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THE PRESENT STATE OF THINGS IN UNHAPPY P...
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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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A Visit To The Shakers. New York, August...
portion has always , since its first colonization , been owned by one proprietor , and the American people never were fond of paying rent ; consequently , they moved further back on freer and richer soil . However , within these last three years , the patroon , as he is called , has departed from his usual policy of renting , and is now selling the land . Several allotments of twenty , thirty , or forty acres each have been sold along the Shaker road , and houses were in process of erection as I Passed .
As I approached within a s hort distance of the village , the road led through a tract of wood of tall sycamores , ash , and a few stunted spruce . The scenery had a still gloomy aspect , from which I was speedily relieved by the appearance of the lively-looking buildings , green fields , and neat gardens of the Shakers . As I emerged from the gloomy wood , and saw , on a
sudden , in full view , the smiling garden—fruit trees and waving corn arrayed in all their summer beautya feeling of indescribable quietness came over me . I thought the visions of Cobden , Bright , Burritt , and Co . were actually realized—that peace at last swayed the councils of men . The very birds appeared to have more harmony in their tuneful voices ; less shy of man , and more at home around his dwellings .
The quiet demeanour of the labourers , with their sombre but contented looks , was in strong contrast with the uneasy selfish bearing of the gold-worshippers in the city . This is the oldest Shaker settlement in the country . There are , in fact , four separate villages or families , the buildings of each family being about a quarter of a mile or a little more apart . An elder superintends the affairs of each family , but they are all closely united , having one church and one office for the transaction of business
with the world . Each family has , on an average , about one hundred members , the greatest portion of which are engaged in agriculture , although a few articles are manufactured for sale . They have become famous for their plants and seeds . They all work , men , women , and children , and likewise the elders ; there are no drones in a Shaker village ; they do not overstrain themselves , although the hours of labour are long , a steady constant medium appears to be the rule . They say that every one does as much as he or she is able . In talking with an old hale man of 75 years of age about some children , he remarked , " They go to school , and learn to work too , and , oh ! how many there are in this world that do not know how to work . "
The dwelling-houses , workshops , barns , and other buildings are separate , and at convenient distances , with a large square in the centre . This square is a smooth clean lawn , with flags or planks laid down for a pathway to each house . I crossed one of these pathways , and I knocked at the front door of one of the houses ; an old man in passing bade me open it , and I entered the workshop of the shoemaker of the family . It was a large well-ventilated room . The artizan was absent , and his tools were arranged in their respective places with great neatness and convenience . Order and cleanliness were
the presiding deities . A newspaper , the New lor / c Daily Tribune , lay on the bench . In the course of the day I visited the schoolhousc for girls . There were fourteen scholars , varying from eight to fifteen years of age . Arithmetic , grammar , and geography were some of the branches taught . The house was pleasantly situated , the schoolroom large and comfortable , and the whole arrangement and the ability displayed in teaching superior to most common schools in the state .
It was in this village that Mother Ann Lee and her disciples settled in the same year that the united colonies declared their independence . There is an historical fact of these singular people which tourists have overlooked , but which 1 apprehend is of great importance . Their society was not established at first upon the principle of communism . It was experience convinced them that harmony and individualism is incompatible . The ruling
idea of Ann Lee ' s singular fanaticism was , that in order to subdue all the evil passions of human nature , strict celibacy is necessary ; but in order to do this faith is our only law . If any one choose to follow the world , let them dwell with the world . To live without sin was the aim of the society , and it was thought necessary to abjure marriage , or , if already married , not to live after the nosh . It was found that there was another source of
evil , that there could be no peace , love , and harmony , as long as the motive to accumulate private property existed . To purchase at the lowest market and sell again at the highest , each one for their own individual benefit , would soon destroy all their aspirations for leading a sinless life . So they , like the Primitive Christians , throw all into a common stock , and discord , poverty ,
and dishonesty were rooted out . This is the reason of their success , and not , as it has been alleged , their religious dogmas , livery thing coinmencluble in their society can bu traced to the influence of communism . Their unequalled cli'unliness in all their arrangement !) , the management of their lauds , the order and regularity that reigns supreme in all their oll ' orts , is all the cti ' octH of communism . The absence of lying , theft ,
drunkenness , murder , and all the crimes that men commit against property , are unknown among eight or ten thousand people , where all labour , and where all enjoy the fruits of their labour . Practical Socialism is with them not only a theory , but a fixed fact ; established beyond dispute by the experience of half a century . As I left the village next morning I could not help
thinking how truth is to be found in such strange places . How few of the great men , teachers of mankind , statesmen , and preachers , have ever worked out an important social truth . Away in the wilderness a few reviled and persecuted fanatics slowly but surely , by the test of experience , solved the great question of labour , while the favoured and recognized great intellects of humanity were vainly seeking after a theory . DtJGAI / D F-ERGUSON .
