The
Russians
marched on Warsaw.
Poland - 1915 - Poland, a Study in National Idealism - Monica Gardner
The
literature that was born of her sorrows has been,
as I have endeavoured to point out in the follow-
ing pages, one of the chief factors in the main-
tenance of that life, and almost the only method
of self-expression that has been possible to a
country, debarred as Poland has been from normal
existence. The production of the Polish poets is
a splendid form of art: but even more is it a
great movement of national aspiration. Hence
my book is not so much a study in Poland's liter-
ature as an attempt to illustrate the soul of a
nation which, were it only for her devoted
, patriotism and fidelity to her ideals under over-
whelming difficulties, should command universal
sympathy. For this purpose, I have in the first
chapter given a brief account of the condition of
Poland since the partitions.
A word must be said as to my mode of dealing
with Russia's past treatment of Poland. It is a
subject that is necessary to be faced in a work on
Poland if any sort of justice is to be done to the
ix b
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? X
PREFACE
Poles. The Russian nation, now that she has shaken
herself free from Prussian influence, has promised
to redress the wrongs that Poland has suffered at
her hands. The greater these wrongs have been,
the more profound will be the admiration of
Europe when she beholds their reparation.
It has been impossible in a book of this scope to
give more than a sketch of such poets and teachers
as Mickiewicz and Krasinski. I have already pub-
lished a monograph on the former (Adam Mickie-
wicz, the National Poet of Poland, London, 1911),
and I have in preparation a study on the life and
work of Krasinski.
For the sake of the English reader unacquainted
with the Polish language, I have generally trans-
lated the Polish Christian names into their
English equivalents. As the Polish crossed 1 is a
complicated matter for printers and readers
ignorant of Polish, I have--although it is incorrect
to do so--replaced it where it occurs by the
simple 1, according to the custom of many French
and English writers on Poland. Certain letters of
the Polish alphabet that present special difficulties
I have rendered phonetically; but as it has not
been always possible to do this, I have indicated
a few rules on the pronunciation of Polish that
may be useful to the reader.
Chapters V. and VII. and portions of my first
and second chapters have already appeared in
the Quest. Through the courtesy of the editor,
Mr. G. R. S. Mead, I am enabled to reprint them
here. With the exception of the chapters on
Anhelli and Ujejski, the present book has been
written after the outbreak of the war. I have
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? PREFACE
therefore been cut off from communication with
my friends and correspondents in Poland. But the
generous assistance which they gave me in the past
and in my work on Krasinski, about which I was
able to consult them before the cataclysm swept
down upon us, has been of the greatest help to
me in what I have been writing during these
terrible months, while their country has been
devastated by all the horrors of war. I therefore
express my deeply grateful thanks to my friend,
Mr. Edmund Naganowski, to Dr. Kallenbach,
and to Professor Zdziechowski. I am also much
indebted to Mr. Ladislas Mickiewicz, the son of
Adam Mickiewicz, and to my brother, Dr.
Edmund Gardner.
My earnest hope in offering this little book to
English readers is that it may arouse their sympathy
for the Polish nation.
1915. M. M. G.
Note. --Since the above words were written,
the news reached me of the death in Poland of
my friend, Edmund Naganowski. With him his
country loses one whose labour in her behalf was
unceasing. To those who, like myself, were hon-
oured with his friendship, and who found in him
the strongest, the most devoted and sympathetic
of friends and advisers, his loss can only be a life-
long and irreparable bereavement.
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? NOTE ON THE PRONUNCIATION OF
POLISH
The Polish C--an English ts, but has a softer
and somewhat hissing sound when it precedes i,
or when it is accented as in 6.
Ch--strongly aspirated h, as in the Scotch loch.
Cz--ch in cherry.
Dz--j, as in jam.
O--oo as in rood.
Rz--the French j, as in Jean.
S', Si--a very soft hissing form of sh.
Sz--sh.
W--v.
Z, Zi--French j.
The accent in Polish is almost invariably on the
penultimate as, Mickie'wicz.
Xll
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? CHAPTER I
THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS
FOR more than a hundred years, Poland
has presented to Europe the spectacle
of a nation rent asunder. Her nationality V
has been proscribed and oppressed. The common 1
rights of race possession have been denied to her.
She has risen in arms for her liberties, only to be
crushed. She has suffered the basest treachery
and the bitterest disillusions. Eighty years ago,
Montalembert, in a famous phrase, gave her the
name of the "nation in mourning. " That title
has never lost its application. .
In 1772 and 1793, the first two partitions of \
Poland were effected: the first between Austria,!
Russia and Prussia, the second between Russia
and Prussia. After the second partition Kosciuszko,
arming the peasants with scythes, rose at the
head of the nation in a desperate attempt to save
the national independence. The armies of Russia
and Prussia were too strong for him. He was
carried, a wounded prisoner, from the lost field
of Maciejowice. Suvorov, the Russian commander,
then marched on Warsaw. The city was taken after
an appalling massacre of the inhabitants of its
suburb, Praga, in which thousands perished by
the sword or by fire, or were drowned in the river
as they fled, with a broken bridge before them,
from Suvorov's soldiers. The cause of Poland was
6
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? 2
POLAND
vanquished; and the third partition of Poland
between Austria, Russia and Prussia followed in
1795. By this' proceeding, a crime almost un-
paralleled in history, assuredly without a shadow of
political or moral justification, Poland as a state
ceased to exist.
But the Polish nation never gave up the hope
of resurrection. She lived on, as she has lived to
the present hour, struggling for her nationality,
clinging to it, and preserving it.
After the third partition, what remained of
the Polish army enrolled itself under Napoleon's
banners. Led by the national flags, commanded
by their own officers, the Polish legions shed their
blood in torrents for the man who they believed
would give them back their country. Napoleon's
betrayal of the Polish cause was only one among
the many deceived hopes and broken pledges of
which the unhappiest of nations has been the
> victim. The Treaty of Tilsit in 1807 has been
called by the Poles the fourth partition of Poland;
for, on this occasion, Napoleon did nothing more
for those whose loyalty remained with him till his
death than to create, under his protection, thdl
Duchy of Warsaw. Ruled by the French laws
that Napoleon imposed upon it, its army, with
Joseph Poniatowski at its head, was, however,
national, and did brilliant service on the side of
France. For nine years the little state was swept
by the war, till, at last, peace was restored to
Europe.
