FROM WARSAW TO ST. PETERSBURG.
WE were to leave Warsaw in the course of the forenoon. At half-past
eight we came downstairs, and found the breakfast-room closed, and
nobody up in the house who could provide the morning repast. As time was
precious, we went out to another hotel, and it was still closed; when at
nine o’clock we succeeded in getting in, there was no one stirring but
the landlord himself, and he managed to get breakfast for us with his
own hands. Returning to our own hotel we called for the bill, and found
the prices for rooms and board one-third more than we were assured they
would be, by the same man who now made the charges. I mention all these
little things to show the ways of the world we are travelling in. We do
not remember any country, nor any hotel, where we were more
systematically imposed on, and where we got so little for so much, as at
the Hôtel l’Europe, the largest and most pretentious house in Poland.
We rode from the hotel across the Vistula, over a new and splendid
bridge, and found the railroad station a mile beyond. It is put at this
safe and very inconvenient distance from the town to be secure against
sudden outbreaks of popular violence. The people are of the excitable
order, and this road is the grand route between Warsaw and St.
Petersburg, over which their Russian masters come to govern the Poles.
The young man selling tickets was civil, and he was the first man who
had spoken civilly to us since we entered unhappy Poland. The Russian
officials at the station were all civil. Before we could purchase our
tickets our passports were examined, and a “ticket of leave” was given
us, for which we paid thirty copakes, about twenty cents. We paid a cent
for the baggage check. The cars were splendid; the first and second
class had spring seats, cushioned, with racks for parcels; and the
second class was quite as good as the first in France or Germany. The
passengers were very few; the train, the only one for the day, had but
three cars, and none were full. We had an apartment for six entirely to
ourselves, two of us.
We rush out into a vast prairie country, very sparsely inhabited, but
well cultivated; large herds of cattle were grazing on the plains; pine
groves were frequent; the north side of trees was torn by winter storms;
houses were thatched with straw, and appeared to be miserable abodes for
the poor inhabitants; they became poorer as we went north, sometimes
partly under ground. They are now more scattered; fewer villages; but
they are doubtless more frequent off the line of railroad, which may be
laid through parts of the country less settled than others. The peasants
in their rude working clothes had a wretched look, and the women were
all barefooted. We passed a village that seemed to be Jewish, the men
and boys being clad in long coats, such as we saw on the Jews in Warsaw.
Once in every half-mile, on the road, was a neat house for the railroad
man, whose duty it is to see that the road is in perfect order. These
houses are numbered in order, over the whole route; they are of brick or
stone, small, warm, and substantial, with a little ornament. The idea is
excellent. A man thus provided for is impelled by his highest interests
to be vigilant and faithful; and it would be strange, indeed, if the
road were ever suffered to be out of order for a moment with such care.
The road is solid, a single track with frequent turnouts, and the cars
run smoothly. At every cross-road for wagons a man stands keeping guard.
Accidents must be very rare on a road so managed.
We stop at Lapy, on the river Narev, for dinner; they give us good soup,
stewed veal, and potatoes, and a ball of forced meat, and charge us
about fifty cents, two or three times as much as it was worth, but they
do not expect to entertain you twice; certainly we do not expect to dine
at Lapy again.
At Bialystok, the next station, a lady left the cars and was met by a
young man, perhaps her son, in military dress; they kissed each other
four times, and he then kissed her hand, and the salutations were
completed. Many Jewish women were out to-day, which is one of their
feasts; the cross-roads were thronged with Jews, who seemed to be
gathering there to see the cars passing; they were not allowed on the
track or on the side of the railroad, but must keep themselves on the
wagon-roads, where they crossed the track. This town of Bialystok is
quite an important place of 16,000 people, on the borders of the old
kingdom, and in the cutting up of the country it has sometimes been
Prussia, sometimes Russia, and aforetime Poland. It is now Russia, of
course. We come on to Grodno, with its 20,000 inhabitants, which is a
large town in Russia proper, and we feel a pleasant relief in being
within the bounds of the empire itself, though even this was once in
Poland, and the residence of some of her kings. Here sat the diets, or
congress, of Poland, and even that most celebrated of all of them, the
diet of 1793, which gave its consent to the partition of Poland. Here,
too, the last king of Poland, Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski, laid down
his sceptre. We find the Jews, in great numbers, out on a holiday; the
grand-high-priest, with his gorgeous breastplate on, with long hair, as
if it had never been cut and he were a Nazarene from his birth. We are
now travelling in Lithuania, once a duchy, whose duke married the Queen
of Poland, by name Hedwiga, in 1386. This union made Poland powerful to
resist the Tartars and the Dukes of Moscow, and to maintain the
independence of the kingdom for a long series of years. The union of
Lithuania and Poland continued until the third partition in 1795. The
country appears poorer as we advance; the soil is less fertile; there is
more sandy and barren waste. Pines and firs and white birches are the
trees we see now; the houses of the peasants are low and poor; we have
long since ceased to see improvements about the railroad stations; we
are getting into regions of less civilization. As far as the eye reaches
away to the horizon, no hills are in sight. It was across these wide
plains that the great French captain led his hosts to invade Russia,
sixty years ago! We shall be frequently on the track of that army’s
awful march, and its disastrous retreat. We have come to Kowno, where
the rivers Vilia and Niemen meet. Here the French army crossed the
Niemen, June 23, 1812, on their way to Moscow, and a gentle rise of
ground, on the bank, is still called Napoleon’s Hill. It was a mighty
host when it was here in June. All the annals of war and of the world
furnish no parallel to the story of that campaign; it was an epitome of
Napoleon’s whole career. But it is rare that marble is so modest as the
monument which the Russians have set up at Kowno to commemorate the
miserable failure of Napoleon’s stupendous plan of subjugating Russia.