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The Present State Of Things In Unhappy P...
THE PRESENT STATE OF THINGS IN UNHAPPY POLAND . The following letter on the present state of affairs in Poland is from a Correspondent in that unhappy kingdom : — Rejoice ! rejoice , all of ye ! the Tsar is coming ! all his family are coming ! Happy Warsaw , rejoice ! Your houses will be rich in the acquisition of a new external coating ; your streets will be benefitted by an extraordinary sweeping ; your barracks will boast of a new yellow coating : your windows will be resplendent with
tallow candles ; a balloon will ascend to divert the grown-up children ; a new ballet will be displayed to the Muscovites ; all the bells of the Russian churches will be exultingly rung , and the soldiers will be drilled to death ; women of questionable character and Russian ladies will be bedecked and bespangled to witness the fireworks in Lazienki , * and Muscovite officials and officers will run about the streets with the confusion of mad people . " What a condescension in the Tsar to deign to visit us ! What animation , what excitement , and what talk and hopes will necessarily precede his
happy arrival ! .. . " Favours ! great favours will be granted ! " loudly exclaim some , whilst others only whisper , " A general amnesty for the exiles ! Your brothers will return from Siberia and the Caucasus , and God knows whether he may not intend even to resuscitate those who were tortured to death ! The prisoners from the citadel , from the fortresses of Modlin and Zamosi , and from goodness
knows where , will all be released ! Only have patience for the jubilee of Prince Paskiewich ' s military service is approaching , and it is rumoured that he will have for three days unlimited power j and , moreover , the Tsar himself will celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of his reign . If petitions are now refused , it will be merely that they may afterwards severally receive a favourable answer . "
Such are the rumours industriously spread about by the spies , and simpletons ( whom experience teaches nothing ) reecho them . We would cheerfully give credit to the above rumours , and most willingly revoke any opinion we may have given utterance to , if they would only honestly explain to us , why so many arrests and persecutions precede each visit of the tsar ' Why upon this visit fresh victims are daily brought into the citadel ? Why they keep the prisoners for years without subjecting them to a trial ? Why they incarcerate innocent people who know nothing
of what ' s going on in the world ? We shudder when we think of their fate , for when once the Inquisitorial Com mission begins its horrid work , torturing them with diabolical questions , —distorting their replies , —reading to them forged protocols , —threatening them , not with death ( for death would be a happy release from the atrocious sufferings ) , but with the ruin of their families , acquaintances , and friends ;—preventing them from sleeping , —torturing them with starvation , or compelling them to live , day after day , for months , upon a salt ( Dutch ) herring , without bread , without one single drop
of water to moisten their parched lips ; the poor sufferers are reduced to a state of epilepsy , or driven into insanity ; and being , moreover , exposed to hear by day and by night nothing but such language as , " Now , scoundrel , confess ! Peter has deposed against you this , Paul that ! " Verily , were they made of iron , they could not long endure such refined and continuous torture , without their whole organization being reduced to such a state that they at last confess anything their tormentors
wish ; and then they learn with delight their condemnation to bo transported to Siberia , to the Caucasus as soldiers , to be thrown for life into the mines , or to be strangled by the fatal rope ; for they then are but killed , not tortured , their conscience no longer tried by hunger , outrage , and flaycllation . In Siberia , in the Caucasus , and the mines , they at least will find neither Lcichtc , Jollshyn , nor any other of the inquisitorial gang . They there die the death of a martyr , without dragging other victims after them . * The niuuu of a place near Warsaw , in which a royal summer palace exists , and where tins Tsar will stay during Ins visit .
