Outside the discussion of an English Education Bill, I suppose that upon the world’s surface you would not find such an atmosphere of energetic pettiness and trivial virulence as in Warsaw. Not that the ultimate aims of the chief combatants are petty, but that many natures take so much more delight in clawing their friends over trifles than in uniting against the common enemy.

In speaking of the Poles in St. Petersburg, I have already described a Polish restaurant there which was sharply divided by an invisible but impassable line into two camps, both violently Polish, and both so hostile to each other that the girls of one would not speak or eat with the girls of the other, nor even with the men. Warsaw displayed a similar division in almost every street. Very likely it is the price that Poles pay for the strong individuality which has given them so many poets, artists, and musicians. The consequence is that in Warsaw, the parties are continually shifting, and grow like polyps by splitting themselves into fractions, so that the political student, after weeks of labour, goes to bed one night happily conscious of having mastered the situation at last, and wakes up in the morning to find the whole thing changed.

But before describing what I believe to have been the condition of Polish parties one post time on a February morning, it may be well to estimate the strength of the common enemy’s position, as one of the enemy’s leaders himself defined it. Of the three highest officials in Poland he was the most experienced in the country and spoke with the greatest authority. Even the extra number of footmen who took my coat symbolized a power of life and death.

“Martial law,” he began at once, “will be unflinchingly maintained, at all events till the Duma meets. These Poles are an unreasonable, unpractical people, full of crazy notions. They need a strong hand. They mistake kindness for fear. They must be firmly dealt with. They like it really—in his heart every Pole likes it. Since we proclaimed martial law last November there has been no disturbance. And for forty years before that—ever since we crushed the Polish revolution in 1864—order had reigned.”

I smiled inwardly, remembering that well-worn quotation about the order that reigned in Warsaw, and I looked at the speaker with fresh interest. I had often heard of him as the perfect type of the thorough-going reactionaries, the real old Russian bureaucrats, who were fighting the revolution at the last ditch for their ideal of empire, their privileges, and their pay. A tall and shapely man of about fifty, diplomatically courteous and grave, he became the furniture of the official palace very well, but in his round, bright eyes I sometimes detected the alert and watchful look of a racoon when he confronts you suddenly in the forest. He afterwards described me to a friend as a terrible revolutionist, and as I remained almost silent during the conversation, being overcome by the superiority of his French, that showed a penetration which gave greater value to his judgments.

“Yes,” he repeated, “these Poles have always been an unreasonable and unpractical people, full of flighty notions. You may now divide them into Nationalists and Socialists—both about equally absurd. I need not speak of the Socialists and the nonsense they talk of equality and nationalization. They are the same everywhere. In Poland we found them doing a certain amount of harm among the peasants; so we quartered troops in the villages, and now the peasants have turned against the Socialists like other right-minded men. Indeed, the Jewish Bund is the only troublesome Socialist body now left, and we are dealing with them. They will tend to disappear.

“The Nationalists are equally helpless. They make a mighty fuss about the suppression of their language, but in our Empire we must have one common language, and it must be Russian. Then as to their Catholic religion: the Poles are a singularly fanatical people. Their attachment to their superstitious rites is most extraordinary. Even the educated classes are little better than fanatics in their religious beliefs. They are incapable of any breadth of view, and if we gave the people the chance, they would show themselves utterly intolerant of the Orthodox Church. They would insult and persecute our fellow-believers. Such things we cannot allow, and we will not.

“Nor can we yield to their talk about autonomy and separation. It is all very well for England to grant autonomy to her Colonies over the sea. She has not granted it to Ireland, and she does not grant it to India. We have not the least desire to become a powerless confederation like Austria, in perpetual danger of disruption. That would be even worse than to become like Germany, continually hampered by her Socialists. Any kind of separation would mean immediate ruin to Poland and her industries. Russia, Siberia, and the Far East are her only markets. If she were separated from us, first she would starve, next she would be swallowed up by Germany, and foolish as the Poles are, they still have sense enough to hate the Germans more than they hate us.

