The Express.
London, England, 1863-12-29 00:00:00

[Stamped, ld. Additional.]

POLAND.

(Isom OUR sezciAl,

POSEN, MinnieAs DAT.

It is pleasant to think out here of your cheerful
English breakfast tables, and the " Merry Christ-
mas and happy new year" repeated, as each member
of the family comes into the room. One wonders if
the time will ever come when it would be anything
but a bitter mockery to express the same wish here
in Poland. " A merry Christmas !" how would it
fall on the ears of mothers of whom the happiest
are those who have only lost one son 1 Only mo-
mentarily happier are those whose sons are yet too
young to bear arms, for the Polish mother never
forgets that she is rearing her children for future
sacrifices. Christmas, looked forward to in happy
England by young and old alike, is to the Poles but
a dreadful day of reckoning. In the family circle
the gaps alone are felt, and the dead *sante fill the
room with their absence. The half closed-up
wounds must now bleed afresh, and the mother's
'team again...liessm To
scenes of grief which I witnessed last sum-
mer with scarcely dry eyes rise up again
with painful vividness, and enable me to
sympathise more deeply with the mourners. It
needs no geographical study to investigate the
boundaries of the ancient kingdom of Poland, for
they are marked with unmistakable distinctness by
a flood of tears. The sum of grief, which prevails
from the Warthe to the Dnieper, is indeed ter-
rible to think of. Nor is it scattered equally over
the whole population, but is almost exclusively
confined to the educated classes, whose capacity of
feeling sorrow is the keenest. The mass of the
population—the peasantry—are, if you like it,
spending a merry Christmas, and making free with
their masters' property, lavishly squandered on
them by the government officials. Over at least
150,000 square miles of territory there is
scarcely a country residence which has been
turned into a house of mourning, either by
actual death, or the deportation of one of the
members of the family to a living death in
Siberia. In those parts where the peasantry have
been more than ordinarily corrupted by the govern-
ment, the lives of the inhabitants of the chateaux
are in jeopardy every moment, and the family pass
the day, huddled together in one room, like a flock
of small birds cowering beneath a hawk. These
are not mere words, or even an exaggeration of
the truth, which I learnt in a painful journey in the
Polish provinces of Russia. Mouravieff has never
gone the length which Prince Drucki-Sokolinski,
who rules at Jitomir, in Volliynia, has dared to go.
In front of his own palace in that miserable town,
which lies at his mercy, did this man publicly em-
brace the brutal peasantry with their blood-stained
hands, fresh from the slaughter of unarmed Poles,
with whose horses, jewellery, and other valuables
he rewarded them for their pains, in addition to the
fixed money reward. What peasantry in the world,
if plied with such temptation as this, and encouraged
by its corrupt priests, would keep its hands off the
throats and property of their masters 1 I will not
disgust your readers by repeating the details of
the foul deeds to which Prince Drucki-Sokolinski
and his " Popes " goaded the Ruthenian peasantry
—details the less revolting of which I gave in my
letters at the time—but I will add that they were
of such a nature that Mouravieff himself would
blush, were it possible, to have his name associated
with them. With good reason was access to those
provinces refused to English travellers, who subse-
quently to my visit were anxious to investigate the
truth for themselves, but baffied in their attempts
to get into the country. I owed my own admission
to a mere accident, and was obliged to escape at a
different point from that at which I had entered,
for fear of being detected in getting into the
country under false pretences. Of the falsity I was
so far innocent that I did not contrive it, but
merely availed myself of it. It was in this wise.
Among my letters of introduction, all of which
were deliberately read through, was one in which a
lady, wall acquainted with the difficulty 1 should
experience at the douane, had written, quite without
my knowledge, that I proposed establishing myself
lat Kieff as a teacher of the English language. This
piece of ingenuity, of which at any rate I should
have been informed, was nearly getting me into
trouble, as I bad been roundly asserting for the
space of half an hour or so that I was simply
travelling for pleasure, and was merely anxious to
see the holy places at Kieff. The glaring discre-
pancy in these two accounts was happily hazed over
by the not remarkably luminous medium of a
Jewish interpreter, who was, besides, burning all
the time to get me into his clutched
when once I should have passed the douane.
The experience of that journey, which I shall
never forget, has quite spoiled me for the charms of
Russian society, of which English travellers are so
full. 1 know that it is unreasonable to allow one-
self to be prejudiced against a whole nation because
of the brutality and corruption of the government
employds, who are but a mere loathsome growth,
feeding ou the life-blood of the people ; but so long
as a nation tolerates a corrupt administration it
must be responsible fur its acts. In Russia
proper the government employd ia, perhaps, merely
corrupt, but iu Russia im-proper—such as Poland,
Finland, and Circaasia—he is ever ready to graft
brutality on to his corruption. The Marquis de
Larochejaquelein endeavoured to convince the
French Senate the other day that it was false that
Polish women had been beaten by order of the Rus-
sian authoritiem "If you don't believe me," exclaims
the indignant senator, "ask your ambassador at St.
Petersburg, and he will tell you he never heard of
such a thing." One would have thought the
negative testimony of the French ambassador at
St. Petersburg—the very man least likely to hear
of Russian atrocities, with the exception of Lord
Napier—hardly sufficient to prove that a thing did
not happen in Poland ; but the Senate applauded,
, and the marquis received the congratulations of his
friends. It is worth observing that in the middle
of the speech I allude to, the Marquis de Laroche-
jaquelt in was so overcome by the weakness of his
own arguments that he found himself compelled to
appeal to M. Troplong for time to take breath.
After a pause of ten minutes, say the reports of the
debate, the marquis continued. As to the ques-
tion at issue, whether Polish women have been
beaten or no, I have myself no doubt that they
have. Now, lam as well aware as most people,
from considerable experience of them, to what ex-
tent the Polish papers from which the accounts
of Russian atrocities are principally derived,
have told the truth or lied. I do not
deny for a moment that they have often circulated
utterly groundless reports, and related as facts
what I knew from my own experience to be false.