Chapter X: The Return to Paris (2)

I do not say that a similar policy, under like conditions, or with similar measures, has been followed in Prussian Poland. There, at least, so much of liberalism prevails that the right of complaining is left. Our griefs are not lost in the silence of a boundless oppression. Polish deputies have to this day a place in the parliament of Berlin, where, inch by inch, they defend the privileges of their country. But are the two systems, after all, so very unlike each other? The latter is less violent in one way, but its object is at bottom the same; for Prussia, like Russia, labours to denationalise Poland. M. de Flotwell, a man who governed the Grand Duchy (Posen) for many years, explained his views when he said, that she did so, by insensibly stifling Polish manners, inclinations, and tendencies, and by introducing the German element in their place. The work of infiltering the German element is carried on in a thousand ways; by bureaucracy, by education, by the compulsory substitution of the German for the Polish tongue; by the transfer of land, with the connivance of the state, which sometimes buys up Polish estates, and sells them to Germans at a loss. There is not a single Polish notary in Posen. Justice is administered in German, and he who appears before the public tribunals is often examined, accused, nay even defended, in a language which he does not understand. It is the same with public instruction: it has hitherto been found impossible to establish a Polish high school (Lyceum), and where a working-man’s college has been opened, the classes are taught and the course is in German. Even in private institutions it is forbidden to teach the history of Poland, and for this conclusive reason, ‘that this history not being taught in the public schools, ought not any more to be taught in private ones!’ The Prussian government, it must be said, makes no secret of its intentions; for it has promulgated in the parliament of Berlin, that ‘the province of Posen is neither more nor less than a simple province of Prussia.’

We now come to Austria. As to that power, need I recall with what sinister dexterity she one day succeeded in putting hatred into the hearts of the peasants of Galicia, and in driving them upon the Polish nobility? And is it not a strange irony of fortune which has made Austria the guardian of the tombs of two heroes of Poland? The one is the grave of Sobieski, who sleeps in a church now abandoned and in ruins at Cracow; the other is that of Kosciusko. When Kosciusko died, the students of Cracow obtained leave to erect a humble monument to his memory on a height, at a little distance from the town. The Austrians came, they did not certainly do away with the tomb, but they covered it round with the works of a citadel, and placed by it an Austrian sentry! Finally, there came a day--a day which has not been forgotten, when the three powers were found united in the definite suppression of Cracow, that town, ‘free, independent, and neutral to all perpetuity,’ and all this with the sanction of Europe, which could do nothing but enter one protest more.

What result is evident from this assemblage of facts, from this eloquent demonstration of the lack of efficacy in European guarantees? This--that in reality the stipulations of Vienna have been set aside by the very powers in whose behalf they were made, by those who have, except these treaties, no other titles for the possession of Poland.

But the stipulations have disappeared under a series of violations, which have been systematically carried out, but which, while they enervate or nullify the guarantees that protected our nationality, also nullify the title of these governments, and give back their rights to nationalities, whose energy has been increased by their conflicts, or by the necessity of self-defence.

Further, it may be thought that these treaties created insoluble difficulties, attempted to make things live together which were utterly irreconcilable, viz., the contradictory rights and interests of the conquerors and the conquered. It may be so; but this only goes to prove that the Treaties of 1815 sowed the seeds of war and of disorder by the Vistula as by the Po; and the disturbances of half a century have grown up out of them, by the Po as by the Vistula.

Here we see what is most truly characteristic in these Polish matters. Here is no natural and peaceful developement of an order of things half constituted by the ruling power of public right. It is a history full of dramatic mysteries, of ardent protests, of which one-half only is known to the world, the other half being lost in dungeons, in subterranean vaults, in mines, in Siberia, in the Ourals. Above all, since 1831, it is the history of a dark and ceaseless conflict between a power which, in order to remain mistress, is obliged at every turn to exceed its rights, and a people which struggles, conspires and rebels, and to whom the permanent contact of a hard and foreign rule with a suffering nationality is a continual punishment--a people which passes its time in believing in hope even against hope, whom oppression raises more than it tames, and which even when conquered has the ingenuity to feed on its own sufferings, and to relish them with a dark and bitter delight.

Let any man represent to himself what that country is like, where to have read such and such a book by a Polish poet has sent thousands of young people to Siberia--a country where in the universities and schools the students, even the children, secretly practised beating each other with rods, in order to accustom themselves to tortures, and to be ready to bear every trial without flinching! This familiarity with pain, this sort of defiance to a hidden warfare, is one of the traits of the contemporary genius of Poland; and it is the theme of a song commonly sung in Poland to a slow and plaintive melody; an ironical and bloody lesson for the use of Polish mothers! ‘Our Saviour, when still a child at Nazareth, played with the cross, the future instrument of his death; and thou, alas! oh, Polish mother, oughtest to amuse thy child with the instruments of his future play. Early, then, tie his hands with chains, fasten them to the infamous tumbril, that he may not grow pale at the executioner’s axe, that he may not blush at the sight of the noose; for he will never go, as did the knights of old, to plant the cross triumphant at Jerusalem; nor yet, like the soldiers of later times, to till the fields of liberty, and to water them with his blood. He who will provoke your child will be a secret spy; he who will contend with him will be a perjured judge. His field of battle will be a dungeon underground; his sentence will be pronounced in some implacable cave. When conquered, no monument awaits him but the empty gallows tree; and for glory he shall have the stifled sobs of women, and the midnight whispers of his brother men!’

