TllE - INSURRECTION IN POLAND.

Author's Object.—Character of the Russian Government in

Crimes against LifeThe National Government 2"18834

Poland 2485

Is Control over Taxation, its

Questions of Serfdom, of Educa-

Postal Service, its Strenjth

tion, of Material Progress, of

Generally 2118 Personal Liberty 2485-6 Secret Assassinations

2189

Alexander IL's Intentions and

Military Strength of the Maur-

Failure 2486 motion 2189-90 Causes of the Insurrection 2186-7 Author's Visit to the Insurgents 2190 Russian Blunders and Berbari-

Prospects and Possible Solutions

ties St the Outset 2187 of the War 2190

Crimes against Self-respevt 2187-8

MY aim in visiting Poland has been to satisfy myself on one or two practical points in the Polish question. Whether all classes were agreed in supporting the insurrection ; what amount of conviction, energy, and intelligence -was brought to bear upon the war ; the actual military position, and what possible final

adjustment would satisfy public opinion in Poland itself, appeared to me the chief issues involved. My opportunities of study have in some respects been singularly good. I left England with an

introduction which opened the doors of the most highly-educated Polish society to me, and there was an almost feverish anxiety to discuss the one topic of the day- with an Englishman. Before I left the country I found an opportunity of spending a week in the immediate seat of war and of visiting the insurgents. The result bas been to impress me strongly with a conviction that the Polish is among the gravest questions of the day ; immeasurably more than the mere revolt of a province.

I shall be obliged, in the course of my argument, to mention many points that reflect gravely on the Russian Government, and on its employes and soldiers. As one who has travelled in Russia, and brought back none but the pleasantest recollections of unfail- ing courtesy and kindness, I deeply regret this necessity. I believe, in spite of the last three years, that the present Emperor is a well- -intentioned man. I believe firmly in the great future reserved to the Russian people. It is with no forgetfulness of the many brave, honourable, and generous men whom the Empire has produced, that I protest against the abominations which the crime of unjust dominion inevitably entails. "Great nations," it has been said, 4‘ have great sins," and the sin of Russia is Poland. Its enormity seems to me to lie deeper than in the mere military outrages which accompany every civil war. What the Cossacks are now doing in Poland is no worse than what we have done in Ireland and India, than what the French did in La Vendee, or than the Austrian vengeance in Hungary and Italy. But the Cossacks are only the last argument of baffled tyranny. It is against systematic and hopeless misgovernment by the vilest officials, by spies, and at the drum-head, against the suppression of all thought, the proscription of all intelligence, the attempt to extirpate the national religion and to abolish the national language, that Poland is now protesting.

It is difficult, I know, for Englishmen to realize what a Conti- nental despotism means. To most it probably implies nothing more than the absence of representative forms, the censorship of the press, and a few formalities about passports. They suppose -that in all material respects the great business of life goes on abroad as at home, that substantial justice is administered, that material progress is all the better promoted without Mr. Carlyle's " national palaver-shops," and, to put the strongest argument of all in Theroigne de Mericourt's most emphatic words, that "the babe smiles upon its mother under Domitian as under Titus." It is precisely in all these points that the real weakness of the despotic system lies. That there have been intelligent and paternal despots I do not doubt, but I question if the world has yet seen an intelligent and paternal despotism. Good men generally will not enter a service where they have no free will, no initiative, and no means of rising except by favour. Anyhow Russian rule in Poland has not been of this kind. The great social question of the country was serf- - emancipation, and Poles are justly proud that the initiative in this question was taken by the nobles of Lithuania, who presented the first address to the Emperor demanding it, while the Russian ' nobles in several governments were in sullen opposition. But the Poles have never been allowed to discuss this question, except as one of theory and within the terms of the existing laws, or to publish

• their discussions or the results arrived at. They might only offer ' suggestions to the Government. One plan suggested has actually been adopted, but the Government has claimed the whole merit of ' it, with the view of attaching the peasants to itself, and assures them • that the nobles are opposed. As it consists practically in endowing the peasantry with small freehold properties parcelled out of the landlords' domains, the Government has, in fact, committed an act of wholesale confiscation with no better object than that of setting class against class.

Take, again, education. The Polish peasantry are below any nation of Western Europe, and, perhaps, it would be too much to expect that proprietors universally should educate their tenantry.

Something like a common system, governmental or by a society, would seem to be imperatively demanded. Government does

nothing itself. It forbids the formation of any society, becarfse all associations are dangerous to the State. But it does more ; it interferes with private energy. One gentleman told me* that two

hundred schools had been suppressed on his father's estates alone. On one property there was a college endowed before the partition of Poland for the higher branches of education by a charge on the property. The Russian Government has abolished the college, and applied the rent-charge to educational purposes in Russia. In another instance, all the schools on a property in Volhynia were suppressed because the Polish language was used in them. In another the proprietor received an order to shut up thirteen schools on his property, in Lithuania, for the same reason. He replied that the authorities at Wilna were acting illegally, and that he should not comply. As the police on his estate were all in his pay he hoped to tide over the difficulty. But agents were sent down from Mina to report, and his schoolmasters were threatened if they did not leave. He replaced them with the same result. He went to %Vilna. to complain, and was told by every educated Russian that the case was a clear one, and that he had right on his side ; but he could obtain no redress. The Nord lately pleaded that the Lithuanian proprietors had made a knowledge of Polish a requisite with their teachers. We in England should be inclined to think that they had a right to insist on any accomplishment in men whom they paid. The fact is, that Polish is the language of all the educated classes there and in Volhynia ; but the Government is afraid of its spread, and prefers to leave the peasantry without edu- cation—their lives divided between the plough and the brandy-shop.

