The Historians' History of the World (Volume 24)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: [1817-1818 A.d.] CONDITIONS LEADING TO THE INSURRECTION OF 1846 The condition of the native Poles since the last partition in 1794 had been very different in the portions allotted to the three partitioning powers. The Russians, aware that the nobles were the class in which the hostility to them was strongest, and fearful of the effects of a national revolution on the extreme frontier of their immense empire, had made the greatest efforts to ameliorate the condition of the peasants. The condition of the peasants became greatly superior to what it had ever been under the old national government and their stormy Comitia. The peasants were all emancipated, and put on the footing of farmers, entitled to the whole fruits of their toil, after satisfying the rent of the landlord. In Prussian Poland, styled the grand duchy of Posen, the changes were still more radical, and perhaps erred on the side of undue concession to the popular demands. In 1817 the Prussian government, under the direction of the able and patriotic Baron Stein, had adopted a change which a revolutionary government would hardly have ventured to promulgate; they established to a certain extent an agrarian law. In lieu of the services in kind, which by the old law they were bound to give to their landlords in consideration of being maintained by them, the peasants received a third of the land they cultivated in property to themselves, and they were left to provide for their own subsistence. The old prohibition against the sale of lands on the part of the nobles was taken away, and facilities given for the purchase of the remaining two-thirds by the peasants, by permitting twenty-five years for paying up the price. This was a very great change, which at first sight seemed to be fraught with the dangers of revoluti...