Thus has Poland existed for nearly thirty years, struggling and conspiring, trying both to interest Europe in her misfortunes, and to accomplish within herself the great work of internal revolution--having to bear the back blow of every event, and of all those catastrophes which have crossed her efforts. In reality, perhaps Poland has suffered by three occurrences within the last fifteen years (occurrences which have had a conspicuous part in her fate) more than by any persecutions carried on against her. These events were believed to have proved fatal to her, but they have nevertheless been but as a new trial, a mysterious and a bitter prelude to a more serious manifestation of her powerful vitality. The first of these events was the massacre in Galicia in 1846--the most terrible and bloody deception of all Polish patriots! The revolution of 1831, when it died out before the arms of Russia, had at least left this lesson, that for the future, any and every attempt at national enfranchisement must form part of such an internal transformation as should unite all classes, and interest the masses throughout the country in one common work for the emancipation of the peasantry, and for making them definitely holders of property. As to the means of doing this, the two parties, namely, the constitutional or aristocratic, and the democratic, differed. At bottom they had the same end in view, and the project was cherished more especially by the democratic propaganda, of which emigrants formed the central body. But all of a sudden, Austria, taking a part in the movement, turned the current of emancipative ideas against Poland, and by unloosing against the nobility the fury of the Galician peasantry, had taught the other dominant governments in Posen, and in the kingdom (Warsaw), how to establish their own reign most securely, by inflaming the minds of men, and by setting class against class. Thus ended the labours of the democratic conspiracy of the year 1846; and the work had to be recommenced, for this bloody act, brought about with most sinister shrewdness, had at least for the time being disconcerted every attempt in Poland, since action had lost its fulcrum in the masses who had been thus fatally led astray.

The French Revolution of February, 1848, was another of those events which, by deceiving Poland, have helped to weigh her down. It was the hour at which a great explosion was expected, for, in a French revolution, how could we do otherwise than see a movement affecting the world? How could we help thinking that all nations would free themselves from old claims, and that Europe would be transformed by democracy? But what, on the contrary, was the result? Everybody knows that this ill-starred revolution availed none of the nationalities. Neither could it have been of help to any, since it obliged France to concentrate her own forces, in order to save herself from dissolution. But the Polish cause had the misfortune of being united with those European commotions which were so much to be dreaded; and, what was worse, that cause served as the banner of the agitators of May 15th, 1848, who menaced everybody, and everything. This was its crime. Having become importunate and teasing, like some unpleasant recollection, its popularity was immediately lost; and, what was still more curious, it was Nicholas who became popular--that Emperor suddenly being transformed into the high priest of order and civilisation.

Then came the war in the East, and, at the prospect of inevitable complications in Europe, as at the sight of that strange combination--viz. a liberal alliance between France and England against Russia--the hopes of the Poles once more awoke. Had the Emperor Nicholas lived, his obstinacy might have occasioned such European complications as might have again given a place to Poland; but his death facilitated peace. The name of Poland cannot be spoken; and, inasmuch as the Revolution of February, 1848, deceived the democratic party among us, so did the war in the Crimea dissipate the illusions of these moderate politicians of the diplomatic party who reckoned upon Europe.

It is, then, after this series of mistakes and of hopes deceived, that Poland has retreated more and more into herself, and that she sits mutely waiting, having seen how conspiracies, European revolutions, and regular interventions, have all alike failed her. Poland feels that she has become unpopular; that, as a Pole expressed it, ‘she is a bore,’ and she avoids being spoken of. No doubt, she could not help feeling with secret bitterness, that liberal Europe takes interest in Italian nationality, in Hungarian nationality, in Moldo-Wallachian nationality, and forgets a little that there was a Polish nationality. But Poland is silent, and she endures this punishment of silence and indifference, which is more difficult to accept than war, more hard to bear than any persecutions; for it has to be borne by a people which has spent its life in seeking for a country, and which has filled the history of to-day with its heroism, its protests, and its distress. No one can imagine what an amount of suffering is inflicted on Polish hearts by the moral isolation in which we are left, and that, too, in the middle of the agitation occasioned by the revival of other nationalities. ‘I see what it is,’ said a Polish peasant; ‘they will end in giving the Tsigans a king, but no one will ever think of giving one to us.’ Poland had at one time so completely disappeared, that she was supposed to be dead; she was thought to be either resigned to her fate or conquered by suffering; and Europe was ready to go to sleep, as over an accomplished fact, thinking that now there was one question less in the world.