Of course, the education of the middle classes has not fared better at the hands of Government. The University of Warsaw has been suppressed ; and a province inhabited by more than five millions of people is thus left without a first-class educational insti- tution. 1Vielopolski signalized his tenure of office by shutting up gymnasiums or classes in Kalisch, Radom, Piotrkow, Kielce, and other less important places. The education actually allowed is not only carefully surveille, but is reduced within the smallest possible limits. The schools are forced to keep holiday on a larger number of feast-days than are observed even in Rome, including more than forty in honour of the different members of the Imperial family. Yet the Poles cannot be accused of indifference to education. Under all disadvantages, the number of students in such higher seminaries as are allowed them was more than 35 per cent., seven years ago, of the whole number in the Russian dominions, the population of the kingdom being at the same time in the proportion of 8 per cent. to that of the Empire.

Take next the question of material prosperity. During fourteen years of comparative liberty, 1815-1829, the population of Poland increased at the rate of 100,000 a year ; in the next twenty-six years the rate of increase was less than 30,000 a year on a larger population ; and much of this augmentation must be ascribed to foreign settlers in the towns, and to the anomalous increase of the Jews who marry as children. In the country districts, where labour is much needed, the population, owing to the conscription, has remained almost stationary. Out of more than 11,000 conscripts taken in twenty-three years (1833-1856) from one district (Piotrkow), only 498 ever returned, and these mostly demoral- ized. There is no poor-law in Poland, and no substitute for a poor-law, as in Russia Proper, where the nobles or the communes support the serfs. Everything has been left to charity and chance. Take, again, what has been done for internal communication. There are great military highways and railroads from St. Petersburg to Warsaw, and to the Prussian and Austrian frontiers. But the country wants a network of canals and railroads, or tramroads, to transport its corn and timber into other countries. Now, here not only has little been done to help, but much has been done to thwart. It was with the greatest difficulty that Count Andre Zamoiski obtained leave to start steamers on the Vistula. They are constantly unable to sail, because the river, one of the finest in Europe, and navigable from Cracow to the Baltic, has never been dredged and deepened in its shallow parts. Prince Gortschakoff for some time steadily refused to let a second railway towards the Austrian frontier be constructed. The authorization has only • Here and everywhere I can give no MUMS. In the present state of Poland. any person known to have given me information would be liable to imprieonMent OT transportation.

lately been obtained. It is true that the country gentlemen were allowed by singular favour to construct small roads in the provinces. But they were obliged to do it under Government inspection, or, in other words, to fee Russian officials and engineers for a favour- able report. A single fact will, perhaps, show the general state of the country most strongly. There are no such things in existence as Polish funds or shares. The spare money of the country is invariably invested in foreign securities. Nor is this distrust of Government confined to individuals. The General Direction of Credit, an association for lending money on landed security, prefers to invest its capital at 4 per cent. in Germany or France to the 8 or 10 per cent. it could easily obtain in its own country. It is said to owe its existence to its international relations.

The life of a Polish gentleman for more than thirty years has been that of a Roman patrician under Claudius or Domitian, with a little less danger of life and rather more of servitude. He has been unable to speak freely, to write freely, to read freely, or to travel at will. He has known that to express his opinions before a stranger might be absolute ruin. The classics of his own country have been proscribed, and foreign newspapers, reviews, and books carefully expurgated before he received them. From time to time his guns have been taken from him. That he could not either be a magistrate or a member of Parlia- ment may seem a small thing ; that he could not free or educate his own tenantry, or discuss the propriety of doing so, is, perhaps, a little harder; but that he should not be able to keep his own sons from the service most hateful to him and them is a grievance, few will contest. The late Czar once took it into his head to in- corporate the sons of the chief Polish nobility as privates in his body-guard, and families hke the Zamoiskis, Potockis, and Wielopolskis were compelled to give hostages to this caprice. Meaner men suffered with lees e'clett, and I know the case myself of a gentleman farming what would be thought a princely estate in England, who has had three sons taken from him by the conscrip- tion. Perhaps, however, all other grievances are small beside the annoyance and misery of powerful and corrupt officials. That this evil has not been intolerable is due, I believe, only to the fact that, partly because the kingdom of Poland retains the Code Napoleon, which few Russians have acquired, and partly because Russians of character and family influence will serve anywhere sooner than in a country where they know themselves to be detested, the administration has always been chiefly Polish. But the few Russians in the service have all the more in most cases been worthless adventurers. Mouravieff, the Governor of Wilna, was known as Mouravieff Vor, "Thief Mouravieff ;" Liiders, some time Viceroy, had been dismissed the army for peculation. Corruption has always been the weak side of the Russian bureaucracy ; but in a distant and unpopular province like Poland it becomes pillage. Yet it is to officials of this sort, gleaning their information from spies, that the management of a high-spirited people has been entrusted during the life-time of one generation.

It will be said, no doubt, that this was the Government of Nicholas, not of Alexander II. This may freely be admitted. The present Czar deserves the credit of having entered upon his reign with the best intentions. He restored the Poles in Siberia to liberty, and I myself well remember seeing one, the schoolmaster of a small town, who was then on his way home when I visited the depot in Kasen three years ago. He allowed popular Polish authors, such as Mickiewica to be read, more or leas expurgated. Above all, he made his courtiers understand that he meant to be the sovereign of one country. Poles have told me that the reception they met with in Russian society at the beginning of the reign was in curious contrast from its cordiality to the state of things under the old regime. They on their sides were not backward. The great ball given in Warsaw in 1856, to celebrate the close of the Crimean war, was made a national demonstration, and the Czar was welcomed as no foreign ruler had ever yet been in Poland. Unhappily, that very visit was chosen by Alexander as the occasion for his celebrated. speech, "Beware of offending me ; I shall know how to be severe." The words were not such as a people ought ever to hear from a newly-elected sovereign. The Czar himself seemed conscious of his false position, and looked sad and embarrassed as he pronounced them. They had, no doubt, been inspired by the old Muscovite party, who will for ever refuse to regard Poland as anything but a province and a conquered people. The same influences still prevail at St. Petersburg. It is not very long since Prince Grutschakoff, the ablest member of the Cabinet, told a leading Polish noble, "As long as I live, and have influence, Russia shall never renounce her true strength to adopt so-called progress." In other words, education and free institu- tions are regarded by the dominant influence at St. Petersburg as incompatible with the prestige and power of the Empire. The view, no doubt, has a certain secondary truth ; but it is an additional reason why the Poles, who gain nothing by the military pre- ponderance of Russia, should cling more tenaciously than ever to that idea of national independence which means for them con- nection with the West and Western civilization.