At the congress of Vienna that met in 1815 to
readjust the political balance, the question of
Poland was one that came prominently forward,
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 3
as it will do again. The ancient Republic of Poland
was not re-established. It was once more divided
between the three original partitioning powers.
To Austria fell Galicia, with the exception of
Cracow. Prussia kept the Duchy of Posen, West
Prussia, Thorn, and Danzig. Russia secured the
rest of the Duchy of Warsaw, Lithuania, and
those eastern provinces of Poland that stand be-
tween the Muscovite empire and Western Europe.
The express stipulation was made that in each of
these three divisions the language, religion, and
nationality of the Poles were to be maintained
and respected in their entirety. But two further
attempts were made to give at least some measure
of fuller independence to the Polish nation.
Cracow was erected into a tiny stateship under
'the protection, the irony of which subsequent
events fully proved, of Austria, Prussia, and
I Russia. A part of the Duchy of Warsaw passed,
it is true, to Russia; but under the condition
that she should be an autonomous state with
the Tsar as her crowned king. Her army, her
administration, every branch of her life, were to
be Polish and exclusively Polish. And to this day,
long after her privileges have been swept away,
that part of Poland is spoken of by every Pole as
/the Kingdom of Poland.
The admirable organization of the newly-
founded kingdom proved how rapidly the Poles
had learned in the school of adversity. Picked
officials filled the posts of trust. The military chiefs,
the army, were the soldiers who had been trained
by Napoleon. Much was hoped of the Tsar,
Alexander I. When an unhappy heir at the court
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? 4
POLAND
of Catherine II. , he had formed a warm friendship
with young Adam Czartoryski, son of a princely
Polish house, who was retained as a hostage
at the same court. In their intimate conversations
Alexander promised the Pole that he would restore
Poland, and it was through Czartoryski's influence
on the Tsar that the Kingdom of Poland owed
its foundation. But unfortunately the viceroy
whom Alexander chose for the new Polish state
was a man of little worth and small patriotism,
mistrusted by his fellow-countrymen. The com-
mander-in-chief, appointed likewise by the Tsar,
was the latter's brother, the Grand Duke Con-
stantine. This semi-madman, in his transports of
mingled insanity and brutality, subjected the
proud and high-spirited Polish officers to indig-
nities that drove more than one of them to commit
suicide rather than serve under such a leader.
In addition to the viceroy and commander-in-
chief, a Russian Commissioner was nominated
whose office was to play spy upon the Poles. It
was this man, Novosiltzov, who brought about
the state of things that goaded the Polish nation
into the rising of 1830. His spies filled the country.
Any careless word resulted in the speaker's arrest.
The prisons were filled.
In 1825 Alexander I. died, and was succeeded
by his brother, Nicholas I. Two years earlier the
famous affair of the Lithuanian student societies
took place. Led by the devoted and high-minded
Thomas Zan, an association had been formed
among the young men at the University of Wilna,
under the title of the Philomathians. Their ends
were the moral and philanthropic ideals of ardent
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 5
and generous youths; patriotic rather than
'revolutionary. The suspicions of the Russian
Government fell upon the society. Its members
were imprisoned and many of them put to torture.
Numbers were banished to Siberia, while others
were exiled to various outposts in Russia. Among
the latter was the poet, Adam Mickiewicz, the
fast friend of Thomas Zan. He has immortalized
the scenes of the imprisonment of himself and the
comrades of his youth, most of whom he never
saw again, in his drama the Ancestors.
These proceedings of Novosiltzov's aroused
the resentment of the whole nation. The liberties
guaranteed to the Kingdom were now being
rapidly trampled underfoot. The country was
treated as a conquered province. The situation
of the Poles was intolerable; and on the night of
November 29th, 1830, they rose in arms for their
'treaty rights.
The Rising of 1830 was ill prepared, chiefly by
a handful of young men. It was badly organized.
There were dissensions among its leaders, lack of
discipline. These are its weak points, redeemed
by the heroic courage of a people that laid down
their lives by thousands rather than see their
country perish. The Poles fell, says an eye-witness,
like grain before the scythe. * Boys from colleges
and schools who, we are told, kept up their studies
in the camp in the intervals when they were not
fighting, young poets whose songs were sung by
the soldiers and who wrote their poems with a
baggage waggon for their table, high-born women,
* Quoted by Count Stanislas Tarnowski in Our History in the
Nineteenth Century. Cracow, 1901 (Polish)
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? 6
POLAND
hunters armed with old hunting-guns, peasants
with their scythes, seasoned legionaries from the
Napoleonic wars, all fought side by side. The
Poles held out for ten months against the Russian
armies. They won victory after victory. Then
came the inevitable hour of defeat by superior
forces. At Ostrolenka, where not a Polish gunner
but died at his gun, and thousands fell with the
national hymn on their lips, the heroism of the
Poles was only equalled by their appalling losses.
From that hour the Polish arms met nothing but
\ reverses.
The Russians marched on Warsaw. In
its defence, men and women fought alike. Ordon
blew up the fort he was commanding, and Russian
and Pole found there a common death. Entrench-
ments were defended, fought for inch by inch,
till not a Pole was left alive. The city could hold
out no longer and surrendered, and in September,
| 1831, the war was ended.
In the interest of historical truth and in justice
to the Poles, the sequel of the rising, however
painful, must be told in a book that professes to
deal with the psychology and the aspirations of
the Polish nation. The world is now looking to
Nicholas II. to inaugurate a new epoch in the
relations between Poland and Russia.
Since the failure of the Rising in 1831, the con-
stitution of the Kingdom of Poland has existed
no more except on paper. Her treaty rights were
destroyed, her army abolished, her administration
taken from her and removed to Petersburg. The
universities of Warsaw and Wilna were closed.
Schools were shut, and the Russian language
enforced on those that still were allowed to remain.
