It is a fearful thing to murder, or attempt to murder, the soul of a
nation. The call that comes to a people’s heart from the soil that gave
them birth is a spiritual force which no conquering empire should dare
to kill. How powerful it is, how mysterious, how unaccountable, and how
infinitely pathetic! The land of one’s country may be so bleak, so bare,
so barren, that the stranger may think God can never have intended that
it should be trodden by the foot of man, yet it seems to us, who were
born to it, to be the fairest spot the sun shines upon. The songs of
one’s country may be the simplest staves that ever shaped themselves
into music, yet they search our hearts as the loftiest compositions
never can. The language of one’s country (even the dialect of one’s
district) may be the crudest corruption that ever lived on human lips,
yet it lights up dark regions of our consciousness which the purest of
the classic tongues can never reach. Do we not all feel this, whatever
the qualities or defects of our native speech--every Scotsman, every
Irishman, every Welshman, nay, every Yorkshireman, every Lancashireman,
every Devonshireman, when he hears the word and the tone which belong to
his own people only? There are phrases in the Manx and the Anglo-Manx
of my own little race which I can never hear spoken without the sense
of something tingling and throbbing between my flesh and my skin. Why?
Because it is the home-speech of my own island, and whatever she is,
whatever fate may befall her, however she may treat me, she is my mother
and I am her son.
Such is the mighty and mysterious thing which we call a nation’s
soul. Nobody can explain it, nobody can account for it, but woe to the
presumptuous empire which tries to wipe it out. It can never be wiped
out. Crushed and trodden on it may be, as Austria has crushed and
trodden on the soul of Austrian Poland, and as Germany has crushed and
trodden on the soul of Prussian Poland, when they have fallen so low
in the scale of civilized peoples as to flog Polish school children for
refusing to learn their catechism and say their prayers in a language
which they cannot understand. But to kill the soul of a nation is
impossible. The German Chancellor could not do that when he violated the
body of Belgium. And though Warsaw has fallen the fatuous Prince Leopold
of Bavaria, with his preposterous proclamations, cannot kill the soul of
Poland.
At Cracow in 1892 I tried to buy for one of my children the little
Polish national cap, but after a vain search for it through many
shops (where I was generally suspected of being a spy for the Austrian
police), the cap was brought to me at night, in my private room,
by shopkeepers who had been afraid to sell it openly in the day.
At Wieliezhe, I, with some forty persons of various nationalities
(including the usual contingent of detectives), descended the immense
and marvellous salt-mine which is now used as a show place for
visitors. After passing, by the flare of torches, down long galleries
of underground workings, we were plunged into darkness by a rush of wind
over a subterranean river through which we had to shoulder our way on
a raft. Then suddenly, no face being visible in that black tunnel under
the earth, the Polish part of our company broke into a wild, fierce,
frenzied singing of their national anthem which, in those days, they
dare not sing on the surface and in the light: “Poland is not lost for
ever; she will live once more.”
No, Poland is not lost for ever! She will live once more!