“And, as to Poland again, you will find that if the Duma meets, it will be compelled to govern Poland exactly as the Autocracy has governed it in the past, and is governing it now.”
It was a frank and reasonable statement of the reactionary position, and, if once the bureaucrat’s estimate of government and of human nature be accepted, the position is easy to defend. Like most Conservatives, the bureaucrats and reactionaries know pretty definitely what they mean, and what they do not want; for even a prophet may perhaps find it easier to see the past clearly than the future. To know the object clearly is a great advantage in controversy, and in action it means victory, unless the enemy knows still more definitely what he intends to have. But in Poland there are so many intentions that the battle for nationality and freedom is more than usually difficult.
At the back of all modern politics stands the workman, tending with every decade to become the only kind of citizen that need be considered. We must suppose therefore that the various Polish parties who are battling for nationality and freedom have the advancement of the workman ultimately in view, and certainly there are few European countries where his advancement is more obviously desirable. In commerce, Poland has suffered more than any other part of Russia from the disasters of the last few years. About five years ago, the time of ruin set in with a commercial depression, vaguely attributed to over-production. Hardly was trade recovering when the outbreak of the Japanese war checked every hope. Siberia and the Far East had become, as my official rightly said, the chief markets for such great industrial centres as Warsaw and Lodz. Then suddenly all orders ceased, the goods already despatched could neither be recovered nor paid for, and the railways were taken up by the army. Ordinary trade dropped, and only those firms could look for any profit which received Government orders for barbed-wire entanglements, empty shrapnel cases, and metals for field railways—“goods” which must be paid for by the starving peasants, and might just as well have been sunk in the sea at once. Out of thirty-one ironworks, ten closed their gates, and the rest blew out half their furnaces. It is true, the iron industry is rather an artificial thing, which even in peaceful times lives chiefly on Government patronage. For it has to import coke from Siberia, and ore from Krivoy Rog in South Russia. But the losses in the iron trade were equalled by disasters in other industries, and the only instance of success I heard of during the war was that the big chocolate works received large orders to supply officers at the front. It is not the first time we have heard of “chocolate-cream soldiers.” Indeed, chocolate is taking the place of the Homeric onions as the food of heroes.
The war also ruined credit, and Polish trade lives on credit. Warsaw depends entirely upon Berlin for money, and Berlin refused to lend. On the top of the war came the strikes—political strikes, economic strikes, general strikes, postal strikes. All through last year they went on, and there was hardly a firm that did not lose from a third to a half of its work. The severity with which the strikes were put down only increased the resentment of the working-classes, and the people deliberately preferred general ruin to the continuance of former conditions, whether of government or industry.
Such was the outlook of workmen in the towns. But about eighty per cent. (something over 8,000,000) of the Poles are agriculturists, and nearly half of these have no land of their own, but are forced to wander round as labourers, some 200,000 of them going into East Prussia yearly for the harvest, and most of them working in towns from time to time. It is true that the peasants are slowly buying more and more land from the bankrupt old nobility, who used to own Poland, and were the chief cause of her ruin as a nation. The average price they pay for the land is from £5 to £6 an acre, and the average peasant holding is seventeen acres. But this division into plots is at present lowering the standard of agriculture, and so things will go from bad to worse till the peasant gains a little learning, and puts science into his primitive methods. At present more than half of the populations cannot write or read, and the proportion of schools to the number of children is actually decreasing. In Warsaw alone there are 60,000 children for whom there is no place in school, and the amount spent on education per head of the population is 6d., as compared with 9s. 7d. in Berlin. Yet the Poles justly boast themselves better educated and more intelligent than average Russians. In brains and Western knowledge they are immensely in advance.