Another thing must be remembered. If Alexander II. has been better than his father, he has also never wielded the same power- for evil. After the Crimean war a return to the old system was impossible ; the Russian prestige had been too severely shaken. Men who had groaned in secret under what was thought the first military power in the world were prepared to assert themselves against the troops who had been routed at Alma, Inkerman, the Tchernaya, and the Alamelon. The Russian army was reduced, and the Russian treasury bankrupt. Nor can the Czar complain that he met with no support among his Polish subjects. I pass over the whole history of the Agricultural Society, dissolved because it debated, as sufficiently known in England, and quote a single instance of a single obscure reformer. A certain Al. Michel Lempicki, an emigre in Paris since 1831, con- ceived the idea of writing to the Czar about the reforms. necessary for the country. He received in reply an invita- tion to Warsaw and a passport. Arrived at Warsaw he found the old system reviving, and remained unnoticed for two years. Then, as matters were getting worse, he wrote a second letter of advice and remonstrance. This time, in utter disregard of all honourable considerations, he was sent to Siberia. The sentence of condemnation must, I believe, have passed before the Emperor for approval. The case of the nobles of Podolia, imprisoned because they petitioned for administrative union to Poland, is. another proof of the spirit in which constitutional suggestions have been met.

In spite of this, the nobles and gentry, who might be supposed to suffer most by misgovernment, are not the class with whom the in- surrection originated. There were many reasons for this. "We," a Polish lady once said to me, "are quite willing to meet an edu- cated and well-bred Russian on friendly terms ; it is our artisans. and mechanics whose hatred of the stranger is so violent that they will have na intercourse with him." Household servants and shoe- makers are said to have furnished more recruits proportionately to the insurrection than any other class. Naturally, too, men of the world have been able to estimate the chances of war and poli- tics better than their inferiors; men of substance have feared to lose everything ; and moderate men have been willing to hope against hope and struggle a little longer by petitions and other peaceful demonstrations. The Central Committee, which inaugurated the secret government, and with which the war originated, was a purely democratic body, and for some time hostile to the upper classes. But the Russian Government, dreading reform immea- surably more than revolution, has pursued a steady policy of goad- ing the more moderate of its opponents into violent measures. The Grand Duke said openly, on one occasion, that if the nobles sup- posed they could. take up a neutral position, neither for nor against the Government, they would find themselves mistaken. As if gentlemen, under any circumstances, could elect to be with the Government that had fired upon an unarmed multitude and against the victims. Little by little the upper classes were forced into revolt. When the order was given to the troops to strike all the people without hats, that is, all the lower orders, in case of any dis- turbance, it became a point of honour to discard hats ; at this moment not even a Russian ventures to walk hatted in any Polish town. But the chief reason why the revolt has been universal, lies, after all, in the excesses which the Russian troops committed in their first expeditions. Where no good conduct secured a country squire from pillage, burning, or murder, it is scarcely wonderful if he took up arms. With ordinary care the rebellion could never have broken out, with common discipline it would have been suppressed in a week.

I dwell upon these points because the Russian Government attempts to represent the insurrection as the work of the foreign exiles. Nothing can be falser. The Central Committee which first organized the insurrection had some connection with the democratic emigration in London and Paris; the leading democrats in England, at present, do not even know the members of the Na- tional Government. The conscription, followed by the infamous tele- gram that announced all had been carried out quietly, was the sole cause of the revolt. The chances appeared so desperate.that even in the Central Committee, not a very wise body, the determination to take up arms was carried by only one vote. A few hundred

young men, armed with sticks and hiding in the forests in the heart of a Polish winter, are not the forces with which any sane man, émigré or not, would care to begin war against the Russian Empire. It was the very hopelessness of the outburst that saved it. The Russians had made no provision for resistance, and their outposts were surprised everywhere. The first feeling of officers and men was satisfaction. Agreeably to Russian practice they would now receive double pay and rations for a campaign of constant and almost bloodless successes. General Uschadoff, at Radom, is said, on good authority, to have supplied the insurgents with arms, and to have made his men fire at a distance in several engagements, that the war might last. Even at this moment the existence and success of the insurrection are little short of miraculous. But there were two sources of weakness in the Russian army on which its commanders had not counted. Alexander II. is eminently, to his honour be it said, a pacific sovereign. He was compelled by the treaty of Paris to reduce his forces, and his own inclination has led him to neglect them. All accordingly had fallen into disorder before the war began. Again, the great social changes going on in Russia have altered the relations of officers and men, and made it difficult to enforce subordination. The men, frequently drunk, wandered over the country, living at free quarters, and murdering in mere revelry or in their anger at some repulse. It was thus, after the affair of Modliborzyee, that they dragged out the proprietor Soliman from the bedside of a young wife just confined, and killed him at their tent fires. It was thus, in the same raid, that they beat the proprietor Gorschkofski about the head with the butt ends of their muskets till his life was in danger. For these atrocities, which an adjutant of the Grand Duke, M. ICireff, as it were, sanctioned by his presence, the only punishment inflicted was that one man was put for three days under arrest. After the battle of Chehn, which has been officially denied, the troops, finding they could not carry off their own wounded, put them in a barn and set fire to it. General Kruk told my informant that the screams of the unhappy victims whom the Poles could not deliver were heartrending. At the same time the Russian fugitives murdered the proprietor Jentita, whom they met on the road, for refusing to give up his carriage to them. Emmanoff, an officer of the Russian Guards, burned down fourteen houses in the town of Tomaszow and headed a massacre in which one Rus- sian and seventeen Poles perished simply because the insurgents had been there. He has since been made a general. I myself saw a postal station which had been visited by the troops. They had come there on a scouting expedition, and found a party of the insurgents in the house. The insurgents repulsed them and went away. Two hours later the Russians returned in force and commenced the work of havoc, killing and wounding several persons in the house, breaking all the glass, and stealing everything valuable. A. Cossack officer took a bronze clock as his share of the Next day the postmaster went to the garrison town, and complained to the colonel of the regiment. The colonel acted well—set the son, who had been imprisoned, at liberty, and ordered the articles stolen to be searched for, with the result that a silver basket NWIS recovered. Fully to understand the significance of this incident, it must be remembered that the postmaster was a Government employe, and his house a Government station, that the scene passed within twenty miles of Warsaw, and that the only offence laid to the sufferer's charge was that he had received armed men 'whom he could not refuse to admit.

