THE CONGRESS KINGDOM 229the state's expenditure, it was well armed and well trained. It wore Polish uni-
forms, marched behind Polish colours, and used Polish as the sole language of
command. Replenished by conscripts engaged on ten-year service, it soon
assumed an air of professional pride and competence. Special attention was paid
to officer training. The three cadet schools in Warsaw, serving the Infantry,
Cavalry, and Artillery, turned out a new generation of graduates buoyant with
soldierly pride and esprit de corps. Russian influence was limited to the army's
divisional structure, to facilitate prospective co-operation with Russian forma-
tions - and to the sensitive matter of military descipline. Corporal punishment
had never been permitted in Poniatowski's day, and its introduction in 1815 on
the Russian model caused great offence. The endless parades which the Grand
Duke organized on the Saxon Square in Warsaw were attended by public displays
of flogging and of running-the-gauntlet. They provided one of the rankling but
avoidable irritants in an otherwise satisfied and highly competent fighting force.^5
Within this context, political life developed without undue strain. Much of the
fury of the early years was drawn by the battle between the clericals and the anti-
clericals over schools, civil marriages, divorce, and censorship. In this, the Tsar
found himself lobbied from both sides. The first session of the Sejm in 1818 pro-
ceeded smoothly. It was opened by Alexander in person, whose speech in praise
of the Constitution was widely but mistakenly construed as the harbinger of
changes to come in Russia itself. A protest from the floor of the House against
the government's failure to present the budget for approval was left unanswered.
Opposition began to coalesce in the 1820s on two separate fronts. In the Sejm,
it centred on the activities of the two Niemoyowski brothers, Wincenty
(1784-1834) and Bona-wentura (1787-1835), whose 'Kalisz Group' held amenda-
tions of government policy to be an essential function of the legislature. In the sec-
ond session of the Sejm, in 1820, when a bill to increase the powers of the
Procurator-General was blocked, the Tsar could hardly contain his astonishment.
The parliamentary election of the Niemoyowski brothers was administratively
annulled. The Sejm was dissolved, and its reopening delayed until 1825. This was
the first clear sign that praise for the Constitution even from a supposedly liberal
Tsar should not be taken too literally. Other members of the Sejm caused offence
by criticizing the government's dilatory attitude to agrarian reform.
In the country at large, opposition centred on the growing fashion for secret
political clubs. In this, Freemasonry held an old and established position in
Polish society. It traditionally attracted the harmless sort of benign noblemen,
to whom both Alexander I and his father, Paul I, felt themselves to belong. In
1815, it had thirty-two lodges in the Kingdom, and could rightly claim to con-
trol a large sector of progressive and patriotic opinion. In 1819, Major Walerian
Lukasinski (1786-1868) founded the Wolnomularstwo Narodowe (National
Freemasonry), a more militant branch of the movement, which soon recruited a
following in the Sejm, in the provinces, and in the army. In 1821, when the Tsar
banned its activities throughout his realms, many of the more determined
members passed into Lukasinski's conspiratorial Patriotic Society. This latter