THE GROWTH OF THE MODERN NATION 37We are, as it were, a field on which nothing can ever mature, since everything falls under
the sickle before its time; as soon as an ear of corn appears, it is cut down immediately
... If all the blood spilled by Poles in the cause of freedom were poured together, it would
fill the biggest lake in the country; and if all the bones of those who have died in battles,
on the gallows, in the camps, or in exile were collected in one heap, they would make
another Wawel. But what benefit has there been? None, and there never can be any, since
Polish patriotism is made up from violent explosions of emotion which are not illumined
by understanding and are not transformed into acts of creative will.^37
The drift of Dzieci is unmistakable. It examines the experiences of Kazimierz
Swirski, a youth of integrity and courage, the Commander of a revolutionary
society called the 'Knights of Freedom'. It tells a tale of unrelieved waste and
mismanagement, which ends in Swirski's futile suicide. Control of the Society
passes remorselessly into the hands of a group of common sadists. The charac-
ters of Zajac, the fearless criminal who thrives on the chaos of a revolutionary
crisis; of Starka, his alcoholic associate, who specializes in street hangings; and
of Regen, the tubercular Jew, who cannot grasp why the police chief is less
frightened of him, than he of the police chief - constitute a merciless denuncia-
tion of the people who had launched the Rising of 1905 and who were still con-
spiring in the underground. In the last resort, Swirski's death was quite
unnecessary, and entirely unheroic. On his way to the Galician frontier, the fugi-
tive Commander is asleep in a barn and is awoken by the approach of marching
feet:
Suddenly, he imagined that the elegant Cossack was seizing him by the scruff of the neck
and dragging him across the snow to the officers, like a piece of carrion. His whole body
was shaking. He placed the Brauning to his right ear, and squeezed the trigger lightly. In
his head, the bells of all the world rang out. The earth exploded in fiery fragments...
Meanwhile, the Cossacks did not even know that Swirski was in the barn, and did not
come to arrest him. Their officers had sent them to requisition supplies. Finding the door
closed, and their knocking unanswered, they marched on to some other houses.
As usual poor Kazimierz had been in too much of a hurry.^38
Historians played a prominent role in the Conciliatory camp, especially when
they began to apply positivist concepts to their methods of investigation. In this
regard, it is interesting to note that Henry Buckle's seminal History of
Civilization in England (1861) was translated into Polish within a year of its
appearance in London. Like Buckle, the Polish positivists were fascinated by
Darwinism and by evolutionary biology; and in their haste to jettison all imme-
diate political considerations, they threw themselves into the task of amassing
data and documents on all the neglected, non-political aspects of their subject.
The clearest formulation of their ideals appeared in the polemics of Wladyslaw
Smolenski. On the general issue of whether or not the historian should direct his
knowledge to practical purposes, Smolefiski took an unequivocal stand. The
question is determined by one's over-all concept of Science,' he wrote; 'and
Science has no other task than the verification and explanation of phenomena.
For the botanist, it is quite irrelevant whether the characteristics of a particular