Emma Stanley

“ It was enough to find men together and pre-occupied, to prove their treason. In a quarter of an hour the decree was pronounced, and the next morning the antechambers of the President of Police, or those of Constantine’s aides-de-camp, were crowded with victims waiting to learn their sentence. In vain the distracted mother might entreat to bid her child adieu: the sentinel drove her away with his bayonet, whilst the well-brushed, tight-laced officer gracefully saluted her as he rode off to learn the will of His Highness Constantine. ”

“ Lubeckoi, the Minister of Finance, was a man completely after the Emperor’s heart, loving nothing on earth, and fearing nothing but his imperial master, cruel as he was passionless, without prejudices as without principles, believing in no one, and false alike to friends and enemies; yet highly talented, full of expedients, never elated by success, nor depressed by evil fortune. He soon acquired complete ascendency over the new Administrative Council; and even the wild Czarowicz was obliged in some degree to curry favour with the minister who held the purse-strings. ”

“ Alexander died, and Constantine, to the astonishment of the world, declined the throne in favour of his younger brother, Nicholas—a brother who, totally devoid of moral qualities, and but very meagrely endowed with intellectual ones, was destined by mere force of will so to impose on the world, that his monstrous egotism should pass for genius, his brutal recklessness for power. ”

“ As Constantine carried his system ever wider, the prisons in Warsaw soon proved insufficient to contain all the accused; so that hospitals and convents and monasteries had to be employed in the service. The vaults below the Czarowicz’s own palaces were retained for those whose tortures he wished to superintend personally.
When a prisoner could not or would not implicate his friends, he was generally consigned to certain dungeons thirty feet below the surface of the earth; there, a prey to deadly miasma and the horrors of perpetual darkness and hunger, he was left to writhe in hopeless misery. ”

“ Even that Constitution was not so broadly liberal as this which the Romanoff dynasty had to inaugurate. Gornicki, the famous Polish publicist of the sixteenth century, had declared, “no country could be lastingly prosperous and happy where either an absolute monarch, a single caste, or the mass of the democracy, direct the government; that it could only be so if king, nobles, and the representatives of the people, unite to make the laws and watch their administration.” ”

“ Decade has succeeded decade, bringing no amelioration to the fall of this unhappy country; but the day approaches when the warning spoken by Edmund Burke, in 1798, will be justified: the nations of Europe will repent the great iniquity consummated in the dismemberment of Poland, and those who profited by that dismemberment will repent the most bitterly. ”

“ But a little time and the world was told the Czarowicz was dead; that his wife and child were also dead; that Nicholas was freed from an elder brother whose wild fury was incompatible with his own discreeter crimes; whilst the Czar feared his ascendancy over the Russian troops as much as he scorned his character.
We must stop here. We cannot follow the Revolution through its varying phases of heroism, treachery, devotion, and disaster. France was saved by it from a terrible war ”

“ He also has signalised his reign by the cold-blooded massacre and the exile of hundreds whose only crime was the probability of future disaffection. The epitome of his policy—so admirable an appendix to that of his uncle Constantine and his father Nicholas—is best given in his own words as King of Poland to the nobles of Poland?—“What my father did was well done, and I maintain it.” ”

“ Where the children of a proprietor had been implicated in the revolt, it was maintained during the lifetime of both parents. Nor was it employed merely to prevent the guilty son from inheriting the ancestral property; for, by the civil law of Russia, all political criminals become necessarily dead in law, and are incapable of either inheriting or transmitting any property whatever: whether exiled to Siberia, or living as an emigrant in Western Europe, the very existence of the offender is ignored by Russian law, except when punishment can be inflicted on him. ”

“ The Arsenal, guarded by Russian troops, was to be the first point of attack, and it was secured with little difficulty or bloodshed by a well-concerted surprise. The Russian Infantry Barracks were close to the Arsenal, but the officers were in gaming-houses for the most part, the men quietly asleep. The next object was to seize the person of the Czarowicz. The proximity of the Military College to the Belvedere favoured this design, but the numerical weakness of the boy-heroes who claimed the honour made success doubtful: it was necessary to give them support. ”

“ General Roznicski established a servants’ registration office in Warsaw, whence every one was required to take their domestics; and, as the servants were thus brought completely into the power of the police, family secrets were soon as fully at its mercy.
The most trifling incident in the life of every person who held any position in society was carefully reported by the spies. From papers found in the police bureau at the Revolution, it appeared that multitudes of the citizens had been watched from the moment they rose in the morning until they retired to rest. ”

“ The Viceregal Court at Warsaw was quickly thronged with a host of nobles, in great part of foreign extraction; the descendants of those who, following the elective kings into Poland, had generally repaid the hospitality they received by selling their influence and senatorial votes to the highest bidder. To these were added a multitude of others created by the new government, all needy men, all ready for any infamy that might bring them a few gold coins or a scrap of ribbon. ”

“ A question has arisen, if the aforesaid decree is applicable in the case of persons who have remained within Russia proper, whilst their children have taken an active part in the revolt. We therefore ordain:—
Art. I. When a landed proprietor remains in Russia, and his sons or daughters are absent in Poland, the whole of his property, real and personal, shall be sequestrated. If certain of his sons or daughters only are absent in the kingdom, then such part shall be sequestrated as would fall to their share at the father’s or mother’s death. ”