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 7
'Russian officials took the place of Poles. The
libraries and artistic treasures of the nation were
transferred to Russia. Confiscations and fines
brought Polish families to ruin. Transportation
of forty-five thousand families into the Caucasus
and other Russian provinces parted husbands and
fathers from their homes for ever. Hundreds of
innocent persons suffered the penalty of death.
The numbers of those who were sent for life to
dungeons or to the mines of Siberia are said to
exceed computation. Children were torn from
the country and carried off by the Cossacks to
Russia, never to be seen again.
Yet the strong national spirit lived on in every
part of Poland and wherever, in their enforced
wanderings over the world, her exiles went. Hope-
less attempts at a fresh rising, mainly instigated
by young Poles stealing secretly into the country
from abroad, continued, always to be discovered
and punished with Siberia or death.
Then it was, in the years following the Rising
of 1830, that the movement known as the Polish
Emigration set in. Those who were banished from
Poland, or who escaped death only by flight, or
who chose to live beyond the frontier to carry on
the work in their nation's behalf that was im-
possible in the country itself, took refuge in foreign
lands, and especially in Paris. Every class was
represented; aristocrats like Adam Czartoryski,
who had in happier days influenced for good the
policy of Alexander I, the friend of his youth,
and who had now lost all for Poland; the generals
and soldiers of the Rising, artisans, priests, the
poets who gave Poland the magnificent literature
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? 8
POLAND
that might not be heard within her boundaries.
All degrees of mental and physical wretchedness
were to be found among their ranks. They were
exiled for ever from their country and from those
they loved. Too often they could not learn the
fate of their families or communicate with those
members of them who still remained in Poland.
Most of them were plunged in dire poverty; all
of them in constant suspense and harrowing
anxiety as to what terrible news, whether personal
or national, the next post from Poland would
i bring them. They shared one common certainty:
I that they would live to return and see Poland free.
Their death in the foreign city, where their graves
are still piously visited by their fellow Poles, was
the only end to their desire.
I shall deal with the condition of the Poles in
Prussian Poland later in this chapter.
Under Austria the Galician Poles were treated
as the victims of a brutal war rather than as a
nation whose rights had been ratified in a European
f congress. The policy of Metternich was to crush
every Polish element underfoot. The stipulations
of the Treaty of Vienna were regarded as non-
existent. The offices of the national government
were filled by Austrians or Czechs. Punishment
by death was inflicted with appalling frequency
on those who held Polish aspirations. The Polish
language was abolished in the schools. It was a
penal offence for the Polish students to be heard
speaking Polish to each other even out of lesson
hours, or to be caught reading in Polish. House
to house inquisitions were made for Polish books.
Those who possessed them, read them or lent
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS
them, went to prison. The publication of Polish
writings was attended with almost prohibitive
difficulties on account of the heavy censorship.
Public works, such as the maintenance of hospitals,
roads, and so on, were completely neglected by
the Government. The country, ruinously taxed,
became poorer day by day.
Here, as to Russian Poland, came emissaries
from Paris, urging insurrection. The prisons were
filled with those whose implication the Govern-
ment discovered or only suspected. Matters were
ripening for a rising in the three divisions of
Poland; when the year 1846 beheld, not the j
war originally planned, btrt-'bne of the most j
lamentable catastrophes in Polish history.
Certain of the Poles in Paris were preparing a
rising on democratic lines. Their representatives 1
endeavoured to persuade the Galician peasants j
to take up arms, and to compel their landowners,
even by force if necessary, to join the movement.
Following these came certain agitators, wander-
ing from village to village, playing upon the
ignorance of the peasantry, instigating them to
turn their weapons, not against the oppressors
of their country, but against the Polish nobility.
These, it is now known, were the agents of the
Austrian government. They were but too sue-
cessful. Duped and deceived, maddened by drink,
the peasants rose against the Polish nobles; fired
their mansions, and massacred the inhabitants.
In the same year, Cracow lost her last vestige \
of independence. The first years of her existence
as a separate state had been tranquil. Her trade,
her schools and University, had flourished. But
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? 10
POLAND
in a city where three official residents represented
the three Powers to which the rest of Poland was
subjected, liberty could not last long. When, in
1846, a general Polish rising seemed imminent,
fheTAustrian army retired from the town, and
the insurgents, believing that all was in readiness,
instituted a government and issued a call to arms.
That rising was abortive; and, in the autumn of
the year, Austria seized the city which she has
since retained^
The wave of unrest that in 1848 ran through
the countries under Austrian rule brought an
expectation of better things to Poland, that was
not immediately fulfilled. In the general ferment,
on the pretext of a chance quarrel between a few
soldiers and workmen, the Austrian army bom-
barded Cracow, thus adding another chapter to
the chequered history of the city which, the
sepulchre of Poland's kings and of her greatest
dead, may be called the sanctuary of the nation.
It was not till 1861 that Austria reversed her
Polish policy. The first Galician Diet was then
opened, and a species of autonomy was granted,
with the result that Galicia became, and has con-
tinued till this day, the centre of Polish national
life.
The Crimean War, upon which the Poles
founded brilliant hopes, had passed, leaving be-
hind it none of the results for which they had
confidently looked. Italy had won her deliverance,
Hungary her constitution. To the Poles it seemed
as if their hour must also be approaching. While
this thought was seething in the hearts of the
Polish youth, events happened in Warsaw that
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS n
precipitated the rising of 1863. On the 25th of
February, 1861, the Poles were celebrating in a
pacific and religious fashion the anniversary of
the battle of Groch6w, one of the victories in
the last rising. Two days later, on February 27th,
a similar peaceful demonstration led to a collision
between the Russian troops and the people. The
soldiers fired upon the unarmed crowd outside
the church of the Bernardines,with the result that
five Poles were killed. All appeals to the Viceroy
were in vain. Then, on April 8th, occurred that
terrible scene outside the castle when a crowd
of unarmed Polish men and women, who stood
there in a silent protestation against their wrongs,
'Nvere massacred in cold blood by order of
Jijfirjxhatojt-
It had been urged upon the Tsar, Alexander II,
that, if a rising were to be averted, the severity
with which the nation had been treated since
1831 must be relaxed. The Tsar refused to renew
the constitution of the Kingdom; and instead
appointed the Pole, Wielopolski, as the minister
of religion and education. In some respects, such,
for instance, as the improvement of the schools,
and the re-opening of the University of Warsaw,
Wielopolski did much for the amelioration of
the country; but, on the other hand, his desire
for conciliation with Russia led him into deplor-
able acts of injustice that effectually exasperated
the Polish youth. The people were on fire with
patriotic and mystic fervour. Singing on their
knees the national hymn, they were shot down
where they knelt, slain in their churches. In 1863
a drastic conscription was levied in order to remove
1
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? 12
POLAND
the youths of Poland from the country. Two
thousand of them were seized in their beds at
night, and despatched to Siberia and the Cau-
casus. This was the match to the explosion. The
young men who were left escaped to the woods
and flew to arms.
