264 REVERIES
of the Polish martyrdom. Herzen, Marx, Garibaldi applauded Poland's
courage. Foreign volunteers queued up to join the Polish service (though many
did not arrive). The ill-fated voyage of the SS Ward Jackson which carried two
hundred volunteers from Gravesend to their final destination on a sand-bank in
Prussia amply illustrates the limited means and mixed motives of foreign sym-
pathizers.^6 In Russia, a wave of nationalist outrage swept the rostra. Despite a
small number of Russians and Ukrainians who came over to the Polish side, the
vast majority of Russian commentators denounced the Polish plot to discredit
the Tsar. All the charges and recriminations which had been levelled at the Poles
after 1831 were revived in a still more virulent form. Tyutchev repeated what he
said thirty years before. Dostoevsky echoed Pushkin's comments in still more
mystical tones. Herzen, whose journal Kolokol lost half of its readership
overnight, was forced to retract his views. The gulf between Russia and Poland,
and between Russia and Europe as 'a whole, was opened still wider.^7
The peasant question ran through the politics of the Rising from start to
finish. It lay at the root of Alexander's original conviction that relaxations were
necessary, and took a prominent place in his way of bringing the conflict to a
close. All the parties involved were forced to compete intensely. Some people
thought that the peasants should be emancipated as a matter of principle; some
thought so in order to win their support. None could afford to let the issue go
by default. Stage by stage, the stakes were raised. Step by step, each side offered
the peasants more than the other. In 1858, the Tsar's first bid had invited the
Polish nobility to submit their proposals. The response of the Agricultural
Society was to propose that the labour dues of the serfs should be commuted
into money rents. In 1861, Wielopolski went ahead with the Land Decree of 16
May which offered less than the Tsar's reforms in Russia. In 1863, the KCN's
Manifesto talked of peasant 'ownership' of the land. In the end the Tsar was
obliged to outbid even this. The ukaz of 18 March 1864 initiated a scheme for
giving the peasants full freehold of the land they worked, and for compensating
the landowners with state bonds. The response of the peasants to these blatantly
political moves was sceptical. In general, they were no less suspicious of plausi-
ble young Polish gentlemen than they were of a liberal Tsar. The canny ones
realized that they would get what they wanted in any case, without having to
fight for it. The districts in the Kingdom where the peasants stood aloof from
the Rising were less numerous than those in which they participated. In the
Ukraine, the peasants were plainly hostile.^8
At the time of the Tsar's decree on Land Reform in March 1864 the last
Dictatorship of the Rising was still in full operation. The Dictator, Romuald
Traugutt, was quite unlike any of the popular stereotypes of a Polish revolu-
tionary. Lean, silent, cool, disciplined, efficient, he possessed most of the quali-
ties so signally lacking in his immediate predecessors. He came from a small
noble family in Podlasie and was married to Antonina Kosciuszkowna, a rela-
tive of the 'Commander' of 1794. Until 1861 he had been a Lt. Col. in the
Russian Army, and had served in Hungary and in the Crimea. He continued to