“It is true that in a weak moment our Government made concessions to Finland, and that has encouraged the Poles to hope for the same. But we shall not be able to allow Finland to remain on a different footing from the rest of the Empire. Those concessions must rapidly be withdrawn. We shall very likely have to conquer Finland over again. That would be an easy task, and need cause us no apprehension. All special rights in any part of the Empire must vanish, and the whole Empire must be bound together into one. If we yield at any point, we must yield in all, and that is impossible.

“It is impossible for our own safety. Here in Poland, for instance, we have to defend a frontier where there is no natural barrier to ward off an attack by Germany. Even if we gave up Poland as far as the Vistula, it would not help us. In these days a river is no real protection in war; if the Vistula were a mountain chain, that would be a different question. As it is, we must maintain our two parallel lines of fortresses in Poland, and especially the triangle of the three main strongholds, of which Warsaw is one. The triangle is too large to be surrounded, and it would secure us the time for mobilization. For certainly we could not mobilize nearly so fast as Germany.

“That is the plain truth of the situation. People talk about Russia’s internal troubles, but they are not of any importance. It is mainly an agrarian question. The peasants think their land insufficient, because they are too ignorant to cultivate it properly, and the redistribution of the land by the communes every twelve years—it used to be every year—deprives them of the valuable sense of ownership. We must abolish the communal system, institute private ownership in land, and plant several new colonies—in Siberia, for example. Then you will see that Russia will easily regain her former condition of quietude and prosperity.

“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.

The twelve wards into which Warsaw was divided had to choose eighty electors between them, and upon these eighty fell the choice of the two members who were to represent Warsaw in the Duma. These two were counted among the thirty-six who would stand for Poland as a whole. The Jews, who make up a third part of Warsaw’s population, were the only formidable opponents to the National Democrats. But the Jews are nearly all Socialists, and as the Socialists had up to that time refused to recognize the Duma or take any part in the elections, the National Democrats expected to secure all the “college” of electors.

Their programme was more advanced than I should have supposed from the rather venerable appearance of their meeting. They aimed at complete Polish autonomy in a Russian Federation. They demanded the use of Polish in schools and law-courts; the appointment of Poles to all offices of local administration; complete local self-government for towns and country districts; and some included the restoration of the Polish Parliament as it existed from 1813 to 1831. This programme was obviously very much more Nationalist than Democratic, but, in spite of the demand for Home Rule, there was no intention whatever of breaking away from Russia. My reactionary official was again right in saying that the Poles, like the Baltic Provinces, would rather suffer under Russia than under Germany. The one thing that ended the great general strike was the cry purposely, though falsely, raised by the masters, “The Prussians are coming!” Germans may think it difficult to understand, but, outside Germany, a certain pleasantness of manner counts for something in the affairs of life, and very few people really enjoy being goaded along the regulation road to official perfection.

Next to the National Democrats came the Progressive Democrats, who bridged the gulf from respectability to Socialism, like Mr. John Burns, let us say, or practical leaders of his type. They were what we should call extreme Radicals, but they liked to borrow the word “Fabians,” not having yet discovered that the Fabian Society ceased to count in the advance of thought or politics after the support its majority gave to the South African War. Like academic people among ourselves, they are fond of repeating that they demand evolution, not revolution, but their opposition to the Government is nevertheless sincere, and many of them were in prison. The gradual nationalization of the land, with compensation but compulsory sale where an owner possesses over a certain maximum, is a great point in their programme, and their aims in general are rather social than political, though they, too, demand a Polish Parliament and a military system under which Polish recruits shall remain in Poland. Like the Socialists, they refused to take any part in the elections, because under martial law there could be no freedom of choice. Otherwise, they would have formed the natural allies of the Constitutional Democrats elsewhere.

The powerful party known as National or Polish Socialists came very near to these. In fact, no one but a Pole could have discovered in their programmes any distinction calling for passionate antipathy. They followed the usual Socialistic lines, with Polish autonomy thrown in, and they also prided themselves on their practical or “real” policy.