I Doomed from the beginning, the Rising of
1863 was a disastrous attempt. It dragged on for
a year in the nature of guerilla war; a struggle
in the woods, carried on by small bands of Polish
youths, armed with any weapon upon which they
could lay their hands. Beaten wherever the
Russian regiments and cannon came in force
against them, they then reappeared in some other
place, frequently victorious over small detach-
ments, fighting on in the certainty that Europe
would come to their help. Those who were
captured were shot, hung, or sent to Siberia. The
farms and dwellings of any person who had
sheltered them or given them provisions were
burnt to the ground, and the inhabitants killed
or imprisoned.
Napoleon III, England, and Austria all addressed
their remonstrances to Alexander II. That he
could afford to disregard them is owing to the
rising influence of Bismarck. The latter entered
into a secret understanding with Russia. England,
with the threat of the Prussian annexation of
Schleswig-Holstein, retired definitely from the
championship of Poland. Napoleon's proposal
that a congress should be held to ameliorate the
condition of the Poles fell to the ground; and
henceforth Europe abandoned the Polish nation
to her fate. To the policy that then began may
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 13
be ascribed the disasters that are now ravaging
the world.
The penalty that desolated Russian Poland,
when the insurrection was at last stamped out,
resolved itself into something little short of a war
of extermination against every semblance of
Polish nationality. We will confine ourselves to
such facts of this terrible story as are necessary to
tell; we trust, as a closed chapter.
Henceforth the Kingdom was no longer ruled
even by a viceroy who was Russia's nominee, but
by a governor-general, and as a conquered dis-
trict known by the name of the Vistula province.
The nation groaned under a bondage to which
modern history offers nothing similar. The Poles
were sent by thousands, on the merest suspicion,
with no attempt at a judicial inquiry, to languish
in the mines of Siberia. Women and innocent
children were deported there, as convicts, in
convict dress. The reign of terror established by
. Muraviev in Lithuania was such that the Russians
refused to touch his hand in friendship on his
return to Petersburg; and it is with the sobriquet
of the " Hangman," which his countrymen gave
him, that his name has gone down to posterity.
Students were expelled from school for speaking
their mother tongue in the streets to their school-
fellows. Polish was forbidden in the churches, in
every public place, in private talk. In the hospitals,
including those devoted to the care of children
and foundlings, the sick were not allowed to hear
I their own language. The University of Warsaw
was, and has remained, entirely Russianized.
Russian masters were placed in every school.
--
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? H POLAND
Even in the village schools the Polish children
might only learn in Russian. The childish minds
were taught falsification of the two dearest in-
heritances of a patriotic and devout race--their
faith and national history. Bishops were driven
from their dioceses, parishes were deprived of
priests, and the church of Poland subjected to a
systematic oppression that has continued ever
since. The Polish landowners were dispossessed
of their estates; Poles forbidden to buy land.
Enormous taxation completed their ruin.
With the course of fifty years, the rigour of
some of these measures has been abated. Others
stand as they were. Others have been added.
When, in 1906, the Russian Duma was opened,
and the Poles granted representation, to Poland,
as to all Russia, it seemed as though a new era of
freedom had dawned. Once more this most tragic
of nations passed through a bitter disillusion.
That the sorrows of Poland will now be a thing
of the past is the hope of Europe and the world.
We will now turn to the Polish subjects of
Prussia. They have suffered from a rule which,
for its drastic brutality, no less than for its galling
pettiness, is, say the Poles, more intolerable than
any other. We are now unhappily familiar with
Pan Prussian methods. It is that machinery which,
since the days of Bismarck, has been employed in
the vain task of crushing out Polish nationality.
The favourite anti-Polish colonization scheme
of the Prussian Government dates from the years
following the third partition. From 1799 to 1807
a fund, paid out of the taxes levied on the Poles,
and a crown grant were devoted to the purpose of
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 15
settling Germans on Polish soil. The Napoleonic
wars diverted the attention of Prussian policy for
a time into other directions, and it appeared as
though Prussia were prepared to respect the rights
of the Poles she governed. But at the time of the
Polish insurrection of 1830 a change set in. Polish
soldiers who had crossed the Russian frontier into
Prussia were handed over by the latter to Russia
and to their death, or shot in cold blood by the
Prussian authorities; and the Prussian Govern-
ment began to treat its Polish subjects more
severely than it had hitherto done. When the
Polish rising broke out in iS? 3, Prussia entered
into agreement with Alexander II. Not only were
those Polish insurgents who had taken refuge in
Prussia imprisoned and sent back into Russia,
but, at the instigation of Bismarck, Prussia under-
took to support Russia in her reprisals against
Poland. Hence the similarity between the measures
of repression adopted by the Russian and Prussian
governments against the Poles in their respective
dominions. During the Franco-Prussian war,
Germany made a bid for Polish support by per-
mitting the military bands to play the Polish airs
as the Poles went to battle, which concession is
now withdrawn. But when she found herself
victorious, she had no further object in conciliat-
ing the Poles. She then, led by Bismarck, pro-
ceeded to the persecution which, in flagrant
violation of the Treaty of Vienna and of Frederick
William IV's solemn promise to protect the
liberties of his Polish subjects, has continued to
gather volume till it has reached its present
lengths.
literature that was born of her sorrows has been,
as I have endeavoured to point out in the follow-
ing pages, one of the chief factors in the main-
tenance of that life, and almost the only method
of self-expression that has been possible to a
country, debarred as Poland has been from normal
existence. The production of the Polish poets is
a splendid form of art: but even more is it a
great movement of national aspiration. Hence
my book is not so much a study in Poland's liter-
ature as an attempt to illustrate the soul of a
nation which, were it only for her devoted
, patriotism and fidelity to her ideals under over-
whelming difficulties, should command universal
sympathy. For this purpose, I have in the first
chapter given a brief account of the condition of
Poland since the partitions.