“ This Old Man of the Sea, who so long crushed down in awful reverence some of the proudest crowns of Europe, was then scarce thirty years of age, and quite unknown to his own empire or to Europe. His real character was shown after Pestal’s conspiracy in 1825, by the wholesale hanging and torturing of those concerned in it, and condemning them in scores and hundreds to the mines of Siberia. The plot had large ramifications in Warsaw, and many Polish officers, and great part of the garrisons, were implicated in it. ”

“ Constantine soon found it necessary to change the military system he found existing in the remnant of the Polish army: promotion by merit was neither profitable nor politic. He immediately consulted with his brother upon the subject, and the result was the gradual introduction of the Russian system, by which a military hierarchy was secured, bound alike by interest and common infamy to the Russian dynasty. ”

“ He was to be constitutional King of Poland, assisted by an Administrative Council. The kingdom to be governed by the House of Nuncios and the Senate. The Constitution recognised the emancipation of the peasants; declared that no one could be legally kept in arrest over three days without being brought to trial; proclaimed the press free from government censorship and the inviolability of the national representatives; that a Polish standing army should be maintained in the country, and that none but Poles were eligible to any appointment, civil or military. ”

“ What might not a country hope from a sovereign whose patriotism was undoubted, whose intellect, though of no high order, was yet thoroughly capable of appreciating excellence, whose professed liberality was of the most advanced kind, and who had always expressed a chivalrous admiration for the character, and sympathy with the fate, of the greatest and the most unfortunate of the Sclavonic races! ”

“ If a person persisted, and escaped arrest, he might perhaps secure his safety in the woods until it was possible to cross the frontier; but he was far more likely to die of hunger and exposure, or to be seized to wear out life chained in a casemate, or in the still more degrading misery of a soldier in the Siberian army.
Next in the detestation of the Czarowicz was the National Church. Alexander had taken great trouble to secure its good will, built churches and monasteries, and kissed the Primate’s ring with exemplary reverence ”

“ He allowed him no other nourishment than salt herrings; the torments of thirst soon drove the poor wretch to the verge of insanity, and he vainly sought relief by licking the moisture impregnated with saltpetre from the walls of his dungeon. ”

“ Art. II. When the proprietor himself (or herself) is absent in Poland, then the whole property shall be sequestrated, though his or her children and next of kin remain in Russia.
Art. III. If a landed proprietor residing in Russia have no children, and his next of kin are resident in Poland, the latter forfeit all right to his inheritance.
Art. IV. As soon as sentence of sequestration has been pronounced, strict care shall be taken that no part of the revenues of the property concerned, pass into the hands of any member of the family in any foreign country. ”

“ Hope and resolution were kept alive in the hearts of the people by their spiritual teachers, from whom they learned not merely lessons of self-denial, and those precepts of patience and submission so beloved of tyrants,—not merely their duties with reference to another world, but those which, as brave men and faithful citizens, were demanded of them in this. ”

“ The tribunal held its sittings at Warsaw, generally in a vault of the Belvedere, and its dread power was soon felt to the farthest limits of the kingdom: its spies contrived to introduce themselves into every family. The attention of the secret police was no longer confined to persons in government employments ”

“ The Polish generals, though at the head of but 45,000 men, whilst the enemy had 150,000, long discouraged any but regular warfare, and were resolved, since the contest was almost hopeless, that the country should die according to strict scientific rule. They concentrated the whole of their forces around the capital, and fatally induced the belief that the hopes of Poland were bound up with the safety of Warsaw. ”

“ For any one to speak or write of modern progress, of the endeavours of France for liberty, or of the heroic struggles by which it had been gained in England, was to challenge ruin. All men who loved their safety avoided such a mad enthusiast ”

“ During hostilities with the eight Guberniums, sentence of sequestration was passed upon all who had been directly or indirectly concerned in the national movement. After the fatal battle of Warsaw, in September, 1831, by which the triumph of Russia was ensured, courts-martial were appointed to determine the fate of the rebels. The sentences included decapitation, hanging, hard labour in chains, imprisonment for life in chains, the mines, exile in Siberia, and enrolment in the Siberian army. ”

“ Petersburg in January, 1838, in which the Emperor, though in the most respectful terms, was reminded of his engagements as a constitutional king, to observe the laws of the country, was answered with such insult and contumely, that those who had so blindly placed all their hopes in royalty, discovered too late the infatuation of demanding free institutions from a Germanised Tartar autocrat. ”

“ No idea is more unfounded: not a single workshop throughout the country but had its adherents to the cause; the very shoemakers and cobblers were all as enthusiastic as the proudest noble in the land. ”

“ On the 20th of December, 1830, Nicholas published an ukase, by which all Poles resident in the eight former provinces of the republic were threatened with sequestration of their lands and goods if they in any manner implicated themselves in the revolt of the “kingdom.” Art. I. declared:—
The property of any of our subjects domiciled in the Western Guberniums, but now resident in the kingdom of Poland, shall be immediately sequestrated, together with all mortgages, &c., effected on it. ”