Next to them, but separated by the impassable abyss of family animosity, came their bitterest enemies, the Social Democrats, with their usual maximum and minimum programmes, that require no further definition. For the Gospel of St. Marx upholds the doctrine of faith all the world over, and its canon allows no variation of circumstance or nationality. In Poland, perhaps, its followers show themselves a little more pedantic and superior than elsewhere, and it is their intolerance of every other form of progress which has done most to keep the parties divided, and maintain the enemy in power. Possibly for this reason, combined with the imprisonment of all their leaders, they appeared, whilst I was in Warsaw, to have lost ground, in spite of their careful organization and superhuman rectitude.

Below them—far below them, they would say—came the Proletariat Socialists, the workman’s party, who refused all “truck” with students or lawyers, or any other members of the “Intelligenzia” and bourgeoisie. They were the extremists; thirty years ago they would have been called Nihilists, though untruly. They preached revolutionary violence of any kind, and took the immediate happiness of the working man as their motive and rule in all conduct. Beyond that, they possessed the immense advantage of being entirely free from all doctrines, theories, and abstractions. For they held by the simple and obvious fact, that a certain amount of pleasure may be obtained from life, and the working man does not get it.

There remains but one party of importance, but it is a little difficult to place it in rank with the rest. For the Bund is not specially a Polish party. As I have shown, it spreads through Kieff, Odessa, and all Southern Russia. But in Warsaw it is particularly strong, because, beyond all others, it is the Jewish party. In social aims it agrees with the Social Democrats, but its methods are more definite and more violent. In Warsaw, its members were at that time collecting arms, organizing bands, and conducting propaganda in meetings that were protected by armed groups. Their programme was to carry on the revolution by a series of general strikes, combined with armed demonstrations and attacks upon Government buildings or officials, and they looked forward to a general and violent insurrection of all Socialists in Russia. Obviously, the first care of such a party should be to win over the enemy’s armed forces, for as long as the Russian Government could trust the army to do the slaughtering for them, a violent insurrection was outside serious consideration. Accordingly, the Bund was continually sending out agents to work among the soldiers. These agents endeavoured to establish in the army a large society of men, who should take an oath never to fire upon their fellow-citizens. There were minor points—a demand for better treatment, a refusal to act as officers’ servants, or to serve outside their home district. But not to fire on citizens was the main thing, and if once that pledge could be imposed upon the Russian army as a whole, the Government, with all its frippery and all its brutality, would vanish in a week.

I have already given my reasons for seeing little hope of such a solution. Obedience is the easiest form of sloth, and as soon as you put a man into uniform you render obedience almost irresistible. Further, a soldier demands pay, clothes, food, and hitherto there has existed no definite power in Russia, except the Crown, to which he could look for these necessities.

But it was no wonder the Government regarded the Bund as their most dangerous enemy in a hostile nation. Under the unpopular bywords of “Anarchist” and “Jew,” the members of the Bund were seized and executed without mercy or regret. Upon the river bank, half a mile north of the city, stands the great fortress called the Citadel. I happened to see more of it than most travellers, for, by good luck, I managed one afternoon to penetrate far within the gates before I was arrested. But still I could not identify Pavilion 10, where some six hundred political prisoners were then crowded together, nor the places of execution, where so-called Anarchist Jews were shot. The official number of the executed in the month then stood at only sixteen, but it was impossible to estimate the true figures, when the only form of trial was a secret court-martial, and when fishermen on the Vistula reported, as they did while I was there, that they had seen bodies appearing through holes in the ice below the Citadel, with faces mutilated to prevent recognition.

As in the rest of Russia, all the prisons were so overcrowded that the prisoners were dying of filth and disease. The town prison in Warsaw had four hundred politicals, and sixty of them were crammed into a room built for twenty-five. But if only as a relief from the dreariness of futile party distinctions, let me end with the official statement concerning two Jewesses, arrested as the accomplices of a man named Gramen, who had been shot for manufacturing bombs. Governor-General Skallon gave it out that it went against his feelings of humanity to shoot women, and accordingly he offered to appeal to the Tsar himself on behalf of these two, if they would only promise never to take part in the revolution again. They both replied that if they were ever released, they would fling themselves into the movement with more enthusiasm than ever. So both were shot. And that one solid instance of invincible heroism proves that even Poland, in spite of all her divisions and abstractions and intrigues, is not beyond the hope of liberty, since even in the wilderness of her parties that kind of courage is seen to blossom.