THE POLISH EMIGRATION 2,03enterprise command respect and admiration. Like all men in their condition,
deprived of the comforts of home and kin, the Great Emigration was forced to
drink the cup of bitterness amidst increasing disillusionment. How many of
them in their outpourings echoed the words of that greatest of all political
exiles, who wrote of la crudelta, of 'the cruel fate which excludes me from that
beautiful fold where I slept as a lamb'. Yet for three decades and more, in the
darkest days between 'November' and 'January' in the interval before the
establishment of national autonomy in Galicia, they led the nation from afar.
Throughout this period, Prince Adam Czartoryski, 'the uncrowned King of
Poland' presided from his Hotel Lambert in Paris over the main focus of inde-
pendent Polish politics. He enjoyed greater personal authority than any con-
temporary figure, in Poland or abroad. His numerous opponents fired the feuds
and debates which kept fundamental issues alive. His literary confreres -
Mickiewicz, Slowacki, Krasinski, Norwid - forged, from Romanticism, the sin-
gle most important School of modern Polish literature. These names, and their
considerable works, have acted as an inspiration for all their successors until the
present day.^2
Economic emigration was confined to somewhat tighter chronological limits.
It began in the 1840s, swelled into a flood in the later nineteenth century, and
came to a sudden halt in 1939. It developed from the practice of seasonal migra-
tion and never lost some of the latter's characteristics. The demand for labour
on the large-scale Prussian estates, and later in the mines and factories of Silesia,
Saxony, or Westphalia, attracted a steady flow of Polish peasants from the east.
At first they came just for the harvest, or for a spell of industrial employment in
the winter, after completing the year's work on their own farms. Later, they
travelled further afield, to Belgium and France, and from the 1860s, to North
and South America; and they stayed for longer periods. But most typically, like
the Gastarbeitern of present-day Europe, they stayed in contact with their fam-
ilies at home, remitted their savings, and looked to an early return as soon as
circumstances allowed. Many returned after a lifetime's-career abroad to retire
at home. Even today, almost forty years after all economic emigration ceased,
there are still Poles who return to the People's Republic from America, to spend
their American pensions in comfort and to be buried, with characteristic fastid-
iousness, in their native soil.^3
In the later nineteenth century, increasing rural overpopulation and grinding
urban poverty forced large numbers of people to emigrate to America with no
thought of return. Established emigrants wrote home with exaggerated stories
of their success. Extravagant tales abounded:
Here in America you can take as much land as you need. You do what you like. Nobody
watches you. Wheat and other grain is harvested twice a year. The land needn't be
manured or tilled. Manure is burnt or thrown into water. Gold is dug like potatoes. The
hares are huge, and they're not afraid of men. You can have as much meat as you like.
Pigs, cattle, and horses breed in the woods. And the frogs are as big as cows. If you meet
one on the road, you must drive round it so as not to upset the cart. Fruit grows on all