around the capital, and fatally induced the belief that the hopes of Poland were bound up with the safety of Warsaw.
But our concern is not with the military events of the campaign, with the desperate bravery of the rank and file and their subaltern officers, the honest incapacity of the two first generals-in-chief, the jealousies of the third, or the misfortunes of the fourth. It is the civil measures for restoring order adopted by the Emperor which claim our attention.
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.
Art. II. All engagements, &c., entered into with regard to said property, after the date of the revolt, shall be null and void.
Art. III. All receivers and farmers upon such sequestrated property shall enter into a written engagement to forward neither money nor any other produce of said property to the absent proprietors, but faithfully to deliver all such produce to the proper imperial authorities—the General Commission of Supervision.
For such sequestrations to take effect, it was not necessary that the victim should have taken any overt part in the revolt: the fact of being present in the disaffected country was quite sufficient to politically contaminate him. If Nicholas really issued this as a repressive measure, the result must have disenchanted him. For, notwithstanding the worldly ruin imminent, and the discouragement which the volunteers from the western Guberniums had at first met from the Provisional Government at Warsaw, as soon as their services were accepted by it, they hastened in multitudes to enlist under the White Eagle; and in March, 1831, when the Russian army had already entered Poland, the insurrection spread far and wide through the dismembered provinces. Then came another ukase, still more to the point. After referring to the provisions of the last, it proceeds:
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.
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.
Thus the wife and children of a proprietor might be deprived of support, though he had left Russia to visit a sick parent, or attend to the simplest personal interests. Parents, though never so submissive to Muscovite tyranny, were equally victimised, if their children had been guilty of any act that could be tortured into an appearance of patriotism. We need not seek for political purpose in such ukases: the reaction inevitable from them must have been evident, even to the obtuse Romanoff brain; they were but a financial contrivance, an admirable scheme for turning the resources and wealth of the country against herself. Nicholas soon found, indeed, they drove into open resistance many who, from the desperate nature of the struggle, might have else held back. He, therefore, issued another ukase on March 22, 1831:—
Art. I. All nobles of the Western Guberniums who shall have implicated themselves in the revolt, or who have offered resistance to the imperial constituted, authorities, shall be delivered over to the military tribunals, and the sentence pronounced on them executed without delay, under the authority of the respective commanders of detachments.
Art. II. The real and personal property of such criminals to be sequestrated and applied to the use of our military pensioners.
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. Thousands suffered this last penalty, which, in its life-long, hopeless degradation and misery, is far more cruel than death. As these sentences involved the loss of all civil rights to the offender, they necessarily brought confiscation of all his worldly possessions. As an appendix to the courts-martial, the Czar appointed a “Commission of Liquidation” in each Gubernium, charged with the valuation of forfeited property, and satisfaction of the legal claims upon it.
In June, 1832, appeared another ukase with reference to sequestrated property; it contained among its thirty-nine clauses, two which are singularly characteristic. Clause 13 declared, that “no debts, contracts, incumbrances, mortgages, &c., not formally registered before the proper authorities, and bearing date after the outbreak of the revolution, could be discharged by the Commission of Liquidation; and no debts, &c., &c., contracted in the kingdom of Poland, or in foreign countries, were reclaimable from the Commission, under any pretence whatever, even if made before the revolt had broken out in the Western Guberniums, and legitimated by official registration and seal.”
Thus, not only were the unhappy insurgents