But Europe was wrong. These long years of silence and of loneliness, far from being the dark and unnoted end of the nation, were, on the contrary, but as the beginning of a new state, which late events have disclosed; of a new order of things formed by degrees, having its elements, its character, its personifications, and which, at a given moment, has turned out to be the unexpected manifestation of an energetic nationality, rallying to the cry of Dombrowski’s legion, ‘No, Poland is not dead!’

It was the era of conspiracies and of democratic propagandism which, up to 1846, furnished heroic men of strange intrepidity, such as Konarski, Zaleski, and Dombrowski; and, of this period of strife, the campaigns of 1846, in Galicia and Posen, were the bloody and mournful close. Ever since that time, and especially throughout the last years, we have had a work of practical renovation, which has used all means, which has been inoffensive in appearance, but not the less persistent because it was unobserved, and which has been accomplished, owing, in part, to that very silence of which I have already spoken. They who laboured felt deeply what danger lay in making their operations heard. ‘Speak of us as little as may be,’ wrote one of the leading men in Poland; ‘speak, if you will, of our miseries, of our agonised state, but do not speak of our vitality, or of those signs of life which you remark in us, for that would be to kill us.’ To this work, Prince Léon Sapieka greatly contributed in Galicia, as did Dr. Marcinkowski in Posen, up to the time of his death; while, in the kingdom, none gave themselves to it more than did Count Andrew Zamoyski.

Of what is that movement composed, which, thus suddenly disclosed, has again brought Polish nationality face to face with Russian power?

Doubtless, it has its source in many elements. All have a share in it; for there meet religious zeal heightened by persecution, the labours of mind, and the efforts made to raise the morals of the people. There is industrial enterprise, and there also are agricultural improvements; but what is most characteristic in the movement is chiefly this, that it has been born in some sort spontaneously from the soil, and upon the soil itself, independent of the action of emigration, or of the propagandism of parties. It has been the work of those who were unwilling either to conspire or to give in, and who, among the ruins of their native country, and after her violent struggles were ended, have sought to bring together elements for a new solution of the Polish question. It certainly was impossible for these patriots to throw themselves into politics. They would have been instantly arrested, if they had done so. Their only thought then was, how best, morally and physically, to remodel the country, and how most to steer clear of politics in doing so. They began by establishing Temperance societies; and even this ground required wary walking, because they ran against the Russian authorities, who protect drunkenness, in order to protect the inland revenues, and who issued circulars against these societies, declaring them to be contrary to law. One Governor-General of Lithuania, M. Nazimof, showed his erudition by citing the marriage in Cana of Galilee, as a proof that the Gospel was not averse to the use of spirituous liquors.

Another institution has played a great part in the present movement: I mean the Agricultural Society of Warsaw. It had a very humble beginning. About 1842 an association had been formed for the publication of a small newspaper, called ‘Annals of Agriculture,’ from which all political questions and allusions had been strictly banished, which did not relate either to the situation of Poland, to its government, its foreign relations, or indeed to things that concerned it. But this was the germ from which grew, during the first part of the reign of Alexander II., in those first moments of liberality and good will, a more serious institution, the Agricultural Society itself, founded with the exclusive object of making physical improvements, having correspondents in all the provinces, and being authorised to hold two sittings yearly at Warsaw. However limited this institution may have originally been in its object, still it formed a bond of union, and it has ended by drawing together 4,000 landowners of the kingdom.

So slowly did the work proceed--creating on one day an Agricultural Society, on another day starting the navigation of the Vistula--sometimes forming banks, at another establishing a Temperance League--recalling the country to a sense of its own interests, and drawing men together by making them co-operate in the same undertakings. Now, let us observe what were the effects of a labour so patient, so modest, so often crossed, and yet so efficacious. Instead of conspiracies, we learnt the habit of acting in legal ways, and we acquired a sense of the power which there is in regular, persistent, and pacific action. Such questions as the emancipation of the peasants, and others which have divided the public mind, and kept up divisions even among emigrants--such questions, mischievous while only a strife of theories, have now found their natural solution in practice; for the Agricultural Society has taken the initiative in this matter, and proposed a system by which the peasant is made an owner, and by which, through an ingenious combination of credit given, an indemnity is secured to the actual possessor; and this indemnity the peasant pays up in successive and limited annuities, without having to give more than he had formerly done. This may be called the Polish solution of the difficulty, as opposed to the Russian one. Finally, and what is most important, this secret regeneration of the country has done what we have just seen. No longer are parties embittered against each other, after a common defeat, nor do they dispute over a distant victory; but we have a compact mass--a nation welded together by one thought--where there is no distinction of classes, and of which the union has been cemented by the bloodshed of the 27th of February, 1861--the day on which Russia made the first attempt to put it all down. Those intelligent Russian bullets did more than they were aware of; for they helped to cement the alliance by striking, as they did, victims of every rank, of every condition, of all religions, almost of every age.

