Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/19

Rh the inconsequent. If I had known of the prohibition against having a pistol in my travelling bag, all I needed to do was to put it into my pocket; for the pockets are not searched. If I had known that it was forbidden to carry foreign books, I might have sent them from Vienna to a bookseller in Warsaw, and I should have received them without any delay.

The government regulations are not strict enough, and yet so strict that, for fear of dismissal, the subordinate officials are compelled to carry out their duty brutally as well as injudiciously. The absurdities which met me on the frontier, continually meet the foreigner and sometimes the native born. A few years ago, on the Prusso-Russian frontier, one of my friends, who had prepared himself for the medical examination in Warsaw at the time when the University was still Polish, but who was compelled to submit to the examination after it had become Russian, had a Russian grammar, written in Russian, taken from him because the custom-house official did not know the book.

The Russian rule is not like the Prussian, prudent and uniform; it is incoherent, absurd, and often entrusted to clumsy hands. The pressure upon Russian Poland is so great that it could not be borne for a month if many of the regulations were not chaotic and meaningless, others too trivial to be executed, others easily avoided by bribery, others entrusted to instruments of so little keenness that their effect is destroyed, and others again to such intelligent and cultivated men that they are not put into practice.

I had accepted an invitation to deliver three lectures in French in the town-hall of Warsaw. In regard to these lectures I had many difficulties beforehand. I was compelled to prepare them in time to send the manuscript to Warsaw a month before my arrival, as they were to be submitted to a double censorship, the usual one, and a special one for public lectures. Since it was certain that if they were sent by the ordinary post they would be detained for an indefinite period at the frontier, it was necessary to find a more convenient means of transit. Ambassadorial courtesy enabled me to send them by a