IN its early years the Polish socialist movement was small in scale and revolutionary in character. For this state of affairs there were two main reasons: industrial backwardness and the absence of any open and recognized Polish political life. Since her third partition by Prussia, Russia, and Austria in 1795 Poland had ceased to be a State. The partitioning powers gave little encouragement to the economic development of the areas under their control, so the industrial proletariat, the natural recruiting ground for a socialist party, remained a small minority of Polish society. Because there was no national parliamentary life, Polish socialists could not organize a national constitutional party, as their fellow socialists were doing in Germany and England.
Yet by the end of the nineteenth century the socialist movement in Poland had considerable vitality and contained some outstanding personalities amongst its leaders; men and women who were to play a prominent role as revolutionaries both in their own country and abroad.
During the last two decades of the century, however, important though limited industrial developments did take place in the Russian part of Poland, and during this period the first two Polish socialist groups of importance were formed.1 In 1881 an organization known as the Polish People was formed under the leadership of Limanowski. Its members combined socialist ideals with the patriotic traditions of the national insurrections. A year later Waryński founded a socialist party, called the Proletariat, in which patriotism was played down, the international character of the revolutionary movement was stressed, and the need for co-operation with Russian socialists was accepted. Though the Proletariat did not expound a full Marxist programme, Tadeusz Daniszewski, the official historian of the____________________