To pass to a few instances where life has not been at stake, The Russian soldiers invariably return to a place where they have been beaten and burn the buildings. They do this with a sort of grim conscientiousness, and I have heard of their extinguishing a fire which had spread to barns where the insurgents had not posted themselves. Latterly they have begun to talk of burning the forests, a crime which would destroy the fuel of unknown genera- tions, and against which it is to be hoped Europe will protest. I know a case in which they visited a fire-proof building set apart for family papers. At the sight of so much writing they decided it must be an office of the National Government, and set fire to all the records accordingly. I once met a gentleman who had been stopped the night before by an outpost. He was kept sixteen hours, searched, interrogated, and dismissed, as nothing sus- picious was found upon him, but only half the money in his purse, a rather large sum, was restored to him. I heard of a ease in which the Costsacks passed by a garden in which some children were playing with their governess. One of thetoldiers shook his fist at them as he went by, and the eldest of the children, a boy of fourteen, shook his fist back. In a moment the garden was filled with troops, and the invaders declared they would carry off the offender to the next town for examination and punishment. Fortunately the father of the family was in the house, and was a cool, sensible man. He went out and parleyed with the troops till an officer came up, then drew up his eight children in file, and asked the officer if he really thought there was any danger from such a family to the Russian Government. The officer was a well- conditioned man, cautioned the boy not to provoke soldiers in time of war, and sent the Cossacks about their business.

It is a natural aggravation of the present situation that arrests are often made on mere suspicion. Troops beaten and angry commit disorders on their way back, and then arrest the proprietor by way of justifying themselves. In one instance, a gentleman who had only just returned from Warsaw, where he had been under medical treatment, was plundered one day and imprisoned the next by roving companies because his house lay near the scene of an un- successful battle-field. In another case, a young man who had lost a hand before by an accident with a reaping-machine was imprisoned for some weeks on suspicion that he had lost it in the field. Some troops suddenly ordered back to Warsaw from an expedition in which they had hoped for plunder were walking sulkily along the road when they came in sight of a village. The bailiff of a neighbouring proprietor incautiously rode off to announce their approach to the inhabitants, instead of waiting or walking his horse ; at the same time, as it was just mid-day, the church belle tolled, and some peasants were seen going home to their dinners. The soldiers at once interpreted the bailiff to be an outpost, the church bell a tocsin, the peasants scythemen, and attacked and plundered the village with all the licence of war. On Friday, the 14th of August, between five and six o'clock p.m., the two principal streets of Warsaw were filled suddenly with police and military, who arrested every man who looked like a stranger or a traveller. The reason given for this was that the Government had cause to apprehend an e'sneuie. The real reason was said to be that the police expected to find some of the money lately taken at the affair of Zyrzyn on the persons of the travellers.

In such a state of society spies, of course, abound, and every denunciation is accepted and acted upon. I heard a ludicrous case of a squire, a man of small intellect and less courage, who kept at home from the first outbreak of the insurrection, scarcely daring even to visit his own barns. Some one out of malice, or hoping to make money by him, denounced him to the Government as a dangerous man, who disguised the most profound cunning and audacity under an appearance of cowardice and simplicity. He was, of course, arrested, and though his examiners soon found out their mistake, they did not dare to set him free altogether, and he is still called up from time to time for examination. Often the only object in an arrest seems to be that the police may get a bribe. In more serious cases the common procedure is that the accused person is put in solitary confinement for a fortnight. Living in a damp room, having repulsive and bad food, debarred exercise, and with the sentry looking in every quarter of an hour, the strongest man is naturally more or less broken at the end of this term. He is then called up for examination, and has probably prepared himself for the worst. To his surprise, he finds his examiner a polished gentleman, who treats him with the blandest courtesy, apologizes for the necessary rigour of a time of war, says that he has had no time to examine papers, and must really ask the prisoner why he is in prison or why he thinks he has been arrested. The accused is probably disconcerted by this reception, and having expected to be cross-questioned has no story ready, and is uncertain what to say. His statements, are confused, very likely con- tradictory and false. Suddenly the face of his inquisitor changes. "How is this, Sir? I trusted you on your honour as a gentlemen, and you tell me things which I know to be untrue." Then the proces-verbal is brought up, and the prisoner's statements are com- pared with the depositions against him. Of course, there are two sides to this question. I can quite imagine that Russian officers are often really anxious to dismiss the unhappy gentleman brought up before them, if the exigencies of the service will allow of it. They probably complain that it is impossible to trust any statement made by the prisoners. The crime in these matters rests with the Government, which has turned its officers into detectives, and gives its subjects no choice between renounc- ing patriotism or veracity. Every Polish gentleman at this moment is, and must be, an insurgent. If the Russian Govern- ment like to arrest or exterminate the whole class, let it do so by a sweeping measure in the teeth of Europe. But it is useless barbarity and demoralization to deal with these men by asking them to criminate themselves. If even they could do this without involving others in nine instances out of ten the hardship would be leas flagrant.