A word must be said as to my mode of dealing
with Russia's past treatment of Poland. It is a
subject that is necessary to be faced in a work on
Poland if any sort of justice is to be done to the
ix b
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? X
PREFACE
Poles. The Russian nation, now that she has shaken
herself free from Prussian influence, has promised
to redress the wrongs that Poland has suffered at
her hands. The greater these wrongs have been,
the more profound will be the admiration of
Europe when she beholds their reparation.
It has been impossible in a book of this scope to
give more than a sketch of such poets and teachers
as Mickiewicz and Krasinski. I have already pub-
lished a monograph on the former (Adam Mickie-
wicz, the National Poet of Poland, London, 1911),
and I have in preparation a study on the life and
work of Krasinski.
For the sake of the English reader unacquainted
with the Polish language, I have generally trans-
lated the Polish Christian names into their
English equivalents. As the Polish crossed 1 is a
complicated matter for printers and readers
ignorant of Polish, I have--although it is incorrect
to do so--replaced it where it occurs by the
simple 1, according to the custom of many French
and English writers on Poland. Certain letters of
the Polish alphabet that present special difficulties
I have rendered phonetically; but as it has not
been always possible to do this, I have indicated
a few rules on the pronunciation of Polish that
may be useful to the reader.
Chapters V. and VII. and portions of my first
and second chapters have already appeared in
the Quest. Through the courtesy of the editor,
Mr. G. R. S. Mead, I am enabled to reprint them
here. With the exception of the chapters on
Anhelli and Ujejski, the present book has been
written after the outbreak of the war. I have
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? PREFACE
therefore been cut off from communication with
my friends and correspondents in Poland. But the
generous assistance which they gave me in the past
and in my work on Krasinski, about which I was
able to consult them before the cataclysm swept
down upon us, has been of the greatest help to
me in what I have been writing during these
terrible months, while their country has been
devastated by all the horrors of war. I therefore
express my deeply grateful thanks to my friend,
Mr. Edmund Naganowski, to Dr. Kallenbach,
and to Professor Zdziechowski. I am also much
indebted to Mr. Ladislas Mickiewicz, the son of
Adam Mickiewicz, and to my brother, Dr.
Edmund Gardner.
My earnest hope in offering this little book to
English readers is that it may arouse their sympathy
for the Polish nation.
1915. M. M. G.
Note. --Since the above words were written,
the news reached me of the death in Poland of
my friend, Edmund Naganowski. With him his
country loses one whose labour in her behalf was
unceasing. To those who, like myself, were hon-
oured with his friendship, and who found in him
the strongest, the most devoted and sympathetic
of friends and advisers, his loss can only be a life-
long and irreparable bereavement.
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? NOTE ON THE PRONUNCIATION OF
POLISH
The Polish C--an English ts, but has a softer
and somewhat hissing sound when it precedes i,
or when it is accented as in 6.
Ch--strongly aspirated h, as in the Scotch loch.
Cz--ch in cherry.
Dz--j, as in jam.
O--oo as in rood.
Rz--the French j, as in Jean.
S', Si--a very soft hissing form of sh.
Sz--sh.
W--v.
Z, Zi--French j.
The accent in Polish is almost invariably on the
penultimate as, Mickie'wicz.
Xll
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? CHAPTER I
THE LAST HUNDRED YEARS
FOR more than a hundred years, Poland
has presented to Europe the spectacle
of a nation rent asunder. Her nationality V
has been proscribed and oppressed. The common 1
rights of race possession have been denied to her.
She has risen in arms for her liberties, only to be
crushed. She has suffered the basest treachery
and the bitterest disillusions. Eighty years ago,
Montalembert, in a famous phrase, gave her the
name of the "nation in mourning. " That title
has never lost its application. .
In 1772 and 1793, the first two partitions of \
Poland were effected: the first between Austria,!
Russia and Prussia, the second between Russia
and Prussia. After the second partition Kosciuszko,
arming the peasants with scythes, rose at the
head of the nation in a desperate attempt to save
the national independence. The armies of Russia
and Prussia were too strong for him. He was
carried, a wounded prisoner, from the lost field
of Maciejowice. Suvorov, the Russian commander,
then marched on Warsaw. The city was taken after
an appalling massacre of the inhabitants of its
suburb, Praga, in which thousands perished by
the sword or by fire, or were drowned in the river
as they fled, with a broken bridge before them,
from Suvorov's soldiers. The cause of Poland was
6
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? 2
POLAND
vanquished; and the third partition of Poland
between Austria, Russia and Prussia followed in
1795. By this' proceeding, a crime almost un-
paralleled in history, assuredly without a shadow of
political or moral justification, Poland as a state
ceased to exist.
But the Polish nation never gave up the hope
of resurrection. She lived on, as she has lived to
the present hour, struggling for her nationality,
clinging to it, and preserving it.
After the third partition, what remained of
the Polish army enrolled itself under Napoleon's
banners. Led by the national flags, commanded
by their own officers, the Polish legions shed their
blood in torrents for the man who they believed
would give them back their country. Napoleon's
betrayal of the Polish cause was only one among
the many deceived hopes and broken pledges of
which the unhappiest of nations has been the
> victim. The Treaty of Tilsit in 1807 has been
called by the Poles the fourth partition of Poland;
for, on this occasion, Napoleon did nothing more
for those whose loyalty remained with him till his
death than to create, under his protection, thdl
Duchy of Warsaw. Ruled by the French laws
that Napoleon imposed upon it, its army, with
Joseph Poniatowski at its head, was, however,
national, and did brilliant service on the side of
France. For nine years the little state was swept
by the war, till, at last, peace was restored to
Europe.
