offer his sword to the Rising; and it is
said that this ungracious reception, widely different from Kosciuszko's
usual address, was due to the fact that he, whose own private life was
blameless, was of too Puritan a temper to be able to overlook certain
notorious aspects of Poniatowski's character.

Still in May Kosciuszko sent Kollontaj and Ignacy Potocki to Warsaw, and
the National Council assumed there its legal functions. Among its
members sat not only Kollontaj, Potocki, and those who had taken part in
the old Polish Diet, former ministers of state and high officers, two
representatives of the clergy of the Latin and Greek rites, but the
banker Kapostas, who had been the originator of the secret confederation
that had prepared the Rising in Warsaw and who had only narrowly escaped
Russian imprisonment, and the shoemaker Kilinski. Thus for the first
time in Polish history artisans and burghers were included in the
national governing body. The assembly was animated by that new spirit of
democracy in its noblest form in which Kosciuszko himself was steeped.
It carried forward the task that the Constitution of the 3rd of May had
begun and had been forced by Poland's conquerors to abandon. Its
presidency passed by rotation to each member, who called each other
"citizen," and who were all, without distinction of rank and class,
treated as equals. They organized the Ministry into the ordinary
departments, and entered into relations with foreign powers, among which
England, Sweden, and Austria--the latter soon to change her
face--acknowledged them as the lawful government of state.

Having thus lightened the burden of civil rule by securing effective
colleagues, Kosciuszko, although he did not cease to be the chief
dictator of the nation, could now more freely devote himself to the
immediate object of the Rising.

CHAPTER VII

THE RISING OF KOSCIUSZKO

II

We have reached the month of May, 1794. Kosciuszko and the Russian army
under Denisov were now at close grips, Denisov repeatedly attacking,
Kosciuszko beating him off. Communications with Warsaw and all the
country were impeded. Provisions were almost impossible to procure.
Kosciuszko's men went half starved. Burning villages, set on fire by
Denisov's soldiers, a countryside laid waste, were the sight the Poles
beheld each day, while the homeless peasants crowded into Kosciuszko's
camp to tell him their piteous stories. Then Denisov retreated so
swiftly to