One man, as I have said, personifies in himself all that is most serious and practical in this movement, and he has left upon it the stamp of his own character. This is Count Andrew Zamoyski, whom the people speaking his language simply call ‘Monsieur André.’ He is not the only one; but he has been, from the very first, one of the most active promoters of all that could awaken the land. By birth he is connected with one of the oldest Polish families--with the family of that grand-constable, John Zamoyski, of the sixteenth century, who laboured to constitute a body of lesser nobles, in the face of our aristocratic oligarchy, and who was one of the greatest of Polish captains. The family is one which has long been eclipsed, and which only reappears at certain epochs. There was another Zamoyski, who was Chancellor in 1772, but who laid down his office because he would not set his seal to the first division; and of this Zamoyski, Count Andrew is the grandson, as he is also the brother of the general who, at one time, was to have headed a Polish legion, at the time of the Crimean war. Count Andrew naturally found himself mixed up with the revolution of 1831. He was first Minister of the Interior at Warsaw, and then was sent on a mission to Vienna, to M. de Metternich, who, it was said, was, at the time of the last battle, inclined for an intervention. When that revolution was, at last, quelled by the Russians, he would not leave the country. He remained in obscurity, cherishing no deceptive hopes, but soon seeking how best to raise her, after her great defeat. No very great career offered itself to him; but he turned to material interests and pursuits, and he brought to the work an activity not the less singular, because it was narrowed by conditions which were strait and uncertain. He established breeding-stables (studs), helped to introduce steam-navigation on the Vistula, which was a tie with Galicia, and laboured to organise the ‘_Crédit foncier_.’ He it was who started the little paper, ‘Annals of Agriculture,’ who afterwards became the principal promoter of the Agricultural Society, and who, up to the present time, has continued to be its President.

Count Zamoyski is characterised in all that he has done by his practical sense, by the clearness of his views, and by a moderation in action, which is joined to great natural dignity. The situation of Count Andrew is, moreover, a sufficiently singular one; for, by his moderation, he excites the suspicions of the more hot-headed among the Poles, who expect nothing except from revolutions, and, by his activity, he makes himself suspected by the Russians. The curious and difficult problem, how to live between these two, is the one which he has to solve. He has to be master over himself, and he cannot suffer himself to be led away by useless rashness; while he must not, on the other hand, sink the dignity and the name of a Pole. His secrets are hid in his actions. He never revealed them to anyone; and, to speak truly, is it perfectly certain that he had any secrets? He simply put in practice the old word ‘laboremus;’ and though constantly obliged to have dealings with the Government, he never yielded his ground; and he kept up an obstinate struggle against the venality of the Russian officials, to which he would not submit upon any terms. More than once he has had to go through some very thorny trials; but he has always acquitted himself well. On the day of the foundation of the Agricultural Society, a dinner took place, at which, of course, the Director of the Interior, M. Muchanof, was present. At last, the toast in use at all Polish dinners, ‘Let us love each other,’ was given by him. All eyes were immediately turned upon Count Zamoyski, who, calmly and simply, and with scarcely a perceptible smile, replied, ‘Yes: but at home!’ There was nothing more to be said. The spirit of this policy, if policy it can be called, is to do all that it is possible to do, to go as far as may be, and to measure one’s steps according to the necessities of the day. It breathes no agitation; but it is to be an activity according to the laws, taking advantage of everything, making use of everything, and communicating life unawares to the country--this is precisely what has appeared in the late events, and this remains the character of the new crisis.

