are in the habit of saying their prayers daily in the churches ordered to say their prayers in Russian in future. A boy has been expelled from school for writing his name in Polish in one of his books. Tim sounds almost incredible, but it is hardly worse than the persecution carried on over the border under the rule of Prussia—that country which professes to monopolize most of the liberality, enlightment, and progress of the preset) t day. An innkeeper, Stanislaus Flaum, was fined £7 because he would not spell his name “Pfiuutn.” He was condemned for trying to “Polish’ 1 a German name. The sentence was so absurd that it was afterward reversed. Another man, a bookseller in Gneisen, who had to give evidence in a local court, declined to testify in "German, on the ground that he did not understand the language well enough. For this he was sentenced to a day’s imprisonment, with the threat of a longer term. Thereupon he tried to testify in German, but with such ill success that the counsel begged that he might be allowed to repeat it all in Polish! But he had'to do his twtjntyifOOT hours in prison just the same. Prayer books in Polish have been suppressed as “hostile to the empire, antiGerman, and favoring the Polish Propaganda. —Boston Courier.