(April 1861-2.)
For some years past we have witnessed one of the most affecting and instructive sights—the breaking up, if we may say so, of an order of events, where the confused and dispersed elements join again, as from some mysterious and invincible unity in themselves. That which once appeared impossible becomes a startling reality, and perspectives suddenly open themselves such as our generation would hardly have allowed itself even to think of.
We have seen public right itself, or that which, at least, bears its name, giving way, and leaving a passage for those national and popular causes which agitate the world, and which are the harbingers of a new way of thinking. It is vain now to attempt to divide those national causes which appeal so strongly to public opinion—vain now to grant everything to one and deny everything to another—to limit justice to opportunity or to fitness of time or place. Policy may have its seasons, its measures, and its predilections, but at bottom right must exist everywhere, or it exists nowhere; and, from its one source, it must apply to all those peoples who aspire to the purest and the most legitimate of conquests—the conquest of themselves—as also to all those movements which, arising at one and the same time, form parts of a general situation, intimately and profoundly characterised by one universal work of transformation.
We must guard against mistakes. What we behold is no vulgar crisis, which may end in an ordinary peace: it is a warfare between two orders of things, between two principles; and it was proclaimed the other day, in a French Assembly, to be the new right—the right of peoples—and, when opposed to this, old political combinations are reduced to act laboriously and uneasily on the defensive. It is the question which agitates the modern world: the problem which, in the East as in the West, in the North as in the South, shows itself under a thousand different and startling shapes.
Certainly one of the most curious of these episodes—one of the most moving of these contemporary spectacles—is that dramatic tête-à-tête which, for the space of a year, has been carried on in Northern Europe between those two very unequal powers, Russia and Poland; where the one is embarrassed by its strength and its political traditions, and where the other makes an impregnable buckler of its rights, and of its very weakness. Nothing has been wanting to the play. Unforeseen events, passionate originality in demonstrations, tragic scenes—all have been supplied, together with those mysterious fatalities which so often make a perfect drama out of the affairs of men. This drama is laid in the heart of a country: it has its colours and its catastrophes; and across its stage there passes, like some chorus of old, a whole nation, which sends up to heaven its supplications and complaint. For a whole year has the spectacle been seen of a moral movement, perfectly new in its character, confronting a policy which is astonished to find itself so weak that, while possessed of so many means of physical power, it resorts to all expedients of apparent concession and of inefficacious repression, and uses both measures alike without conviction. After a year all seems again to have settled into silence. Outward manifestations certainly have ceased, but still the demonstration has been made. That which had been supposed to be dead was found to be still full of life. That assimilation of Polish provinces, which Russia believed to be accomplished, was found to be not even begun; and Europe suddenly saw that Polish question arise which brings in its train such prodigious difficulties, and in which are involved at once the fate of a nation, the policy of a great empire, and the balance of power in the West. By some vague instinct, Europe felt that she had not yet got rid of that problem which is, doubtless, so strangely complicated by the multiplicity of rules and of régimes spread over Poland; which changes its shapes according to the chances of dismemberments and of treaties; which is not the same in Posen as in Cracovia, at Warsaw as at Wilna, in the Kingdom, in Lithuania, or in the Ukraine; but to which one national sentiment, identical and vital in all the parts, has communicated an indissoluble unity. This character truly belongs to a question at once so energetic, so simple, and so complex, which sums up in itself the strifes of to-day, which is too often believed to have been stifled under the weight of impossibilities, and which comes to light again at a time when any palpitations of oppressed patriotism was least to be expected. I wish to set forth this question in its most recent explosion, in its elements, and in its progress, as well as in its relation to all that is in motion or in preparation in Europe, and even in the very heart of Russia.