Are men aware of what it is that gives to this movement the weight of a true national manifestation? It is that it has nothing in it which is either artificial or evanescent. It is the work of the few, and also the work of all. Like all deep movements, it is at once simple and complex, it is sincere as is the passion of a whole nation; and far from resolving itself into a mere series of efforts for physical order, which have suddenly issued in a political question, it has a moral side, which agrees wonderfully with what I have said of its characteristics of practical and lawful action. One thing in these occurrences at Warsaw, interspersed, as they are, with scenes of bloodshed, is very striking, and that is, the passive attitude of a people, which appears unarmed and offers no resistance--which persists, and, though dispersed, constantly reassembles--which offers itself as a defenceless victim, and which refuses the arms which are left within its reach. And under such an attitude, there must be something more than mere obedience to a watchword or to an order. No conspirator could have been clever enough to have imagined it. It is the sign of a thorough revolution in the minds and in the souls of men, a revolution to which the mind of one poet was no stranger--I mean Krasinski, whose works have appealed to all Polish imaginations, and which will be imprinted on all hearts, even of the lowest orders of the people. He is that _anonymous_ poet from whom we formerly had a few poems, all full of deep meaning, all marked by gloomy and ardent mysticism. Sigismund Krasinski is dead now; but he had endured the bitterest trials of spirit, both as a patriot and as a son. He was born in 1812, and was held at the font of baptism by Napoleon, for his father was that Vincent Krasinski (a descendant of one of the chiefs of the Confederation of Bar) who, at the end of the empire, replaced Prince Poniatowski in the command of the Polish army, and who subsequently played a part in the Chambers of the kingdom of Poland, after the Restoration. Unhappily, General Krasinski irritated public feeling by the vote he gave in the Senate, in regard to the conspiracy of 1828; and his son Sigismund received, in the public square, such a marked and cutting insult from his school-fellows, that he was obliged to leave the country. He travelled, and went to Rome. When the revolution of the 29th of November, 1830, broke out, he set out immediately for Poland; but, at Berlin, he had to stop. His father had been taken, at Warsaw, by the insurgents, and had only saved himself by promising devotion to the national cause; and now he had fled to St. Petersburg. Sigismund despaired; he never could bring himself to remain in his own land, and the rest of his life, spent among strangers, was devoted entirely to the composition of his poems, which he published without ever acknowledging their authorship. Through him, Polish patriotism found a fresh voice.

When Mickiewicz addressed the revolutionary and warrior youth of Poland, he said, ‘Strong through union, wise through self-denial, forwards! my young friends!’ Krasinski said, in a song now as popular as once were Mickiewicz’s words, ‘No man can build with mud, and highest wisdom still is highest virtue.’ These are the watchwords of two different epochs.

The ruling inspiration of the whole of the poetry of Krasinski is the abjuration of all hatred and of all vengeance--that force alone will not enable us to contend successfully against force, but that the weapons of our warfare must be superior powers of soul--that, in order to conquer one’s enemy, it is not enough that we have the right on our side, unless that right rests upon strong and pure moral sentiments; that the most powerful levers are love, and the virtues of self-sacrifice and of heroic patience. One of the heroes of his ‘Infernal Comedy’ is Pancrace, the type of that brutal strength which yields and quails in helplessness before a superior power. The same inspiration reigns in his Greek poem ‘Iridion,’ where the Christian hero is a passive martyr, with a horror of vengeance, who triumphs over Rome, and confounds the patriotism of Iridion, a man who had no thoughts beyond revenge, and who makes shipwreck in spite of the justice of his complaints and of his cause. This is also the thought embodied in ‘Aurora,’ in the ‘Psalms of the Future.’ In all these songs the Polish soul thrills with mystic ardour, glows with enthusiasm, and with inexhaustible youth. ‘Lord!’ says Krasinski, in one Psalm, ‘what we crave is not hope, since she descends upon us like rain upon flowers. It is not the death of our foes, since that death is written in the clouds of to-morrow. It is not arms, since they are placed in our hands by Thee. It is not help, for Thou hast opened a free path before us; but we implore, put a pure spirit in our inmost hearts. O Holy Spirit! who dost teach us that our great strength doth lie in sacrifice, grant that we by love may lead the nations to the ends we seek!’ But in a fragment of his ‘Aurora,’ Krasinski has still better described this part of heroic expiation:--‘Is it then required that we should be murderers with murderers, and criminals with criminals? Must we lie, hate, slay likewise, and blaspheme? The world cries: At this price you may have power and liberty; without it, nothing! but nay, my soul! nay; not with such arms as these. The weight of sacrifice alone can in its turn crush down the weight which crushes us. In the world’s story, sacrifice is lionlike and unconquered still; but crime is as the chaff which the wind in passing sweeps away.

‘No! my country; yours is rather the patience which doth show, how stone by stone the building can be reared: yours rather the will inflexible, which, abiding humbly, prepares for future victory. Rather yours is calmness amid the storms, and harmony amid discordant cries: rather yours, eternal loveliness amid abhorrent shapes: rather yours to heap on cowards and Pharisees that mournful silence which doth overwhelm. Be yours the strength which lifteth up the weak; and yours the hope of those who cease to hope. For thy strife against this world’s hell, be thine the peace and strength of love, against which hell itself cannot prevail...!

‘The nations are all sought by God: all in Thy Grace, O Jesus, are concerned! to each from high a calling Thou hast given; in each a sense profound from Thee doth live, and weaves the woof of all their destinies; but some among the nations Thou hast chosen to defend the cause of Heavenly Beauty, and to give to the world an example, while they bear, through the long day, a heavy cross, and walk the world’s paths red with blood. These by their sublime strife shall at last, O Lord, give to man a feeling higher and more divine, a holier charity, and a larger brotherhood, in exchange for that sharp sword which men have plunged into their breast. Such is this Polish land of thine, O Jesu Christ! Our love of man has caused our death, and men have seen the corpse of Poland carried to the tomb; but when the third day comes, the light shall shine, and shine through all the ages yet to be. Think you, that he who loves, in dying, disappears for evermore? Yes, to our fleshly eyes; but the whole world, through the soul’s eyes, beholds him still. He who in love expires, leaves in his hour of martyrdom his soul to all his brethren. He abides in the sanctuary of human hearts, and every day, every hour, he lives, though buried; grows, though in the tomb!’