Neither do I think that a Government which has proclaimed

with the most revolting cynicism its disregard for the sell-respect of its subjects has any reason to complain if they cease to deal with it on ordinary principles. -Within the last few weeks torture is said to have been introduced into the prison practice of the citadel of Warsaw. To cite one instance ; Wysniecki, who com- manded the gendarmerie at Radom, received 400 blows, and in excess of anguish unfortnnately made confessions implicating others. General Kostanda, one of the commanders in the district of Kalisch, has made flogging with his own hand his speciality. He once paid a domiciliary visit to an estate and summoned the pro- prietor to say on his honour whether any arms were concealed there, and whether any insurgents were placed to protect them. The Pole thus interrogated admitted that there was a depot of rifles in a barn, but stated that there were no insurgents about the place. Some soldiers were sent to carry away the arms, and Kostanda stayed talking. Suddenly the report of a gun was heard. "How, Sir, is this your word of honour ? There are in- surgents, then, about the place. Soldier, bring me a whip." The squire was thrown on the ground, and Kostanda had already administered several strokes with his own hand when he learned that the gun had been discharged by accident. " A h I" he said, "I have been too hasty. Get up, Sir, and shake hands." The victim naturally declined. "What! you are sulky, you bear me a grudge. Soldiers, tie his hands and take him to the citadel." At the time I heard the story the gentleman was still a prisoner ; and Kostanda, it may be mentioned, is not a mere rough soldier, but has mixed largely in society, and is so far sensitive to opinion that he wrote lately to the Illustration to deny (falsely, as it turned out,) the reported mutilation of a French officer. Women, of course, bear their part in the sufferings of the war. I know of one case in which a young lady of about twenty was killed because a wounded insurgent was found in the house. The last worst outrage of all is, of course, neither unknown nor infrequent, but the subject is too horrible to be dwelt upon.

I confess that to me these outrages upon self-respect outweigh all other offences in enormity, and I believe there are few Conti- nental gentlemen who would not prefer a bullet to a blow. As, however, there is an extreme, perhaps a morbid regard for mere animal life in England, I add a few instances of the treatment of the wounded and prisoners. My first I take from the Journal de Bt. Petersbourg, quoted in the Bell (Kolokol) of July 10. It is the story of the Russian officer who had captured the wounded chief Sierakofski and twenty followers without resistance. "We approached the forest," he says, "and were going slowly. A non- commissioned officer came up to me and said, Your nobility, in case of attack, must we kill them?' ' Is this Asia,' cried Siera- kofski, 'that such orders are demanded aloud ?' I explained to him that the soldiers did not consider them as prisoners of war, and that they only regarded them as brigands, and that not without reason." His wounds, though they must ultimately have proved fatal, did not protect Sierakofski from being hanged at Wilna. The case of the "children of Warsaw" at Rubsczewice is one of the most appalling in history. A company more than a hundred strong of boys and young men was dining in a large room, and had neglected to put outposts. Suddenly they were surprised by an overpowering Russian force. Resistance was hopeless. They were ordered to strip off their clothes and hand them to the soldiers. When this was done a general massacre commenced, in which the greater number perished or were murdered. In one case, that of a boy of fourteen, the soldiers near him had not the heart to strike him till they were ordered by one of the officers. Then he received a bayonet thrust through the shoulder, but sur- vived it, and is, I believe, in a fair way or recovery. I „have men- tioned one case in which the Russians burned their own wounded as a proof of their demoralization. Naturally they are not more gentle to their enemies. They give as a rule no quarter on the field of battle, partly because, as in the Crimea, they are commonly drunk when they fight. But they often return the next day and carry off any wounded they may find to the hospitals. It was on one of these occasions, after a skirmish at 'I'yscowce, that, finding themselves pursued, they renewed the tragedy of Chelm, this time on their prisoners, and burned them in the barn of Tuszapy.

I dwell upon these things not, Heaven knows, from any desire to accumulate black charges against the Russian nation, but because the causes of the revolt are in anarchy of this kind, as much at variance with the laws of war as with those of humanity. The nation was discontented because it was badly governed ; it is fighting now because its only chance of safety is in arms. A district where the insurgents are in force is comparatively safe ; the Russians are forced to keep in the towns instead of spreading over the country, and are held in check by a wholesome fear of reprisals. Once let the last insurgent band be destroyed, and a corporal will be the representative of law in every village. No doubt the war is maintained at a fearful cost of blood and money. But the Poles weigh death in the field against death in prison or in the Russian service, and prefer the former ; against the cost of buying arms and ammunition they set off a partial exemption from plunder and an entire freedom from Russian taxation. These reasons . make me believe that the struggle will be protracted till the last possible moment.

The organization which has achieved such wonders hitherto is, I believe, unparalleled in history for completeness and efficiency. In two points only, perhaps, has the Secret Government failed. It tried to forbid all railway travelling ; the prohibition was a foolish one, and the Poles, though they have more than once broken up isolated parts of the railways, have not been able to hinder the constant passage of trains. Secondly, as a part of this attempt, they ordered all railway officials to resign their places. They did so, but as the Russians retorted with a threat of imprisoning all who could not give a satisfactory reason for their resignation the strike had to be given up. Bating these points, however, the success of the Secret Government has been little short of miraculous. It collects its own taxes, and it prevents the Russians from receiving a farthing. There is a dramatic story, for which I will not vouch, that the Grand Duke himself was one day summoned to pay 10,000 roubles (about 1,6000 as his share of the income-tax. He sent an aide-de-camp with the money to the house indicated, of course ordering the police to surround it. secretly. The officer was presented to an old man, who took the bank-notes, left the room to fetch a receipt, and did not return. When the police were at last called in, it appeared that the room was occupied by a governess who gave lessons elsewhere, and the landlord disclaimed all knowledge of the old man. It is added that when the officer made his excuses to the Grand Duke, he found that the receipt had already been forwarded to the palace. That the Russians should be unable to collect in a city like Warsaw, where at this moment they have something like a soldier to every three inhabitants, may seem even more wonderful. But they are met everywhere with a dogged refusal. If they distrain, in the first place, it collects a crowd, and may cause an eineute ; in the next place, no one will buy the property thus brought into the market. Of course this state of things cannot last for ever ; but even Mouravieff was almost baffled by this spirit in Lithuania, and. was reduced to putting up the cattle seized at nominal prices, such as 3s. for a cow, when the peasants often bought them in for the proprietors. Meanwhile, in Poland Proper the police profess to give no passports until the Russian taxes are paid. One of my friends told me notwithstanding that he should soon see me in England. "As soon as it is known," he said, "that I wish to leave the country, some official will bring me a receipt for the taxes I have never paid, duly drawn out and attested, for the sake of a gratuity, and I shall not even have the trouble of applying for it."