We have , by the grace of his Tsarian majesty , a cita del erected with the money of the people of Warsaw by his grace we likewise have a road to Siberia , we have besides casemates , mines , the knout , the rope , and the scaffold . What other favours can he graciously bestow upon us ? Or what more can he in his mercy deprive us of ? We are as naked as Christ on his cross ; they have
divided our garments amongst themselves ; they have scourged and crucified us ; nothing is left us save the spirit and precepts of the Redeemer ; and of these the Tsar cannot rob us , for they are divine , and therefo re cannot belong to Caesar . And we , are we to believe in . the favours that are to be poured upon us ? Trust to promises ? when every day , every moment proves we cannot , we ought not .
Oh no ! no ! we have hadjenough of such favours ! more than enough ! If our groanings , the sighs of our brethren in prison , exile , and banishment could fuse themselves in one single sound , in one prayer , in one sorrow , the very bowels of the earth would melt into tears . If our tears , the blood we have shed , could unite in one stream , humanity would then have an immense historical river , every drop of which would be the relic of a martyr And if all our anguish , all our pangs , fears , disquietude , doubts , and despair could be embraced by the human mind , we should have on earth the idea of the tortures of hell .
Day after day , night after night , do policemen and gendarmes rudely penetrate into the houses of the peaceful inhabitants , and drag from , the bosom of their families all that is held sacred . They seize upon quiet and pious clergymen for having promoted amongst their flocks the love of God and of their fellow-men . They carry off women for having assisted their unfortunate brethren , and all are dragged into the dark casemates of the citadel . He who unhappily falls into their hands is dead to his family , to the world I The father loses all claim to his son , the mother to her daughter , the sister
to her brother . As long as he remains in prison he can be seen by no one ; when they carry the poor victim to Siberia it is always by stealth in the dead of night , in order to prevent his family from providing him with the necessaries for his long journey ; a journey from which he never returns ; if he be tortured to death , the mother has not even the poor consolation of claiming the corpse of her child , for it might bear some traces of the hangman ' s inflictions , and such traces would speak to the living , and would hasten the hour of retaliation . The corpse is , therefore , safer buried in the citadel , covered over with lime .
Thus died and were buried Walter , Mikhalovski , Petlinski . The corpse of Adolphus Chrzanovski was the only one which was given up to his parents . How many others remain in their premature graves of lime the world is ignorant , and will for ever be so . The history of the last twenty years will be the most
extraordinary one;—its title should be " The martyrology of the Polish nation , " for no other title would be so appropriate . It will be under the gallows , in the mines , in the inquisitorial protocols , and dark prisons , that the required materials for its compilation will be collected . Not one man only will contribute to it , but the whole nation , which will yield it to the succeeding generations , to depose it in the holy ark of the allied Peoples , for the
eternal glory of the martyr-nation . We have very often had the opportunity of hearing people , who are in certain circles deemed very conscientious , uttering the following words : — " there are abuses , certainly , but there is not the least doubt that the Tsar is unaware of them ; if he know all that is going on , his supreme will would put an end to the evil , and so forth . But let me ask , if it be true that he is ignorant of those abuses , why does he shut his eyes when those abuses are brought before him ? Why , in the most vital questions of the country , in our agonizing pangs , he refers us to his lieutenant , and the latter to Jollshyn , and Jollshyn in his turn to a subaltern spy ? liberation
Address a petition to the Tsar , soliciting the of an incarcerated brother , husband , or father , he sends you to the prince lieutenant ; and if you forward a petition to the latter he will direct you to Jollshyn , and that omnipotent Lord will answer you , " That is not allowed ; and from such a decree there is no other appeal but to God himself . When will all those trials , all those imprisonments come to an , end ? is a question the people anxiously ask each other . When will they dissolve the inquisitorial commission , that curse upon earth , that diabolical tribunal ? And the members of that commission insolently rCply : — « What should we do if the inquisitorial commission were to be dissolved ? What a number of people
would not such a measure deprive of support ? Conspiracies , therefore , must exist , else the commission would die ! " Hence , people are indiscriminately seized , and thrust into the casemates of the citadel ; one for having read a forbidden book , another because he went abroad without a passport ; such a one booause , relying upon an amnesty given to him , he rerturned to his country ;
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Citation
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Leader (1850-1860), Oct. 26, 1850, page 4, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/cld_26101850/page/4/
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