In the centre of the market-place they have set up a stone bearing this
significant inscription,—
“In 1812, Russia was invaded by an army numbering 700,000 men. The army
recrossed the frontier, numbering 70,000.”
When Napoleon entered Wilna on his fatal march to Moscow, he occupied
the same rooms in the episcopal palace that the Emperor Alexander had
hastily vacated the day before. We shall not have the same apartments,
but we are here at the same season of the year; it was June 28, 1812,
when the French army took possession of Wilna, the Russians having
evacuated it in the night.
We had been riding eleven hours steadily, yet the cars were so
comfortable, the road so smooth, and the motion so easy and gentle, that
we had suffered little fatigue. The scenery had been improving. The
country was more uneven, rolling, and actually rising sometimes to the
dignity of hills, until we were able and obliged to pass through a
tunnel, being our first experience of the kind in some days, so level
had been the regions through which we had travelled. Wilna is surrounded
by hills, and enjoys a river flowing out of the valley, and the ravines
are filled with birch and larches, giving something of the life and
beauty of verdure, which is quite inspiring in this latitude. In the
fourteenth century the people here were pagans, and a fire was kept
burning day and night at the foot of one of the castle-crowned hills.
The ruins of the castle, which was reared in 1323, are still visible on
the summit. What a history of war, famine, and fire these intervening
centuries have seen. Thirty thousand inhabitants were destroyed by
famine in one year, 1710, and five years afterwards nearly the whole
town was burned. The people are still impatient of the Russian yoke.
They are always ready for an outbreak. In 1831, they tried and failed;
and in 1862 they made a desperate effort, and the leaders of the
movement were summarily hung or shot.
The beauties of travel in Russia begin to be seen even in the dark. We
are in the station, in the midst of a crowd of people, who seem to be
talking all the languages of Babel; such a jargon does the Russian,
Polish, and German make, when all are spoken at the same time by an
impatient multitude. We are to wait an hour for the train to leave, and
that will bring it near to midnight. If we spend the night here, there
is no train until to-morrow night at the same hour, and we shall
therefore be as badly off when it comes. It is better to go on and make
a night of it. Twelve hours will bring us to St. Petersburg, and then we
can rest. There are no _sleeping_ cars. We must sit up or lounge the
best way we can. It is now eleven o’clock and is getting to be dark. But
we are so far north that the days are long, and the night will be very
short. At midnight we curl up in the corner of the seat, and the train
starts as we go to sleep. At two o’clock in the morning we awake, and it
is broad daylight! At three we enter _Dunaberg_, a large town of small
houses; 27,000 inhabitants: the most of the buildings are of wood, and
only one story high, like the little farm-houses scattered over the
country. It is well fortified, though it is hardly worth fighting about.
John the Terrible captured Dunaberg in 1577, and the Swedes took it in
1600. The railroad station-house towers above the dwellings, that look
like ant-hills scattered around. We stop a few minutes only, and push on
through vast quantities of charcoal and railroad fuel collected here,
and pine forest succeed, and white birch-trees, and over a flat,
uninteresting country. The sun rose between four and five o’clock, and
at a wayside station we were refreshed with a cup of coffee. The night
was over, and the shortest I ever spent with my clothes on. We now pass
tilled fields, and at one time we counted twenty villages of low, small
houses in sight at one time, as we rushed along. The grain is well up,
and with a warm summer will come to maturity. Wide tracts of land are
destitute of vegetation; and with the evidences of want of agricultural
knowledge, and the brevity of the summer, it is easy to see that these
crowded villages may be pinched for want of food in a bad season. These
famines have sometimes reached the cities, and the sufferings of Moscow
in 1600 were not exceeded by the horrors of Jerusalem besieged by Titus.
