THE AUSTRIAN PARTITION 105opened in 1848. The Galician oil-field at Boryslaw, discovered in the 1860s, was
producing over 2 million tons of petroleum by 1908; but its short-lived wealth
did not flow into the pockets of the slum-dwellers who crowded round the rigs.
It was a standing joke among schoolboys that they lived in the land of 'Golicia
and Glodomeria' — Goly meaning 'bare', and glod meaning 'hunger'.
Galician society was unbalanced in the extreme. A handful of aristocratic
families, such as the Tarnowski, the Zamoyski, the Potocki, the Goluchowski,
the Lubomirski, and their like, who received patents of imperial nobility in the
1780s, lived in style from start to finish. Yet the vast majority of the population
were indigent peasants. In 1887, the peasantry still composed 81 per cent of the
population, and most of them were still illiterate. For them, it was almost aca-
demic whether serfdom existed, as it did to 1848, or whether it did not. In eco-
nomic terms they saw no noticeable improvement in their condition. Yet the
landowners themselves could hardly be described as a prosperous class. The
total number of registered landowners did not exceed two thousand families—
which marked a dramatic decrease from the state of affairs under the old
Republic. Of these, some three hundred were foreigners: either immigrant Jews,
like Lewis Namier's father, who were unable to buy land in Russia, or officials
connected with the administration. Most of the non-registered landowners,
who did not participate in the rights of their estate, were so burdened with debts
and mortgages that they could not live up to the style accustomed. It has been
calculated that a mere four hundred families could rightly consider themselves
to be independent country gentlefolk. This figure stands in glaring contrast to
the 200,000 public officials, the 188,000 Jewish merchants, and the 220,000
Jewish innkeepers and licensees. The emergence of a viable class of landed
smallholders and tenants was constantly delayed by the traditional division of
family plots among children, and by the deleterious effects of chronic overpop-
ulation. The development of a strong middle class was held back by the lack of
commerce and industry, and distorted by the disproportionate number of
undersized Jewish businesses in the wholesale trade and the professions. The
Jewish community itself was severely inhibited by the sheer mass of its urban
paupers, and by its incurable sense of insecurity. Except on the fringes of the
Kingdom, in Boryslaw and in the Duchy of Teschen (Cieszyn) in Austrian
Silesia, an industrial proletariat never existed.
The nationality pattern was hopelessly complicated. It is not completely
accurate to maintain that the Germans (3 per cent in 1880) oppressed the Poles;
that the Poles (45 per cent) oppressed the Ruthenians; that the Ruthenians (41
per cent) oppressed the Jews; or that the Jews (11 per cent), by virtue of their
supposed economic stranglehold, oppressed everyone else. But misconceptions
of this sort, which were common enough in Galicia, convey a real whiff of the
endless arguments and conflicts which divided mutually exclusive and rival
national groups. Every minority in this part of Europe felt oppressed in one way
or another, and all complained bitterly of discrimination. In the early decades of
Galicia's history, the Poles shared the embitterment of all their neighbours.