A second proof of the efficient working of the National Govern- ment is to be found in the postal system it has organized. When I started on my visit to the seat of war I procured two passports. The first, from "the Prefect of Warsaw," simply stated, "The bearer is allowed to visit the army of the Congress," giving my name and quality as a British subject below. The second ran thus : "The Prefect of— [a provincial city] instructs all the national authorities, as well civil as military, that they are to give all possible assistance to the bearer of the present travelling in the interest of the national cause. The national stations are bound to supply two horses and a britschka. The present advice is good for fifteen days." While I remained in Russian Poland I was so entirely among friends that probably I could have got on without using this document. But when I crossed the frontier I came into a part of Galicia where I had no acquaintance, and where I believe there were no ordinary means of procuring any- thing better than a peasant's waggon. Thanks to my passport I accomplished a difficult journey in the shortest time possible, meeting everywhere with the most cordial reception. And it must be remembered that whatever may be said of Russian Poland, the power of the National Government in Austrian Poland is purely one of opinion. Only the educated classes are with it, and it cer- tainly could not enforce any system of so-called terrorism upon these in the face of the Austrian police and with the peasantry hostile. I will justeadd that as my passports were numbered 947 and 806 respectively, the business done in this way must be con- siderable. In fact, at one large station I was told that the horses were worked to death.

I have dwelt on these points, the taxation and postal questions,

because I think they best exhibit the real strength of the National Government. Nothing short of universal and absolute success would sustain it in these matters. But its power in other respects is very remarkable. It learns the Russian plans almost as soon as they are conceived, and gets the earliest information of military ope- rations on either side. If it forbids an entente all is peaceable ; and no one doubts that if it ordered one the streets of the town desig- nated would run with blood. Not long ago the Russian Government bought two houses in one of the principal streets of Warsaw, the Cracow Boulevard, with the intention of demolishing them, as they were unsightly and interfered with artillery practice in time of civil disturbance. The National Government forbade any one to remove them, and the work has had to be done by soldiers, whom the Warsaw municipality is fined to pay. It has regulated the dress of ladies and they obey ; it has forbidden amusements and there are none. Take, again, the moral aspects of the late seizure of notes at the Warsaw Bank. The employes concerned in that daring adventure were quiet, respectable men, who had grown old in the routine of office, and who would have shuddered some years ago at the bare thought that they could ever betray their trust. They forfeited pensions and personal safety by the attempt. Rely upon it the mental struggle must have been most cruel, but they obeyed none the leas. The whole was done in broad daylight, and no research has discovered the actors in the spoil.

There is, of course, a dark side to this power of the National Government in the material means by which it is sustained, and in the interests of the Poles themselves I do not wish to exten- uate it. I know of no martyrdom more splendid than that of the unarmed crowd shot down before their ruler's house in February, 1861; I believe nothing in history surpasses the heroism of the last year's struggle; and I regret all the more that such a cause has ever exchanged the cross and the sword for the dagger of the assassin. Of course, even this must not be exaggerated. There is no "terrorism' in the common sense to control public opinion, for all classes are unanimous. I have talked with some fifty gentlemen at least, and have heard only one language, "We did not begin the insurrection," perhaps, "We did not desire it, but it has been forced upon us, and we will fight it out." In fact, where the priests, the women, the gentry, the students, and the middle classes generally are all equally fervid, it would be strange indeed if the enthusiasm were not national. But, as in every society, there are men of exceptional infamy who care only to obtain the bast price for their services, the National Government, while it leaves the soldiers who fight against it to the chance of war, and the judges and ordinary police who condemn or arrest its partizans to the judgment of their own consciences, thinks itself entitled to inflict death upon traitors and spies. The trials are, of course, secret,—how could they be otherwise ?—but it is professed that all possible care is taken to collect evidence on both sides. Still, it stands to reason that this system is insufficient. In one of its last bulletins the National Government clears the memory of a certain Michael Bobrowski, whom it hanged last June, and regrets that it has not been able to bring his denouncers to justice. About a month ago, an official list was published in the Cracow newspapers of ten persons declared to be Russian spies, mostly procuresses or low publicans. One of these solemnly denied the charge in a spirited public answer some days later. In these cases the first publication was, of course, meant only as a warning, but in the excited state of public opinion it might easily have produced dangerous consequences. Colonel Leichte, a Russian victim, had introduced torture in the citadel. The case of the Grand Marshal Domejko at Wilna is of European notoriety. As representative of the nobles, he was summoned by Mouravieff to sign an address to the Emperor. He refused, but under threat of instant deportation to Siberia, not only complied, but tried to procure signatures. Poles, of course, regarded him as guilty of high treason to his country and his order. A case which happened during my stay at Warsaw is curious, because both parties attempted to hush it up ; the Poles from a feeling that they had gone too far, the Russians from a fear of exposing their weakness. A Polish usurer was applied to by the collector of the national taxes. He kept the man in conversation while his wife sent the servant for the Russian police. By one story, but I think a false one, the collector was almost instantly condemned to death. Any how, next morning, the usurer, his wife, his servant, and their dog were found stabbed, though I believe a guard had been set on the house. Both parties now spread the story that the murder had been committed for private purposes by a, lodger in the house. Probably the lodger was, in fact, guilty ; but as the money found upon him was in packets of consecutive notes, as if freshly drawn

from a bank, while it is the custom of Polish money-lenders to keep no money in hand except the little that comes in casually, the best- informed foreigners believed that the murder was a political crime.

