The Times correspondent at Vienna sends an extraordinary narrative of
Polish tyranny in Galicia. About a month ago some two hundred Ruthene students at the Polish University of Lemberg were arrested for rioting when the authorities refused to allow Ruthenes to take the oath in their native tongue. About eighty of these students were kept till a few days ago in groups of ten in cells only designed to hold four persons. For nearly a month they asked in vain to be released till they could be tried, and at last they informed the President of the Supreme Galician Court that they would begin a "hunger strike." They acted on their word, and refused food for ninety hours, at the end of which they were released because the whole story had leaked out, and was creating a scandal in other parts of Austria. The Ruthenes, or -Little Russians, have always been capable of a wonderful amount of resistance, though, as in the case of other people who have been oppressed for generations, it is often resistance of a rather passive kind. But the painful point in this incident is that the Poles, who have so often appealed to the humane world against persecution, should themselves turn persecutors on such slight provocation. So true are Cromwell's words : "Every sect saith, 'Oh give me liberty.' But give him it and to his power he will not yield it to anybody else."