This thought of the power of sacrifice, and of passive heroism, has filtered through our youth, and permeated even the masses; and this it is which is visible in the Poland of to-day, for the inspiration of the poet has become the feeling of the people. One other cause, and it is a strange and curious one, has also helped, during the last few years, to spread and to popularise these ideas, by suddenly throwing a new element into Polish society. When the Emperor Alexander II. ascended the throne, he signalised his accession by an amnesty, which, however incomplete, opened the gates of their fatherland to a multitude of exiles. Some came from the West, the others (and these the most numerous) came from Siberia. Those who had lived in France, or in England, naturally returned to their country embittered by thirty years of sufferings, accustomed to a Western atmosphere, nourished with all sorts of revolutionary ideas; in short, half strangers in their mind and manners. But with that tribe of exiles, called in Poland ‘Siberians,’ it was not so. They returned hardened and strengthened by habits of secret and solitary suffering. Calm and resigned, they were mystics to a certain extent, but their mysticism was of that grave and gentle kind, which has nothing fierce or hateful in its nature. It is a remarkable thing that, among these exiles returned from Siberia, the country has for the last years found its best men, the most apt for journalism, for professorships, for the administration of private and national establishments, such as the Agricultural Society. There are writers of talent who could not, it is true, sign their works with their names; but their names were not, therefore, the less well known. One brought back from Siberia a translation of ‘Faust,’ and is one of our most eminent critics; another has translated Shakespeare. A newspaper in Warsaw published a series of sketches of Caucasus, and of Asia, which were the work of ‘Siberians,’ and in which there was an indefinable mixture of freshness and resignation.

These men spread over the country, and had a singular effect upon it. Thence the serious and religious tinge of striking originality, in all the popular demonstrations which have since happened, and in all those manifestations which are so thoroughly free from the revolutionary phraseology of the West. Theirs is, on the contrary, a nervous and sober speech, and except in its religious accent it has nothing exaggerated in it. The influence of the Siberians is peculiarly visible in that strange address by the artizans of Warsaw: ‘Death is alike for all. Without sparing our persons, it is necessary that we should go to the slaughter, and show to the world what it is we wish. This is why we have walked in processions, and sung of the constitution, and we will do so again whenever it shall be necessary; if there are to be victims, it will be seen that that is according to the will of God, if more is required we are ready to draw lots for the one who is to be sacrificed--ready even to give our throats to the knife, or to expire under the knout, as did those three victims whom the waters threw up near Zakroczym, and which wrapped in straw were flung from the castle into the Vistula. Only if then there is no pity for our country, it will be ill!...’ Should one not say that this is the same obstinate idea of sacrifice, which has passed through the imagination of Krasinski, and through the action of the ‘Siberians,’ into the popular mind?

And now that all these elements are reunited, now that this union of practical efforts extends over all interests, and this lawful impulse has been communicated by Count Andrew Zamoyski, and instinctively accepted by a whole population, now that a moral and religious sense has been propagated in all minds, at once inflaming and satisfying them, and a national sentiment has spontaneously reappeared in all hearts, the movement is one, which, though imperceptible at first, and existing silently for many years, has been facilitated by the change of reign at a given moment, and it has ended in that brief but eloquent dialogue which took place recently between the Lieutenant-Governor, Prince Gortchakof, and the crowd assembled in one of the squares of Warsaw. ‘What do you want?’ ‘We want our country!’

Evidently nothing has been accidental or unforeseen except the hour at which the explosion took place. For the space of one year already successive manifestations had revealed a sort of secret understanding in the populace. First there was a funeral service celebrated all over the country and at fixed epochs, in memory of the most eminent Polish poets, Mickiewicz, Krasinski, and Slowacki. Then came the interview which reunited at Warsaw the three Sovereigns of the north, and which piqued the popular sense. It was in truth an odd idea which assembled at Warsaw, for a conference in which it was suspected that designs hurtful to Italy were to be discussed, the three masters of Poland. Their reception from the populace was more than cold; and what is most curious is that, impressed by this disagreeable circumstance, they tried to ascribe to each other the blame of the annoyance which they had received. The Russian papers avowed that it was the Emperor of Austria who had earned this cold reception for the Emperor Alexander, while the press of Vienna proved no less clearly that this demonstration had been aimed at the Emperor of Russia.