It is needless to show what utter demoralization among people and police such practices must lead to. During my stay in Warsaw a man was found dead in the suburb of Praga with a butcher's knife near him, the murder in this case being probably a private one. The police, however, arrested all the butchers of the district, twenty-eight in number, and tested them by the ludicrous method of finding out whether the action of the heart was sensibly increased when they were told of the charge against them.

It so happened that fourteen were designated in this way for the citadel.- Conceive any respect for justice existing in a country where such scenes are possible. In fact, both parties are desperate. Yet, as I have dealt hardly with the Poles in this matter, I will mention one instance in which I think their conduct was thoroughly within bounds. A Russian settler in Poland occupied himself with transmitting reports against his neighbours to Government. He received a warning that if he persisted in this conduct he would be punished, but he persisted none the less. One day a company of insurgents appeared before his doors, arrested, and marched him off, telling him to prepare for death. He was marched about for two days in this way, and then sent back with a hint that he had better not provoke a third visit. The lesson has been sufficient. After all said, the Russian Government, which has filled Polish society with spies, has no right to complain if assassins are employed against it. Of the two evils, the former, which strikes at the roots of all veracity and self-respect, is surely the more loathsome and terrible.

Where the National Government has been least successful, to my mind, is in the conduct of the war. I do not deny the one broad and startling result that the insurrection commenced seven months ago hopelessly, and is now able to hold its own against more than doubled forces in at least three provinces. But I think there has been a want of plan and concert in the military operations, and a disposition to fritter away irreparable time in countermarches and skirmishes. The first fault is partly in consequence of the com- position of the Government. In its first beginnings it was, as I have stated, a purely democratic body. 'When the war had begun, the influence of the nobles and gentry, without whose co-operation nothing could be done, began to make itself felt, and the nomi- nation of Langiewicz as Dictator was really a small coup d'e'tat, intended to substitute an aristocratic nominee for a popular council.

Unhappily, the move had been made too soon, Langiewicz was driven out of the country, and the present executive council is a mixed body, in which the democratic element preponderates by number and the aristocratic by influence. All active dissension is suspended in presence of the common danger, but either side watches the other a little jealously. In particular, the democrats are careful to avert the danger of a second dictatorship, and they are even said to have slurred over an important victory by one of their best generals, Jezioranski, for fear he should rise upon his reputation into supreme power. This feeling, of course, main- tains the partizan character of the war. Still, I have little doubt that a man of first-rate capacity would overcome these jealousies, which are common to every free country. The preference for a guerilla war as such, has arisen, I believe, partly from a keen remembrance of the damage sustained by Langiewicz's defeat, and a disposition not to stake all on a cast, but still more from a wish to gain time, in the hopes of European intervention. Till quite lately it has been confidently believed throughout Poland that France would interpose if the rebellion could hold its own. With whom the responsibility of having excited these.hopes rests after history must determine. I am inclined to think that the sanguine temper of the exiles, attaching an undue importance to public opinion, has been the chief source of the fatal delusion.

But if the insurgents have a little thrown away the advantages of numbers, local knowledge, and a friendly population, it must be remembered that they have had to contend against unparalleled difficulties in the way of obtaining supplies and recruits. What- ever may have been the case at first, Austria is now almost as hostile as Prussia to the movement, most of the employes are in Russian pay, and the soldiers quartered in Galicia—themselves Galicians—are bitterly against what they are taught to regard

as an aristocratic movement. I have heard of their refusing a large bribe to let a supply of powder pass. The result is that a rifle costa the insurgents eight times its price from the manufacturer. Latterly they have obtained a certain supply from the Russian officials themselves ; but even these guns, which are of inferior make, cost forty roubles a piece, or

about 61. 5s. The great want of all is of cartridges. General Kruk was unable to follow up his victory at Chrusline for this sole reason, and his antagonist, Colonel Mednikoff, is said to have com- menced his despatch to General Chruszscheff with the words, "I do not know why I am not a prisoner." Again, the material of the troops is very unequal. There are very few foreigners among them, three English, a few French and Hungarians, one or two Italians, and none from other countries. Poles who have served in the French foreign legion, or in the Hungarian war of 184849, are the back-bone of the army. There is no want of recruits, and it is said that the National Government has 40,000 now on its lists whom it could call into the field if it had arms for them. Of these the gentlemen, who must always, unfortunately, be few, are the most reliable. A tradesman or a peasant can go back to his home after a defeat with comparative safety, and, perhaps, with no great sense of shame. But a gentleman joins the ranks in a hope- less cause till death. The moral effect of this in welding the classes together has been admirable. "I have always been a

democrat hitherto," said a Pole to one of my informants, a foreign resident, "but the conduct of our gentlemen has converted me. These men know how to die." Recruits from the middle classes are enthusiastic, but are said to want stamina and steady pluck. The hope of the leaders, therefore rests in the peasanty. These were at first indiffer- ent and distrustful of opposing the Government. But gradu- ally the war spirit has reached them, and (in Poland Proper) they are taking up arms freely. In Posen they have been ready from the first, but wish to begin by fighting their natural enemies, the Prussians. It is said that in one district alone, that of Lublin, 3,000 peasants have lately been enrolled. A romantic story, lately circulated in Cracow, of a peasant who had joined the insurgents- with his wife, his daughter, and his daughter's betrothed. The detachment was attacked the moment it crossed the frontier ; the father, mother, and lover fell in fight, and the daughter, already wounded, was only saved by an officer who saw her sex. Generally it is these frontier battles which are most fatal to the rebellion. The recruit who, perhaps, cannot even handle his gun, is helpless and panic-stricken when he finds himself suddenly in presence of an overwhelming force.