At the congress of Vienna that met in 1815 to
readjust the political balance, the question of
Poland was one that came prominently forward,
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 3
as it will do again. The ancient Republic of Poland
was not re-established. It was once more divided
between the three original partitioning powers.
To Austria fell Galicia, with the exception of
Cracow. Prussia kept the Duchy of Posen, West
Prussia, Thorn, and Danzig. Russia secured the
rest of the Duchy of Warsaw, Lithuania, and
those eastern provinces of Poland that stand be-
tween the Muscovite empire and Western Europe.
The express stipulation was made that in each of
these three divisions the language, religion, and
nationality of the Poles were to be maintained
and respected in their entirety. But two further
attempts were made to give at least some measure
of fuller independence to the Polish nation.
Cracow was erected into a tiny stateship under
'the protection, the irony of which subsequent
events fully proved, of Austria, Prussia, and
I Russia. A part of the Duchy of Warsaw passed,
it is true, to Russia; but under the condition
that she should be an autonomous state with
the Tsar as her crowned king. Her army, her
administration, every branch of her life, were to
be Polish and exclusively Polish. And to this day,
long after her privileges have been swept away,
that part of Poland is spoken of by every Pole as
/the Kingdom of Poland.
The admirable organization of the newly-
founded kingdom proved how rapidly the Poles
had learned in the school of adversity. Picked
officials filled the posts of trust. The military chiefs,
the army, were the soldiers who had been trained
by Napoleon. Much was hoped of the Tsar,
Alexander I. When an unhappy heir at the court
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? 4
POLAND
of Catherine II. , he had formed a warm friendship
with young Adam Czartoryski, son of a princely
Polish house, who was retained as a hostage
at the same court. In their intimate conversations
Alexander promised the Pole that he would restore
Poland, and it was through Czartoryski's influence
on the Tsar that the Kingdom of Poland owed
its foundation. But unfortunately the viceroy
whom Alexander chose for the new Polish state
was a man of little worth and small patriotism,
mistrusted by his fellow-countrymen. The com-
mander-in-chief, appointed likewise by the Tsar,
was the latter's brother, the Grand Duke Con-
stantine. This semi-madman, in his transports of
mingled insanity and brutality, subjected the
proud and high-spirited Polish officers to indig-
nities that drove more than one of them to commit
suicide rather than serve under such a leader.
In addition to the viceroy and commander-in-
chief, a Russian Commissioner was nominated
whose office was to play spy upon the Poles. It
was this man, Novosiltzov, who brought about
the state of things that goaded the Polish nation
into the rising of 1830. His spies filled the country.
Any careless word resulted in the speaker's arrest.
The prisons were filled.
In 1825 Alexander I. died, and was succeeded
by his brother, Nicholas I. Two years earlier the
famous affair of the Lithuanian student societies
took place. Led by the devoted and high-minded
Thomas Zan, an association had been formed
among the young men at the University of Wilna,
under the title of the Philomathians. Their ends
were the moral and philanthropic ideals of ardent
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 5
and generous youths; patriotic rather than
'revolutionary. The suspicions of the Russian
Government fell upon the society. Its members
were imprisoned and many of them put to torture.
Numbers were banished to Siberia, while others
were exiled to various outposts in Russia. Among
the latter was the poet, Adam Mickiewicz, the
fast friend of Thomas Zan. He has immortalized
the scenes of the imprisonment of himself and the
comrades of his youth, most of whom he never
saw again, in his drama the Ancestors.
These proceedings of Novosiltzov's aroused
the resentment of the whole nation. The liberties
guaranteed to the Kingdom were now being
rapidly trampled underfoot. The country was
treated as a conquered province. The situation
of the Poles was intolerable; and on the night of
November 29th, 1830, they rose in arms for their
'treaty rights.
The Rising of 1830 was ill prepared, chiefly by
a handful of young men. It was badly organized.
There were dissensions among its leaders, lack of
discipline. These are its weak points, redeemed
by the heroic courage of a people that laid down
their lives by thousands rather than see their
country perish. The Poles fell, says an eye-witness,
like grain before the scythe. * Boys from colleges
and schools who, we are told, kept up their studies
in the camp in the intervals when they were not
fighting, young poets whose songs were sung by
the soldiers and who wrote their poems with a
baggage waggon for their table, high-born women,
* Quoted by Count Stanislas Tarnowski in Our History in the
Nineteenth Century. Cracow, 1901 (Polish)
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? 6
POLAND
hunters armed with old hunting-guns, peasants
with their scythes, seasoned legionaries from the
Napoleonic wars, all fought side by side. The
Poles held out for ten months against the Russian
armies. They won victory after victory. Then
came the inevitable hour of defeat by superior
forces. At Ostrolenka, where not a Polish gunner
but died at his gun, and thousands fell with the
national hymn on their lips, the heroism of the
Poles was only equalled by their appalling losses.
From that hour the Polish arms met nothing but
\ reverses.
The Russians marched on Warsaw. In
its defence, men and women fought alike. Ordon
blew up the fort he was commanding, and Russian
and Pole found there a common death. Entrench-
ments were defended, fought for inch by inch,
till not a Pole was left alive. The city could hold
out no longer and surrendered, and in September,
| 1831, the war was ended.
In the interest of historical truth and in justice
to the Poles, the sequel of the rising, however
painful, must be told in a book that professes to
deal with the psychology and the aspirations of
the Polish nation. The world is now looking to
Nicholas II. to inaugurate a new epoch in the
relations between Poland and Russia.
Since the failure of the Rising in 1831, the con-
stitution of the Kingdom of Poland has existed
no more except on paper. Her treaty rights were
destroyed, her army abolished, her administration
taken from her and removed to Petersburg. The
universities of Warsaw and Wilna were closed.
Schools were shut, and the Russian language
enforced on those that still were allowed to remain.