Some months later a more serious manifestation followed. It was a commemorative service for the dead killed at that battle of Grochow, in which in 1831 the Polish army contended during three days with the Russian troops; and on that day it was (February 25th) that a new Poland appeared, personified by a populace which walked with tapers in its hands, reciting as with one voice this religious and national hymn: ‘Holy Lord God! God Almighty, God Immortal, have mercy upon us! From plague and pestilence, from fire and sword, O Lord, deliver us! Be pleased to give us back our native land! Holy Virgin Mary, Queen of Poland, pray for us!’ Then the crisis declared itself, and agitation spread, as the concessions of Russia alternated with scenes of blood; and thus it continued till April 8th, the day in which violent measures for repressing the movement finally prevailed. It is not what followed these events that I now have to describe. Everything in them bore the mark of those influences which I have pointed out. This movement, as has been seen, began with a religious service, and when it came to a crisis, what was the step taken by those who had some power over the people, and who felt the importance of the moment? A popular delegation, authorised by the Lieutenant-Governor, took the command of the town; a voluntary constabulary was organised for the prevention of all disorders, and the Agricultural Society itself interfered as a moderator, and a guardian of the peace. The addresses presented to the Emperor contained nothing but what was according to law, since they hardly even exacted all that had been assured to Poland by the treaty of 1815. And what was the attitude of the populace itself? It showed its _life_, if the expression may be permitted, by abstaining from all conflicts. It assembled to give vent to its wishes and to its complaints, but it presented itself unarmed and passive; even after it was dispersed by force, women, children, and old men crowded round a Madonna with weeping and with prayers. Strange insight into the nature of a movement, of which the tactics have been to resist, but not to take up arms! What constitutes its originality is the alliance already mentioned of practical sense with a feeling which is moral, religious, and even mystic--an alliance of which the secret is in the conscience of a people, and which accords marvellously well with all the instincts of the Polish nation, and indeed of the Slavonic race in general, which appeals to political minds because its tendencies are towards moderation and good sense, and at the same time offers the charm of a certain poetic mysticism to the young and to the mass of the lower orders. It is, then, the originality of this movement which also constitutes its strength, for it reveals sources of vitality ever new, in a race which has found in misfortune nothing but a generous incentive.

It is this same originality which in like manner has placed Russia in a position of singular difficulty, when opposed to a popular awakening of this sort; for this is no simple internal strife, but by considerations of humanity and of right it forms part of a crisis peculiar to the times, and of an order of things of European interest and extent.

It is said that after the first bloody scenes at Warsaw in this month of February, the Emperor Alexander II. being told that some of the people had fallen victims, asked immediately what loss their army had sustained, and what quantity of arms had been taken from the insurgents? He was told in reply that there was no loss in the army, and that it had not been possible to seize the arms of a populace who had none, and would not have any. The Emperor, it is said, was greatly surprised; and this astonishment at the beginning explains the vacillations of Russia, and the hesitation which is to be observed in her conduct. She seemed at first to fluctuate between all sorts of policies.

She gave up some of her officials, who were the most pointed at by public animadversion, and, if I may use the expression, only seemed to repress the movement by mistake. She made some concessions; she drew the programme of a new organisation; she promised a variety of reforms; she accepted the popular delegation as an auxiliary--accepted even the help of the Agricultural Society itself. But presently both delegation and Society were dissolved. Agitation was allowed to increase by her indecision, till the scenes of April 8th mark the fresh starting-point of a repressive policy. _Physically_, no doubt, Russia can repress and disperse the manifestations of Warsaw, and she can prevent the population wearing mourning for its dead; but when that is accomplished, I ask whether, _morally_, the question will be one whit less living or less important--whether it will be less _oppressive_--for the politics of Russia?

Truly, Russia finds herself to-day in a strange and a serious dilemma. She must make her choice. She may begin over again in Poland her policy of the last thirty years; and she may even push that system to extremity. It may be the interest of Prussia and of Austria to keep the Tzar to this plan; because they are always uneasy at the reappearance in the Kingdom of a centre of attraction for the parts of Poland which they possess. This is their interest (and it is odd enough that it should be so, because the strength of Prussia lies only in ideas of nationality and of liberalism); but is this the true interest of Russia at this juncture of the world’s affairs? Russia has only to revert to her own counsels and to her own traditions to find in them incentives to a more equitable policy. The Emperor Alexander II. has only to open his mind to those ideas which are most intimately connected with the constitution of the kingdom of Poland, and with the epoch at which the Emperor Alexander I. founded it, saying to the Poles, ‘You will preserve your language; you will have your laws, your army. Your restoration is defined by the most solemn treaties.’

