Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/129

Rh Petersburg, where there are Finns enough in the censorship who understand our language. No great regard is paid to the convenience of the reader if it is a question of watching the foreign press. Whole articles are cut out; thus one in a French review on the history of anarchism. All that is disapproved on political, moral, or religious grounds, is blackened over in such a way that not a letter is legible.

It is not to be denied that the Russians know how to govern. The machine works to perfection—soundless, silent as death, but effectual. For instance, the time is long gone by when political trials had a certain publicity; now things are done in quite a different and undeniably a far more intelligent way. Early some morning the person concerned is fetched by a carriage and a couple of very polite gendarmes. And from that moment ni vu ni su—impossible to learn anything at all of him until he comes back, if he comes back.

In one of the neighbouring manors a young girl of twenty was arrested one morning. The parents' desperate demand to know the reason why received no answer; the gendarmes had their orders and knew nothing. The parents followed in their carriage and reached Warsaw almost as soon as their daughter. They rushed to the authorities; they knew nothing, only that the young girl was no longer in Warsaw. Six months later she came back from the Petropavlovsk fortress in St. Petersburg. A cousin of hers had been arrested on the charge of possessing a number of forbidden books. Questioned as to whence he had got each of them he had not answered, until the constant awakening during the night-time, and other methods loosened his tongue. He confessed that his cousin had procured him one of these books. As nothing else could be stated against her she was released that time; but this year, when the insane mourning procession of young men and young girls took place through the streets of Warsaw on the day on which the revolt in 1794 broke out, she was arrested anew as a participator. It was of no avail to the promoters of the demonstration that they had called together the young people by means of a handbill in these words: "A lady (here a fictitious name) of great