policemen’s helmets to the weather-vane of the new Rathhaus; out of its tense atmosphere of whirring wheels within wheels; out of its geometrically correct parks and new and ever growing building additions, Cracow looked to me as if it had fallen off this revolving planet and settled itself “Where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest”—wherever that may be.
The only thing that had grown since last I saw the city was its hatred of the Germans. On the doors of many stores on the Rinok were large placards, which, literally translated, read: “The gentlemen travellers from Germany, who wish to come in here to do business with us, are politely requested to stay out.”
Everything else looked the same, only more dingy; even the Austrian officers who loaf around Havelik’s restaurant seemed to have lost something of their newness; for braid and buttons, two of the component elements out of which Austrian officers are made, were tarnished and worn.
The Jews’ quarter seemed more hopeless and wretched than ever. On the Kazimir were the same haggling crowds in the same small stores, and the same shambling Jews in black, greasy cloaks. In front of the Jesuit church stood the same twelve apostles, and I regret to say that they were just as shabby-looking as their unbaptized brethren.
Cracow, the freest portion of divided Poland, is certainly as wretched looking as Warsaw, where liberty dare not lift her head, and it cannot compare with any of the cities of German-Poland where the Prussian gendarme is trying, at the point of the bayonet, to cram German speech down the unwilling throats of Polish children.
Why, I asked myself, should this shabbiness, this negligence, this “run-down-at-the-heel” appearance prevail in all the Slavic cities from Belgrade to St. Petersburg, and from Cracow to Irkutsk? Why should this be so of every place, except where the German has stepped in with his iron heel or where the Magyar or the Jew is trying to make of the Slav what he is not and does not care to be?