Still in May Kościuszko sent Kołłontaj and Ignacy Potocki to Warsaw, and the National Council assumed there its legal functions. Among its members sat not only Kołłontaj, 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 Kościuszko 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, Kościuszko, 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 KOŚCIUSZKO II