From his deathbed old Adam Czartorysczki sent me by his son a warm word of greeting; a deputation of Poles in Paris presented me with an address signed by four hundred exiles, to 14 'Vivat Polonia,' 'lOth April and the Murders in Warsaw,' 'Mater Dolorosa' and others published in The Bell. (A.S.)
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which signatures were sent from all parts of the world, even from Polish refugees living in Algiers and in America. It seemed as though in so much we were united ; but one step farther in and the difference, the sharp difference, leaped to the eye.
One day Ksawery Branicki, Chojecki and one or two other Poles were sitting with me; they were all on a brief visit to London, and had come to shake hands with me for my articles.
The talk fell on the shot fired at ConstantineY'
'That shot,' I said, 'will do you terrible damage. The government might have made some concessions; now it will yield nothing, and will be twice as savage.'
'But that is just what we want ! ' Ch. £_16 observed with heat ;
'there could be n o worse misfortune for u s than concessions. We want a breach, an open conflict.'
'I hope most earnestly that you may not regret i t.'
Ch. E. smiled ironically, and no one added a word. That was in the summer of 186 1 . And a year and a half later Padlewski said the same thing when he was on his way to Poland through Petersburg.
The die was cast! .
Bakunin believed in the possibility of a nsmg of the peasants and the army in Russia, and to some extent we believed in it too ; and indeed the government itself believed in it, as was shown later on by a series of measures, of officially inspired articles, and of punishments by special decree. That men's minds were working and in a ferment vvas beyond dispute, and no one saw at the time that the popular excitement \vould be turned to ferocious patriotism.
Bakunin, not too much given to weighing every circumstance, looked only towards the ultimate goal, and took the second month of pregnancy for the ninth. He carried us away not by arguments but by his hopes. He longed to believe, and he believed, that Zhmud and the Volga, the Don and the Ukraine would rise as one man when they heard of VVarsaw; he believed that the Old Believers would take advantage of the Catholic movement to obtain a legal standing for the Schism.
That the league among the officers of the troops stati oned in Poland and Lithuania-the league to which Potebnya belonged 15 The Grand Duke Constantine Nikolavevich was made viceroy of Poland in 1 862. On the day of his arrival in \\'arsaw. in J une of th�t year. an a tt<'mpt was made on his life. (A.S. )
16 Charl es Edmond was the pseudonym of Chojecki. ( A .S.)
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-was growing and gathering strength was beyond all doubt; but it was very far from possessing the strength which the Poles through design and Bakunin through simplicity ascribed to it.
One day towards the end of September Bakunin came to me looking particularly preoccupied and somewhat solemn.
'The Warsaw Central Committee,' he said, 'has sent two members to negotiate with us. One of them you know-Padlewski ; the other is Giller, a veteran warrior; he took a walk from Poland to the mines in fetters, and as soon as he was back he set to work again. This evening I will bring them to see you, and tomorrow we will meet in my room. We must define our relations once for all.'
My answer to the officers was being printed at that time.
'My programme is ready, I will read my letter aloud.'
'I agree with your letter, you know that; but I don't know whether they will altogether like it; in any case, I imagine that it won't be enough for them.'
In the evening Bakunin arrived with three visitors instead of two. I read them my letter. While we were talking and while I was reading, Bakunin sat looking alarmed, as relations arc at an examination, or as lawyers are when they tremble lest their client should let something slip out and spoil the whole game of the defence that has been so well arranged, if not strictly in accordance with the truth, anyway for a successful finish.
I saw from their faces that Bakunin had guessed right, and that they were not particularly pleased by what I read them.
'First of all,' observed Giller, 'we shall read the letter to you from the Central Committee.' Milovicz read it; the document, with which readers of The Bell are familiar, \"\·as written in Russian, not quite correctly, but clearly. It has been said that I translated it from the French and altered the sense. That is not true. All three spoke Russian well.
The sense of the document was to tell the Russians through us that the provisional Polish government agreed with us and adopted as its basis for action: 'The recognition of the right of the peasantry to the land tilled by them, and the complete selfdetermination of every people, the right to determine its own destiny.'
This manifesto, Milovicz said, bound me to soften the interrogative and hesitating form of my letter. I agreed to some changes, and suggested to them that they might accentuate and define more clearly the idea of the self-determination of provinces; they agreed. This dispute over words showed that our attitude towards the same questions was not identical.
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Next day Bakunin was with me in the morning. He was dissatisfied with me, thought I had been too cold, as though I did not trust them.
'Whatever more do you want? The Poles have never made such concessions. They express themselves in other words which are accepted among them as an article of faith; they can't possibly at the first step, as they hoist the national flag, wound the sensitive popular feeling.'
'I fancy, all the same, that they really care very lit_tle about the land for the peasants and too much about the provinces.'
'My dear fellow, you will have a document in your hands corrected by you and signed in the presence of all of us; whatever more do you want?'
'I do want something else though! '
'How difficult every step i s t o you! You are not a practical man at all.'
'Sazonov usPd to say that before you did.'
Bakunin waved his hand in despair and \vent off to Ogarev's room. I looked mournfully after him. I saw that he was in the middle of his revolutionary debauch, and that there would be no bringing him to reason now. With his seven-league boots he was striding over seas and mountains, over years and generations.
Beyond the insurrection in Warsaw he was already seeing his
'Glorious and Slav Federation'17 of which the Poles spoke with something between horror and repulsion ; he already saw the red flag of 'Land and Freedom' waving on the Urals and the Volga, in the Ukraine and the Caucasus, possibly on the Winter Palace and the Peter-Paul fortress, and was in haste to smooth away all diffirultit>s somehow, to conceal contradictions, not to fill up the gullies but to fling a skeleton bridge across them.