If the world of to-day appeared such as it did thirty years ago, it might be possible that any physical victory should have the sad power of deadening in an unhappy nation its undying feelings, of at least discouraging it, and of adjourning to another day the solution of a question so often agitated. But to-day, against the continuance of an oppressive policy, are ranged the general sense of Europe, the principles of right, the interests of Russia in her other combinations and alliances, the irremediable decadence of the treaties of 1815, forgotten by the governments themselves even before they were abrogated by the peoples which returned, as it were, to life; and, finally, this movement on the part of united Poland--a movement which can but be accelerated, or kept up, by the new Diets in Galicia, by the incessant way in which the deputies of Posen remind the parliament of their country, and by the attitude of moral resistance assumed by the population of Warsaw. Be it what it may, there is certainly something moving, and morally important, in this determination of a people to _live_, and to preserve in itself the inviolable inheritance of its patriotic faith.

In the legends of the Saints it is related that, one day, in the age of martyrdom, some Christians had been assembled upon the ice of a frozen river, and that they were there abandoned, alone and naked, to all the severities of the air, having also no food to eat. Offers were made to them from the shore of clothes, and of delicious viands, if they would abjure their religion. Some of them yielded to the temptation, and, when they touched the banks, perished. The others, immovable under trial, invoked the Divine mercy, and were miraculously saved; for there fell from heaven upon them both food and clothing. In this behold a touching picture of a nation which suffers, but which will not allow itself to be tempted, and which sends up to heaven such a cry of faith as shall melt the rigour of its adverse fortune.

A YEAR OF AGITATION IN POLAND.

(April 1861-2.)

For some years past we have witnessed one of the most affecting and instructive sights--the breaking up, if we may say so, of an order of events, where the confused and dispersed elements join again, as from some mysterious and invincible unity in themselves. That which once appeared impossible becomes a startling reality, and perspectives suddenly open themselves such as our generation would hardly have allowed itself even to think of.

We have seen public right itself, or that which, at least, bears its name, giving way, and leaving a passage for those national and popular causes which agitate the world, and which are the harbingers of a new way of thinking. It is vain now to attempt to divide those national causes which appeal so strongly to public opinion--vain now to grant everything to one and deny everything to another--to limit justice to opportunity or to fitness of time or place. Policy may have its seasons, its measures, and its predilections, but at bottom _right_ must exist everywhere, or it exists nowhere; and, from its one source, it must apply to all those peoples who aspire to the purest and the most legitimate of conquests--the conquest of themselves--as also to all those movements which, arising at one and the same time, form parts of a general situation, intimately and profoundly characterised by one universal work of transformation.

We must guard against mistakes. What we behold is no vulgar crisis, which may end in an ordinary peace: it is a warfare between two orders of things, between two principles; and it was proclaimed the other day, in a French Assembly, to be the new right--_the right of peoples_--and, when opposed to this, old political combinations are reduced to act laboriously and uneasily on the defensive. It is the question which agitates the modern world: the problem which, in the East as in the West, in the North as in the South, shows itself under a thousand different and startling shapes.

Certainly one of the most curious of these episodes--one of the most moving of these contemporary spectacles--is that dramatic _tête-à-tête_ which, for the space of a year, has been carried on in Northern Europe between those two very unequal powers, Russia and Poland; where the one is embarrassed by its strength and its political traditions, and where the other makes an impregnable buckler of its rights, and of its very weakness. Nothing has been wanting to the play. Unforeseen events, passionate originality in demonstrations, tragic scenes--all have been supplied, together with those mysterious fatalities which so often make a perfect drama out of the affairs of men. This drama is laid in the heart of a country: it has its colours and its catastrophes; and across its stage there passes, like some chorus of old, a whole nation, which sends up to heaven its supplications and complaint. For a whole year has the spectacle been seen of a moral movement, perfectly new in its character, confronting a policy which is astonished to find itself so weak that, while possessed of so many means of physical power, it resorts to all expedients of apparent concession and of inefficacious repression, and uses both measures alike without conviction. After a year all seems again to have settled into silence. Outward manifestations certainly have ceased, but still the demonstration has been made. That which had been supposed to be dead was found to be still full of life. That assimilation of Polish provinces, which Russia believed to be accomplished, was found to be not even begun; and Europe suddenly saw that Polish question arise which brings in its train such prodigious difficulties, and in which are involved at once the fate of a nation, the policy of a great empire, and the balance of power in the West. By some vague instinct, Europe felt that she had not yet got rid of that problem which is, doubtless, so strangely complicated by the multiplicity of rules and of _régimes_ spread over Poland; which changes its shapes according to the chances of dismemberments and of treaties; which is not the same in Posen as in Cracovia, at Warsaw as at Wilna, in the Kingdom, in Lithuania, or in the Ukraine; but to which one national sentiment, identical and vital in all the parts, has communicated an indissoluble unity. This character truly belongs to a question at once so energetic, so simple, and so complex, which sums up in itself the strifes of to-day, which is too often believed to have been stifled under the weight of impossibilities, and which comes to light again at a time when any palpitations of oppressed patriotism was least to be expected. I wish to set forth this question in its most recent explosion, in its elements, and in its progress, as well as in its relation to all that is in motion or in preparation in Europe, and even in the very heart of Russia.