During my visit to the disturbed districts I saw one division of insurgents first on march and afterwards at halt. It consisted of two regiments, 500 and 420 strong respectively, which were then going towards the frontier to protect the entry of newcompanies and to collect recruits. From a fourth to a third were cavalry, mounted mostly on rough country horses, and about the same number scythemen, who were, of course, exclusively peasants. Their baggage and sick, together only occupying about six carts, might have satisfied Sir Charles Napier's love of simplicity. The men were comparatively veterans, and looked bronzed and soldier- like, marching a little roughly, it is true, but still in good order and with fair precision. Dress and arms were as various as the owner's fancy and means ; thick military cloaks and attempted uniforms alternating with shooting coats, common frock coats, and the linen shirts of the peasantry-; while the rifles were from- every conceivable factory, and those who had the means showed revolvers. I walked about two miles with them, and can testify that they stepped out well at the rate of nearly four miles an hour. Head-quarters at the halting-place were, of course, in the house of the village squire ; and the dangerous guests were welcomed with a cordiality which could not be mistaken. Our host after- wards told me that he had two sons in the service. Before I left one of the commanding officers carried me into the drawing-room, where I found a general gathering, and the health of England and Queen• Victoria was drunk with all the honours. It made me sad to think that the men with whom I was then talking, and whom I saw in the highest spirits clustered round the dinner-table or the piano, were only the forlorn hope of an almost desperate cause. One of them was a boy of only fourteen, but I was told a capable soldier. Their discipline was said to be very good, and their commanders were devout, God-fearing men, who repressed all disorders. The one I saw most of had a medal of the Virgin round his neck, and they had sent -word to the priest of a neighbouring village to deliver the troops an address-as they passed through.

In truth, the only consolation any man can draw from this deplorable struggle is that its results are ennobling a whole genera- tion. I said once to a friend that it was impossible to mil. in Polish society and not observe the general tone of exaltation that pervaded it. "Call it rather resignation," he replied ; "it was exaltation at the beginning ; it has now penetrated and become a

part of the character." M. de Mazade mentions the answer given by the women of a small town when the Russians summoned them to withdraw :—" Here the wives die by the side of their husbands, and the children by the side of their fathers." Such answers, and still more such actions, are the common-places of Polish life at present, where the duties of tending the wounded, sheltering the proscribed and fugitive, supplying food and clothing to the patriotic armies, are carried on fearlessly every day in the very shadow of death. Weighing all dispassionately, considering what life is in countries where there is no freedom, and where only vicious pleasures are tolerated, I can scarcely find it in my heart to pity the young who are growing up as it were within a charmed circle where only duties and heroism enter. I can conceive no more sacred household life than that which trains its women to be sisters of mercy, and no better occupa- tion for men than a war for a just cause unstained by any hope of plunder or of the marshal's baton. It is not these people I pity, it is the future survivors of the noble army of martyrs, it is the country and Europe that are losing them. In a struggle like the present it is always the bravest and most pure-hearted who fall first. What, in God's namel is to become of Poland if she be paci- fied or even set free next year, with the loss of half her ablest and best gentlemen ? What is to become of us and of the cause of order in Europe, if we let the Cossack trample down a civilization based like our own, on the spirit of freedom, chivalry, and Christianity? Even our last political watch-word of brotherhood in Christ, the principle of non-intervention, will sound a little strangely over a nation's grave.

At this moment the insurrection is, perhaps, stronger than ever. It occupies the country in the provinces of Lublin, Radom, and Warsaw, and the Russians only garrison the towns and make razzias. In a week's travel through the country I only saw Rus- sian troops once, and then in a town. The Rosaian Government is almost bankrupt, and only maintains a silver circulation in Warsaw by supplying the tradesmen with change to a given amount (10 roubles) every day. In the country notes are issued almost at pleasure by the Jews or local companies. The Rus- sian army numbers 250,000 men in Poland and the old provinces, and can barely hold its own. The Guards have been sent down from St. Petersburg. It will take several months before the, conscripts, whose levy was lately decreed, can be enrolled, disciplined, or marched to the frontier. However much, therefore, Prince Gortschakoff may bluster, he must yield to anything like a serious threat. If we cannot interfere in the- interests of justice and mercy, we are, at least, warranted by the treaty of Vienna, in which Russia contracted with us to grant "a representation and national institutions" to the Grand Duchy of Warsaw as defined by the treaty of Tilsit. The one thing neces- sary at present is to stop the effusion of blood instantly. That the Poles will never consent to lay down their arms and surrender at discretion is quite certain, but that they will accept an armistice under European guarantee is undoubted. If they do not, or if, having accepted it, they reject reasonable terms, their blood must be upon their own heads. But the common belief that they will accept no terms short of the limits of 1772 is, I think, a mistaken one. The Central Committee, which conducted the war till the Dictatorship of Langiewiez, stated in a letter to the Kolokol that they recognized the right of each province to decide the question of union for itself. This would probably exclude Volhynia, Podolia, Kiew, and the old Polish Ukraine. As regards Lithuania, the western part of which is thoroughly Polish, while the eastern portions have been Russianized, there might be greater difficulty, but surely none insuperable to diplomacy. The aristocratic section of the National Government would, I have some ground to believe, be accessible to reason, and would probably accept any fair compro- mise, such as a division of the territory, or even a customs' and passport union, for the sake of procuring a solid practical inde- pendence to Poland Proper. Of course, the Poles desire better terms than these ; but the kingdom of Italy is sufficient evidence that a nation may be satisfied, or at least quieted, with something short of its legitimate aspirations. Besides, the RuPsiana, who are weak in Poland Proper, could certainly hold their own frontier against such an enemy. Meanwhile, blood is flowing, and it will be difficult for us to wash our hands of it if we neglect a single means of legitimate influence that can be used in the victim's behalf. At present, the threat of recalling our ambassador would almost certainly be sufficient. Six months hence the armies and the fleets of the Western Powers may be insufficient to restore the dead to life, and Europe will be poorer by one

PeoPle.'