The population, which is thicker on the ground than in France, increases very rapidly, and that is one of the reasons why wages in the last ten years have remained stationary in Warsaw, though the cost of living has doubled. In the country a farm labourer’s wage is 9d. a day. In the towns the unskilled workman gets about 14s. a week, and the unskilled woman from 6s. to 12s.. But a skilled workman, such as a weaver, will make £2 10s. or even £3 a week for nine hours’ work a day. The rent of two fairly good rooms with kitchen, on the fourth floor, is from 4s. to 5s. a week. But owing to the large numbers of the unskilled, it is very common to find four families living in one room, and the standard of life, especially among the Polish Jews, who number 1,500,000 of the population, is very low, as any Londoner may see by walking down Whitechapel. As usual, the Jews are regarded as the worst of all work-people, though they make most money in dealing. On the other hand, the overseers in mills, whether German or English, spoke very highly to me of the Poles as mechanics, especially of the girls. “When they will work, these Poles are first-rate,” said an English manager in a lace works. “But they are butterflies, all butterflies,” he added with a sigh. “I sent my little boy to school here, and they taught him languages well, but unveracity better. So now I’ve sent him to England, where at least he’ll learn nothing.”
In the accounts I heard or read of Polish trade, two other points appeared to me unhappily characteristic. One was that Polish hides have to be sold at a cheaper rate than their apparent value, because they are scarred and spoilt by the cruelty with which the Polish peasants use their heavy whips. The same is true even of the pigs, in which Poland does an immense trade; both the skins and the bacon are deteriorated by the cruelty of the swineherds. The other point I discovered in a Consular Report, which noticed that in Poland there is a very large demand for antiquities—“family portraits, signet rings, blood-stained weapons, and so on”—and suggested that, though Germany has almost entirely ousted English trade from the country, an opening for romantic Birmingham goods might here be found. It certainly seems a needless sorrow that any one who desires a family portrait or blood-stained weapon should be without it.
From all this it appears that the Polish parties have enough scope for their labours on behalf of the workmen and labourers, even without the internecine intrigues and animosities with which they enliven their task, like British sects battling for the Kingdom of Heaven. Among the leading parties on the extreme right stands the solid phalanx of officials and reactionaries; but it is not to be called Polish. It is manned from the 300,000 Russians who are distributed among the 10,000,000 Poles. It is the party of “the Garrison.” For no Pole can become an official—not even a policeman—unless he is first thoroughly Russianised and joins the Orthodox Church, and even in Russia it is only the officials and priests who are genuinely reactionary on principle, because it is they who are fighting for their existence in their last dirty ditch.
But next to the reactionaries, though far removed, came a genuine Polish party, who called themselves sometimes Realists, sometimes Conciliators, because they represented their aims as real or tangible things, and they were willing to act as peacemakers between Government and people. They were the moderate Opportunists, the cautious bourgeoisie (if any Pole is cautious), and they looked to the Duma for salvation by gradual reforms. Still, they would struggle, however gently, for autonomy, and, conscious of their own weakness in numbers, they were willing to lend the weight of their intellectual powers (which they believed to be considerable) to any union of moderate Nationalist parties.
In practical politics (if Polish politics ever became practical) the Realists, who were called a staff without an army, were expected to unite with the National Democrats, who were an army without a staff. Certainly the National Democrats were numerous and confident. They alone of all the Polish parties were doing what we should call election work for the Duma; for though their meetings were forbidden by the Government, those who attended them were not necessarily shot. I was myself present at one of those meetings, held in an upper room decorated with pictures of dead animals, and some seventy or eighty gentlemen were there, for the most part substantial and elderly. There was something a little pathetic about the performance, for they had met to practise how to do it, and they reminded me of a class of dockers I once tried to teach writing in Poplar, because they had escaped the School Board. It is now eighty years since there was anything in the least like an election in Poland, and that was for the Polish Parliament which preceded the revolution of 1831. The tradition of how to vote had died since then, and those few comfortable gentlemen in the upper chamber were trying to recover it. Each received a pencil and a little square of blank paper, and after they had followed their instructions to the best of their ability, the papers were collected and mistakes pointed out. As a first lesson in the nomination of candidates, the result showed considerable promise, and the teacher, who had studied in England, expressed much satisfaction at the progress made.