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 7
'Russian officials took the place of Poles. The
libraries and artistic treasures of the nation were
transferred to Russia. Confiscations and fines
brought Polish families to ruin. Transportation
of forty-five thousand families into the Caucasus
and other Russian provinces parted husbands and
fathers from their homes for ever. Hundreds of
innocent persons suffered the penalty of death.
The numbers of those who were sent for life to
dungeons or to the mines of Siberia are said to
exceed computation. Children were torn from
the country and carried off by the Cossacks to
Russia, never to be seen again.
Yet the strong national spirit lived on in every
part of Poland and wherever, in their enforced
wanderings over the world, her exiles went. Hope-
less attempts at a fresh rising, mainly instigated
by young Poles stealing secretly into the country
from abroad, continued, always to be discovered
and punished with Siberia or death.
Then it was, in the years following the Rising
of 1830, that the movement known as the Polish
Emigration set in. Those who were banished from
Poland, or who escaped death only by flight, or
who chose to live beyond the frontier to carry on
the work in their nation's behalf that was im-
possible in the country itself, took refuge in foreign
lands, and especially in Paris. Every class was
represented; aristocrats like Adam Czartoryski,
who had in happier days influenced for good the
policy of Alexander I, the friend of his youth,
and who had now lost all for Poland; the generals
and soldiers of the Rising, artisans, priests, the
poets who gave Poland the magnificent literature
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? 8
POLAND
that might not be heard within her boundaries.
All degrees of mental and physical wretchedness
were to be found among their ranks. They were
exiled for ever from their country and from those
they loved. Too often they could not learn the
fate of their families or communicate with those
members of them who still remained in Poland.
Most of them were plunged in dire poverty; all
of them in constant suspense and harrowing
anxiety as to what terrible news, whether personal
or national, the next post from Poland would
i bring them. They shared one common certainty:
I that they would live to return and see Poland free.
Their death in the foreign city, where their graves
are still piously visited by their fellow Poles, was
the only end to their desire.
I shall deal with the condition of the Poles in
Prussian Poland later in this chapter.
Under Austria the Galician Poles were treated
as the victims of a brutal war rather than as a
nation whose rights had been ratified in a European
f congress. The policy of Metternich was to crush
every Polish element underfoot. The stipulations
of the Treaty of Vienna were regarded as non-
existent. The offices of the national government
were filled by Austrians or Czechs. Punishment
by death was inflicted with appalling frequency
on those who held Polish aspirations. The Polish
language was abolished in the schools. It was a
penal offence for the Polish students to be heard
speaking Polish to each other even out of lesson
hours, or to be caught reading in Polish. House
to house inquisitions were made for Polish books.
Those who possessed them, read them or lent
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS
them, went to prison. The publication of Polish
writings was attended with almost prohibitive
difficulties on account of the heavy censorship.
Public works, such as the maintenance of hospitals,
roads, and so on, were completely neglected by
the Government. The country, ruinously taxed,
became poorer day by day.
Here, as to Russian Poland, came emissaries
from Paris, urging insurrection. The prisons were
filled with those whose implication the Govern-
ment discovered or only suspected. Matters were
ripening for a rising in the three divisions of
Poland; when the year 1846 beheld, not the j
war originally planned, btrt-'bne of the most j
lamentable catastrophes in Polish history.
Certain of the Poles in Paris were preparing a
rising on democratic lines. Their representatives 1
endeavoured to persuade the Galician peasants j
to take up arms, and to compel their landowners,
even by force if necessary, to join the movement.
Following these came certain agitators, wander-
ing from village to village, playing upon the
ignorance of the peasantry, instigating them to
turn their weapons, not against the oppressors
of their country, but against the Polish nobility.
These, it is now known, were the agents of the
Austrian government. They were but too sue-
cessful. Duped and deceived, maddened by drink,
the peasants rose against the Polish nobles; fired
their mansions, and massacred the inhabitants.
In the same year, Cracow lost her last vestige \
of independence. The first years of her existence
as a separate state had been tranquil. Her trade,
her schools and University, had flourished. But
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? 10
POLAND
in a city where three official residents represented
the three Powers to which the rest of Poland was
subjected, liberty could not last long. When, in
1846, a general Polish rising seemed imminent,
fheTAustrian army retired from the town, and
the insurgents, believing that all was in readiness,
instituted a government and issued a call to arms.
That rising was abortive; and, in the autumn of
the year, Austria seized the city which she has
since retained^
The wave of unrest that in 1848 ran through
the countries under Austrian rule brought an
expectation of better things to Poland, that was
not immediately fulfilled. In the general ferment,
on the pretext of a chance quarrel between a few
soldiers and workmen, the Austrian army bom-
barded Cracow, thus adding another chapter to
the chequered history of the city which, the
sepulchre of Poland's kings and of her greatest
dead, may be called the sanctuary of the nation.
It was not till 1861 that Austria reversed her
Polish policy. The first Galician Diet was then
opened, and a species of autonomy was granted,
with the result that Galicia became, and has con-
tinued till this day, the centre of Polish national
life.
The Crimean War, upon which the Poles
founded brilliant hopes, had passed, leaving be-
hind it none of the results for which they had
confidently looked. Italy had won her deliverance,
Hungary her constitution. To the Poles it seemed
as if their hour must also be approaching. While
this thought was seething in the hearts of the
Polish youth, events happened in Warsaw that
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS n
precipitated the rising of 1863. On the 25th of
February, 1861, the Poles were celebrating in a
pacific and religious fashion the anniversary of
the battle of Groch6w, one of the victories in
the last rising. Two days later, on February 27th,
a similar peaceful demonstration led to a collision
between the Russian troops and the people. The
soldiers fired upon the unarmed crowd outside
the church of the Bernardines,with the result that
five Poles were killed. All appeals to the Viceroy
were in vain. Then, on April 8th, occurred that
terrible scene outside the castle when a crowd
of unarmed Polish men and women, who stood
there in a silent protestation against their wrongs,
'Nvere massacred in cold blood by order of
Jijfirjxhatojt-
It had been urged upon the Tsar, Alexander II,
that, if a rising were to be averted, the severity
with which the nation had been treated since
1831 must be relaxed. The Tsar refused to renew
the constitution of the Kingdom; and instead
appointed the Pole, Wielopolski, as the minister
of religion and education. In some respects, such,
for instance, as the improvement of the schools,
and the re-opening of the University of Warsaw,
Wielopolski did much for the amelioration of
the country; but, on the other hand, his desire
for conciliation with Russia led him into deplor-
able acts of injustice that effectually exasperated
the Polish youth. The people were on fire with
patriotic and mystic fervour. Singing on their
knees the national hymn, they were shot down
where they knelt, slain in their churches. In 1863
a drastic conscription was levied in order to remove
1
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? 12
POLAND
the youths of Poland from the country. Two
thousand of them were seized in their beds at
night, and despatched to Siberia and the Cau-
casus. This was the match to the explosion. The
young men who were left escaped to the woods
and flew to arms.
