This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1865 Excerpt: ...support of the peasants was not secured. But could it have been secured? The members of the party of action maintain that it could; and if every landed proprietor had occupied himself as a sort of political missionary for some years before the insurrection; if he had agreed of his own free will to receive no rent; and ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1865 Excerpt: ...support of the peasants was not secured. But could it have been secured? The members of the party of action maintain that it could; and if every landed proprietor had occupied himself as a sort of political missionary for some years before the insurrection; if he had agreed of his own free will to receive no rent; and if at the last moment he had called the peasantry on his estate to arms, then who can say but that the peasantry might not have been got to fight for their native land? Under the actual circumstances of the outbreak, however, the support of the peasantry could not be counted on. Their neutrality was the most that could be expected, and this may be said, as THE PEASANTS IN POLAND PROPER. 169 a general rule, to have been secured by the gift of land, and by the consequent refusal of the proprietors to receive rent. But the comparatively favourable, because neutral, attitude of the peasantry may also be regarded as the natural result of the corvee having been put an end to two years before by the Wielopolski law, and to some extent also by the fact that in this part of Russian-Poland the peasants for upwards of a half a century have been free, and have only performed task-work in virtue of their own agreement to do so. The peasants, moreover, in the 'kingdom ' are of the same religion and race as the proprietors; and the insurrection, too, was a much more serious and formidable affair in the kingdom than in any other part of Eussian-Poland, and was therefore less likely to be resisted by the peasants. Finally, in the 'kingdom, ' the administration, from the civil governors downwards, was exclusively Polish, They were liberated when the Grand Duchy of Warsaw was formed by Napoleon out of Prussian Poland in 1807. But the law which rendered them free ...
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