One hundred and twenty-seven thousand dead bodies remained for some days
unburied in the streets, and 500,000 perished.
The peasants are astir in the early morning at their work in the fields.
They are decently clad, and have the appearance of being “comfortable;”
they and their houses indicating that they have time and inclination to
take care of themselves. They are no longer serfs. This term is not the
same as slave. The serf was sold with the land on which he worked, not
away from it, or without it. So long ago as 1597, a decree was issued
forbidding peasants to leave the lands on which they were at that time
employed. This made every working-man a fixture on the land of the
landholder. At a date even earlier than this, they were forbidden to
leave except at stated periods, but the complete attachment by statute
of the husbandmen to the soil did not take place until the sixteenth
century. This continued to be the established order of things until the
accession of Alexander II. to the throne in 1856. The serfdom of Russia
was not absolute slavery. It did not subject the man to the unrestricted
will of the master. The peasant remained the tiller of the same soil,
and changed his master only when the soil changed owners. But the
grievance was inexpressibly great. In some cases it worked extraordinary
results. The serf sometimes by energy and ability became a man of wealth
and power. But he was under a social ban that kept him down as color
depresses the black man. The reign of the present Emperor has been
marked by the introduction of great and beneficent reforms. Railways
were begun, and a new impulse given to trade at home and foreign
commerce. The manumission of the serfs had long been discussed, but an
opposition from the nobility had been too formidable to make it safe. In
1838, some of the nobles petitioned for the abolition. In 1859, the
nobles of Lithuania offered to free their serfs. A general plan was then
devised for the whole empire, and by a decree of March 3, 1861, about
twenty-three millions of people were raised to the enjoyment of civil
rights. A certain amount of land, varying in different districts from
two and a half to ten acres, was allotted to each peasant. He is allowed
to acquire more land by purchase. A board of arbitrators, in different
parts of the country, regulate the price and terms of payment to the
original owners. The government advances the purchase-money to the
peasant in the form of a five per cent bond, and this the proprietor
receives for his land, and the government takes the payment of the
peasant by instalments, through a series of years. The districts, or
towns, being made responsible for this repayment to the government, a
wholesome restraint is put upon the inhabitants, by which they are kept
within bounds until this debt is paid. Thus the entire population is
made interested in the accomplishment of the great work. The nobles who
were the proprietors of the soil, receive government bonds bearing
interest, and thus derive a fixed income, while each peasant becomes an
independent landed proprietor. The change has been effected with no
convulsion, and is gradually becoming a settled and peaceful state of
things. A few outbreaks occurred at the time, chiefly from want of
understanding the plan, and on the whole it has worked well.
This beneficent reform has been effected without passion, and with the
intelligent approbation of the masters who were by a single decree
deprived of 23,000,000 of bondmen. The original owners of the soil are
not reduced to poverty by the emancipation of their men. The men are not
turned loose upon the world without means to earn their living, and
without incentives to industry. The government is not made to bear the
expense of supporting them, or of finding work for them to do. The
emancipated man is at once put into a position to earn his living where
he has always lived. The master is left with a large surplus of soil,
which he may cultivate with hired labor, which must be abundant, when
the peasants have but small farms of their own, which are easily and
chiefly tilled by the women. And this work has been accomplished with so
much moderation, wisdom, and justice, as to compel the approbation of
every enlightened judgment and conscience. It is in most aspects of the
case a model plan of emancipation.
It seems strange to me that this rapid travel is hurrying me on to St.
Petersburg! The cathedral and churches of PSKOF are before us, and we
stop for breakfast. We enter the breakfast-room and find the dishes
laid; each one helps himself to whatever he wishes, and pays for what he
takes; not a word being necessary, except to learn the price of the
food.
A lady and gentleman were walking up and down on the platform, _both_
smoking. We are coming to a city where smoking in the streets is
prohibited by law. The peculiar garb of the rustic Russian is seen on
the men around the station. They wear long woollen coats, reaching
nearly to the ground. A girdle is about the middle. The hat is a
low-crowned beaver, and rapidly expanding toward the top.