I Doomed from the beginning, the Rising of
1863 was a disastrous attempt. It dragged on for
a year in the nature of guerilla war; a struggle
in the woods, carried on by small bands of Polish
youths, armed with any weapon upon which they
could lay their hands. Beaten wherever the
Russian regiments and cannon came in force
against them, they then reappeared in some other
place, frequently victorious over small detach-
ments, fighting on in the certainty that Europe
would come to their help. Those who were
captured were shot, hung, or sent to Siberia. The
farms and dwellings of any person who had
sheltered them or given them provisions were
burnt to the ground, and the inhabitants killed
or imprisoned.
Napoleon III, England, and Austria all addressed
their remonstrances to Alexander II. That he
could afford to disregard them is owing to the
rising influence of Bismarck. The latter entered
into a secret understanding with Russia. England,
with the threat of the Prussian annexation of
Schleswig-Holstein, retired definitely from the
championship of Poland. Napoleon's proposal
that a congress should be held to ameliorate the
condition of the Poles fell to the ground; and
henceforth Europe abandoned the Polish nation
to her fate. To the policy that then began may
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? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 13
be ascribed the disasters that are now ravaging
the world.
The penalty that desolated Russian Poland,
when the insurrection was at last stamped out,
resolved itself into something little short of a war
of extermination against every semblance of
Polish nationality. We will confine ourselves to
such facts of this terrible story as are necessary to
tell; we trust, as a closed chapter.
Henceforth the Kingdom was no longer ruled
even by a viceroy who was Russia's nominee, but
by a governor-general, and as a conquered dis-
trict known by the name of the Vistula province.
The nation groaned under a bondage to which
modern history offers nothing similar. The Poles
were sent by thousands, on the merest suspicion,
with no attempt at a judicial inquiry, to languish
in the mines of Siberia. Women and innocent
children were deported there, as convicts, in
convict dress. The reign of terror established by
. Muraviev in Lithuania was such that the Russians
refused to touch his hand in friendship on his
return to Petersburg; and it is with the sobriquet
of the " Hangman," which his countrymen gave
him, that his name has gone down to posterity.
Students were expelled from school for speaking
their mother tongue in the streets to their school-
fellows. Polish was forbidden in the churches, in
every public place, in private talk. In the hospitals,
including those devoted to the care of children
and foundlings, the sick were not allowed to hear
I their own language. The University of Warsaw
was, and has remained, entirely Russianized.
Russian masters were placed in every school.
--
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? H POLAND
Even in the village schools the Polish children
might only learn in Russian. The childish minds
were taught falsification of the two dearest in-
heritances of a patriotic and devout race--their
faith and national history. Bishops were driven
from their dioceses, parishes were deprived of
priests, and the church of Poland subjected to a
systematic oppression that has continued ever
since. The Polish landowners were dispossessed
of their estates; Poles forbidden to buy land.
Enormous taxation completed their ruin.
With the course of fifty years, the rigour of
some of these measures has been abated. Others
stand as they were. Others have been added.
When, in 1906, the Russian Duma was opened,
and the Poles granted representation, to Poland,
as to all Russia, it seemed as though a new era of
freedom had dawned. Once more this most tragic
of nations passed through a bitter disillusion.
That the sorrows of Poland will now be a thing
of the past is the hope of Europe and the world.
We will now turn to the Polish subjects of
Prussia. They have suffered from a rule which,
for its drastic brutality, no less than for its galling
pettiness, is, say the Poles, more intolerable than
any other. We are now unhappily familiar with
Pan Prussian methods. It is that machinery which,
since the days of Bismarck, has been employed in
the vain task of crushing out Polish nationality.
The favourite anti-Polish colonization scheme
of the Prussian Government dates from the years
following the third partition. From 1799 to 1807
a fund, paid out of the taxes levied on the Poles,
and a crown grant were devoted to the purpose of
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-06-10 17:08 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/mdp. 39015005782621 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? THE LAST HUNDRED TEARS 15
settling Germans on Polish soil. The Napoleonic
wars diverted the attention of Prussian policy for
a time into other directions, and it appeared as
though Prussia were prepared to respect the rights
of the Poles she governed. But at the time of the
Polish insurrection of 1830 a change set in. Polish
soldiers who had crossed the Russian frontier into
Prussia were handed over by the latter to Russia
and to their death, or shot in cold blood by the
Prussian authorities; and the Prussian Govern-
ment began to treat its Polish subjects more
severely than it had hitherto done. When the
Polish rising broke out in iS? 3, Prussia entered
into agreement with Alexander II. Not only were
those Polish insurgents who had taken refuge in
Prussia imprisoned and sent back into Russia,
but, at the instigation of Bismarck, Prussia under-
took to support Russia in her reprisals against
Poland. Hence the similarity between the measures
of repression adopted by the Russian and Prussian
governments against the Poles in their respective
dominions. During the Franco-Prussian war,
Germany made a bid for Polish support by per-
mitting the military bands to play the Polish airs
as the Poles went to battle, which concession is
now withdrawn. But when she found herself
victorious, she had no further object in conciliat-
ing the Poles. She then, led by Bismarck, pro-
ceeded to the persecution which, in flagrant
violation of the Treaty of Vienna and of Frederick
William IV's solemn promise to protect the
liberties of his Polish subjects, has continued to
gather volume till it has reached its present
lengths.