An event which dates back to no very remote period is the source of many results which belong to the present day. I mean the Crimean war, which doubtless did nothing directly or ostensibly for Poland, but was very near (nearer than perhaps is supposed) doing a great deal for her. At the time when that great strife ended, the name of Poland, as we are now aware, ought to have been heard in the Congress of Paris, along with that of Italy. France and England were agreed, and the day was fixed, but the dexterity of the Russian plenipotentiaries, and of Count Orlof in particular, eluded this inconvenient call. They made it the interest of the West to be silent, and they promised far more than ever was asked of them, on condition that Europe would leave the Tzar at liberty to make none but spontaneous concessions to the Poles. This is no longer a secret; for Lord Clarendon said one day in Parliament, in reply to Lord Lyndhurst (that old champion of liberal causes), ‘We had serious reasons for believing that the Emperor of Russia was, with regard to Poland, generous and kind. We were obliged to admit that the Emperor was not only disposed to publish a general amnesty, but even to give back to the Poles some of their national institutions; and while they received guarantees for the exercise of their religion, public education in Poland was also to be established on a more liberal and national footing. We also believed that we were warranted to hope that Russia was about to renounce for ever the severe system which she had hitherto pursued; and, moved by these convictions, we ceased for the future any discussion of the question.’ Count Orlof gave promises, the Congress of Paris kept silence, and scarcely one month had passed before the Emperor Alexander II., while promulgating an amnesty which was nothing more than a cruel deception (according to Lord Clarendon’s own expression), addressed, at the same time, two allocutions to the Polish nobility at Warsaw, wherein he harshly said, ‘I expect that the order established by my father is to be maintained: so, gentlemen, above all, we will, if you please, have no dreams—no dreams! The happiness of the Polish people depends on its entire fusion with the people of my empire; what my father did, was well done, and I will maintain it: my reign shall be the continuation of his. In preserving to Poland her rights, and her interests, such as my father granted her, I have the unalterable wish to do good, and to favour the prosperity of the country. It rests with you to make this last possible for me, and you alone will be responsible if my intentions fail, on account of your chimerical resistance.’ When one of the Marshals of the nobility seemed about to reply, the Emperor turned and said, ‘Have you understood me? It is pleasanter for me to reward than to punish; but know this, once for all, gentlemen, that when it is necessary I shall know how to keep down, and to punish, and it will be seen that I punish severely.’ This happened in the month of May 1856, immediately after the Congress of Paris.
It is not without reason that I recall to-day a vain attempt at negotiation broken off by an illusory promise. It determines the events which have since arisen, in the same way that the debate at the Congress of Paris has governed events in Italy; it also in some sort puts on the recent crisis in Poland a mark of European sympathy, and proves an intelligent wish, while it shows further how Russia had conducted herself up to the time that this crisis arrived. ‘What my father did, he did well!’ an expression which was perhaps highly filial on the part of the Emperor Alexander II., but which was certainly an imprudent and impolitic dictum. What was really that order established by Nicholas which he promised to maintain?
I do not refer now to the guarantees by which the treaties of Vienna had striven to surround a nationality which they abandoned; I do not speak of the constitution of 1815, the work of the Emperor Alexander I., but of the statut granted by the Emperor Nicholas himself in 1832—a statut which was as a punishment, the penalty of a defeat sustained by Poland; and what had become of that? It was M. Tymowski, a Russian Minister of State, who last year, at the commencement of the affair, told us what had become of it. In a private report he stated that this statut had never been either abrogated, or put into execution. Of all the new authorities which it created, councils for towns, councils for palatinates and provincial assemblies, ‘with the right of deliberating on questions of general interest in the kingdom,’ not one has ever existed. There ought also to have been a Council of State, but that probably was held to be either too revolutionary a measure, or too visible a sign of autonomy. So in 1841 this Council of State was quietly replaced by two new departments of the directing Senate of St. Petersburg, which were called the ninth and tenth departments, and were transplanted to Warsaw. ‘In a word,’ added M. Tymowski, ‘it may be said that since 1831 the kingdom of Poland has been given up entirely to bureaucracy, and that without any regard to the statut of 1831, it has also remained under the exclusive influence of officials, without the participation of any of its inhabitants, who are in this manner rendered incapable of sharing in the Government.’
It would, indeed, be useless to tell how bureaucracy and officials have for the last thirty years swayed the Government of Poland: and I shall content myself with reminding my readers and the public, that one day the Emperor Nicholas did ‘with his own hand and with a quiet mind’ (adds his minister) order the transplantation to the Caucasus of forty-five thousand families, all ‘formerly Polish gentry, but bearing henceforward the name of freemen and burghers,’ as it is phrased in this strange Government language. We have often heard that a painful yoke is laid by their rulers on the people of Lombardy, of the pontifical States, or of the old kingdom of the two Sicilies: nor is this said without reason; but we must also remember that there is a country where, in the daylight of this present century, it has been possible to transplant forty-five thousand families guilty of no other crime than of being suspected of patriotism, and of ‘exciting the suspicion of the Government.’