CHAPTER XXII.
WARSAW.
ON the banks of the Danube, but just where the story does not say, and when it is quite uncertain, lived three brothers, whose names were Lekh, Teckh, and Russ. They were of the Slavonian race. Ambitious to found distinct dynasties of their own, they set off on their travels. Presently three eagles appeared, flying in as many directions, and the brothers instantly agreed to follow the birds and the example. Russ went after one of the eagles, and the region he went into he called Russia; Teckh went to Bohemia, whose people were anciently called Teckhs; and Lekh, led by a white eagle, came to Poland. The people adopted the white eagle as their national emblem, and they were called Polekhs, or Polaks, and in Shakespeare the people of Poland are Polaks. In some parts of this country the Poles are yet called Lekhs. The great importance of this recondite history is not very apparent; but it is enough to intimate that the origin of nations is often involved in obscurity, and this is specially true of these northern peoples.
The history of Poland, through its early centuries down to 1772, is one of the most romantic in the “book of time.” With the coming of the Jesuits into Poland came trouble, as trouble always comes with those pests of the human race. War with Russia followed, and the Polish territory east of the Dnieper, or Little Russia, was subjected to the Czar; and by and by, when the kingdom of Poland lay at the mercy of three surrounding powers, it was “partitioned” between Russia and Prussia and Austria. This was but the beginning of her trials. Never conquered, though always overcome, fighting for independent existence again and again, she has in her death-struggles shown a tenacity of life that has commanded the admiring sympathy of mankind. Three times she has been divided among these devouring kingdoms; and at the settlement of 1815, after the battle of Waterloo, when a new map of Europe was made, it was decided that a part of Poland, Galicia, should belong to Austria, Posen to Prussia, and the large part which Napoleon had made into the Duchy of Warsaw, should be a constitutional monarchy under the Russian Emperor as King. In 1830 the Poles made another insurrection, and when crushed they were deprived of their constitution, their language was proscribed, and the last vestige of their nationality was beaten out.
There is a savage wickedness in this cutting up of nations, that does not touch the moral sentiment of the world as it ought. To murder a man is something palpable, and so obviously damnable. But to blot a nation out of being, to strike down the life of a people and bury it out of sight for ever, this is what has been done for poor Poland, and we have only to drop a tear over her grave, enter a protest in the name of human rights, and pass on. The most extensive portion of ancient Poland is under Russia, the most populous in the grasp of Austria, and the most commercial is held by Prussia. Warsaw is the unwilling serf of Russia. The present Emperor has sought to gild the chains that bind this people; but the iron chafes them, and will. He restored their language and schools; a council of state was formed; all the local officers were Poles. But nothing will satisfy a noble race but to be their own masters: in 1863 Warsaw was again in insurrection; the men rushed to arms, the women to the altars; the streets ran blood, the weak sank under the strong, and the end came.
The city of Warsaw has nearly 200,000 inhabitants. It is a well-built town, modern in its appearance, with many of its streets straight, and having large and handsome houses. It stands on the Vistula. It is more gay and attractive than you would expect to find it, under the heel of an oppressor, and after years of fruitless struggle with a crushing power. On every hand we see the signs of the ruler’s presence, in the persons of his armed deputies, the soldiers of Russia, who are here to keep order in Warsaw. In our hotel, the dining-room is always occupied by soldiers, who are eating and drinking, especially drinking. “Sherry cobblers” in quart tumblers are in front of them, and they are sucking at them diligently. Venice, under Austrian rule, was not more vigilantly guarded than Warsaw is at this day, after a subjugation that has been endured for forty years! It will take two or three generations to make Poland contented under foreign rule, and then the hereditary love of nationality will remain, and rise to the surface whenever it gets a chance for demonstration.
The city has a very unfinished appearance: there are splendid public edifices near by others that seem only begun, or neglected in the midst of building. Revolutions and the fears of revolution have made its prosperity precarious, and the inhabitants lack the highest stimulus to enterprise and exertion, the hope of permanent possession and enjoyment. The splendid government houses are in many cases the palaces of the old Polish nobility, now decayed or extinct families. Many of the former owners, who once rolled in hereditary wealth, have long since been exiled to the desolate wilds of Siberia, and their places will never know them again. A pall, like a perpetual cloud, is on the face of Poland, and by degrees the spirit of liberty will be extinguished. The language and rule of Russia will become universal. There is no hope in the future for the nationality of Poland.
In 1863 a spy of the Russian government was stopping at the Hôtel de l’Europe in Warsaw, where we are now writing; and, his business being suspected, the patriotic Poles, who are not likely to abide the presence of such a fellow if they know him, took the liberty of murdering him in his bed. The Russian government seized the house, shut it up, and for some years it has stood closed, a monument and a warning. Russia will not allow her spies to be murdered without visiting her vengeance on the house itself in which the murder is committed. As this hotel was formerly the palace of one of the noble Polish families, and the only hotel of large proportions, it was a serious injury to the city as well as to the proprietors. And I do not apprehend that the Poles will be any more gentle in their treatment of Russian spies, because their largest tavern was shut up half a dozen years.
Out of my window I see a soldier standing with his back against the wall; he has a soldier’s cap and long cloak reaching nearly to the ground; he has been there five or six hours, marching now and then a few rods and returning to his post: five soldiers come and stand in front of him, one of them takes off the cloak and puts it on his own shoulders, and, stepping into his place, mounts guard; and this process is continued and repeated all over the city, day and night, year after year. Thousands of Russian soldiers are thus quartered on the city continually: lazy, intemperate, and licentious, they are a moral pestilence; using their power to compel the subject people to submit to their insolence, and corrupting by their example and association those with whom they come into contact.
With this admixture of foreign and native people, it is impossible to discriminate between them; but a more unmannerly set of people I have never met at public places than they are here. The servants have no manners but bad manners. They enter your private room without knocking; they are grouty in their address, sulky in their answers, and generally disagreeable. The same may be said of the officers of the hotel: disobliging, inattentive. The women appeared to be lively in each other’s company, but the men of Warsaw are grave and thoughtful.
We rode in the afternoon through the beautiful parks and meadows and groves where the Russian military exercises are held, and through the Botanical Gardens, and to the Observatory, for the pursuit of science has not been arrested by the revolutions that have overturned the government; and then we came to Lazienki, a splendid rural palace, built by King Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski. Here the Emperor of Russia has his temporary abode when he visits Warsaw, which, by the way, he does not often, for his presence is not specially agreeable to the people. Beautiful villas are scattered through the park, the residences of persons connected with the court; fountains play, a beautiful stream flows by, and a monument to Sobieski, John III. of Poland, stands conspicuous, the sight of which is said to have led the Emperor Nicholas, in 1850, after the war in Hungary, to make the remark: “The two kings of Poland that committed the gravest error are John III. and myself; for we both saved the Austrian monarchy.” It is hard to say whether such reflections are sound or not; the rise and fall of kingdoms are all in the plans of Infinite Wisdom, and what to us seems exceedingly desirable may be the height of folly in the eye of Him who reads the future. It is certainly not human wisdom that has spared Austria or Turkey and sacrificed Poland, but the end may yet be well.