that, under the pressure of great wants and scarce supplies, our neighbours' martial zeal has grown precarious, their Emperor has but to pronounce the word " Warsaw," and the elastic spirit will return, and carry him on flood-tide over every bar of finance that could impede his way. Nor could any thing so strengthen the ties between the allied countries as their union in a positive and constructive, as well as a mere negative and preventive enterprise, their joint committal to a bold and magnanimous policy, generous to one European people and protective to all. Of all the parties that have reigned in Paris during the last thirty years-Legitimist, Orleanist, Republican, Bonapartist, the first alone is indifferent to the fate of Poland; nor can any political interest be named that awakens in France so little dissension and rests on so broad a base of public support. It is a noble feature in the character of the French nation, that, while still unable to work out their own social problem, they have ever sympathised with foreign struggles of patriotism, and been quick to pity the exiles of defeated liberty. If, as we believe, this is the deepest and most pervading of all high impulses in our neighbours, to call it into healthy action is their best preparation for dealing with their own interior difficulties, the happiest moral gymnastic to fill the interregnum of their constitutional existence. When the time shall come to resume their civic life, they will stand before Europe as liberators of others even when not free themselves,-as having accepted indeed a dictator, but one who could interpret their generous inspirations, and was not afraid to ask them for honourable sacrifices. If he would obliterate painful recollections, and provide a future worthy of ambition; and if we are to be in alliance with the soundest, choicest, most abiding elements of his nation, we must take the mutual pledge to a new political creation on the plains of the Dwina and the Dnieper.

Yet not a creation, but a resurrection. And here lies the peculiarity of the present complication, that the direct way out of it is by a path not revolutionary, but conservative; not cut by military pioneers through the forest of an impenetrable future, but known and trodden as the highway of history. You have not to carve out with the sword a conventional state without physical or moral landmarks, and insulting to every preconception of political or ethnological unity. You have not, like the first Napoleon, to make new surveys, and to cover the walls of your foreign-office with maps bewildering to last season's geography. You have but to take Spruner's Historic Atlas, and turn the leaves backward till you have rid yourself of the great Muscovite upstart, and left his innovations and åρπáyμата behind; and there, with tints of the past upon it

to separate it from the Russian waste beyond, lies the very map that you may send to your political engraver. From the Carpathians to the sources of the Wolga, and spanning Europe from the Black Sea to the Baltic, spreads a region that for centuries has been a realm; that was so within living memory; that has a common language and proud traditions to unite its parts, and a western Christianity to separate it from the domains of the Greek church on the east and south;-that has, for its area, nearly five times the population and produce of the rest of European Russia; and supplies to its usurper's army, now in the field. against you, 300,000 soldiers, with the greater part of the horses, the grain, the hemp, the hides, that mount and feed and equip them. The mode in which this land was stripped of its independence is kept in remembrance by universal abhorrence, and is admitted by all parties,-yes, even by the minor accomplices themselves, to be unique in enormity among political crimes. Frederick the Great assures us that "it was the empress Catherine who proposed the partition. I know," he adds, "that Europe generally believes that the partition of Poland was a consequence of political intrigues imputed to me. However, this is utterly false. After I had proposed divers intermediate measures, it became necessary to have recourse to the partition as the sole measure that could prevent general war. Appearances are deceptive; yet it is by these that the public judge. That which I here say to you is as true as the forty-eighth proposition of Euclid." Maria Theresa pronounced the act to which she gave her reluctant signature to be not only a great blot upon her reign, but so contrary to all right, that a just Providence would assuredly avenge it on succeeding times. And even Russia, though her empress at the moment was incapable of compunction, has thought it decent to have a little remorse at a safe distance. In 1806, Alexander said to some Polish generals: "The partition of Poland is a great injustice. Had I been on the throne at that period, I would never have consented to it." At the congress of Vienna, the sincerity of this profession was put to the test. The Duchy of Warsaw having been restored to its independence by Napoleon, the leading statesmen of the allied powers,-Talleyrand, Castlereagh, Metternich, Stein, Hardenberg, Knesebeck,-concurred in urging the reestablishment of Poland, as an indispensable security to Europe. The Emperor Alexander, however, insisted on taking the kingdom to himself and occupying its throne; only to be merged on the first colourable pretext into a province of his empire. Lord Castlereagh vainly endeavoured to change Alexander's resolution; and the correspondence between them manifests so strongly the alarm of the allies at the Russian pretensions, and exhibits,

on the emperor's side, an hypocrisy and rapacity so odious, that, were it not for the confusion of the Elba-escape and the hundred days, the concession ultimately made with so much weakness to so much wickedness would be utterly inexplicable. The clearness with which the German statesmen saw the danger of yielding to the Russian demands may be judged by the following impressive words of Knesebeck,-a man, be it observed, who detested the Poles with true Prussian intensity:

"The future expects from us that we should consolidate that which the exigencies of the times has produced. The common interests now felt by Europe must be preserved, guaranteed, strengthened for the future. . . . Picture to yourself the Turks driven out of Europe;-what would be the result? Either Russia would establish herself in the country, or a separate Greek empire would be founded there. Now, is it desirable, either to render Russia more powerful even than she is at present, and to have to cope with the colossus on that side also, or to found a Greek state, which the influence of Russia, as regards religion, commerce, and other relations, would soon transform into a Russian colony? . . . If Poland be not re-partitioned between the conterminous countries, such as it was in 1805, there are but two alternatives open for that country: either it must become a Russian province or an independent state. In the latter case, the power of Austria and Prussia will counterbalance that of the new state; and though its possessions may form a topographical projection of their territory, this will not be more dangerous to them than if those countries belonged to a state even beforehand stronger than they. One hundred thousand Poles stationed near Lenczyc may be counterbalanced by one hundred and twenty thousand Prussians collected near Posen or Bromberg; but five hundred thousand Russians stationed near Lenczyc would blow up the Prussian monarchy. As regards the first of these suppositions, the position of the Polish territories would be disagreeable and annoying to Prussia; as regards the second, the position of the Russian territories threatens the very existence, destroys the independence of Prussia. One may submit to the first; in presence of the second life loses its value! ... Where an interest of such magnitude is concerned, the gain of a few square miles of territory or of a few thalers of revenue ought not to be taken into consideration. . . . Austria and Prussia have no reason to fear the Poles taking the offensive. . . The Carpathian Mountains form the true frontiers of Austria. Prussia would attain her object if she were to advance from the Druenca to the Vistula. The safety of the states therefore requires that care be taken to re-establish Poland in her integrity, with the exception of the territories necessary for our security; that is to say, that sincere

and energetic endeavours should be made to form Poland again into a separate state, into an independent state, governed by sovereigns who shall occupy no other throne. Should Russia refuse to consent to the integral restoration of Poland, her plans of universal empire will become patent, the liberty of Europe will be threatened from this side, and another war for the purpose of saving the independence of the other states will not be far distant."*

That war is upon us to-day; and the mistake as well as the guilt of the extinction of Poland is admitted on all sides. With a rare unanimity, politicians of every class-Lords Lyndhurst and Harrowby, Sir R. Peel and Mr. Roebuck-concur here in their verdict; and there is every where a ready-made feeling and preconception to which, in times of difficulty, it is the statesman's highest advantage to be able to appeal. A policy in reversal of a great crime is in itself a power; and a minister who shapes into action the public remorse of forty years, and arms himself with the recorded indignation of the civilised world, is master of priceless elements of success. Why should France and England forego this moral superiority? They have carefully retained it in their possession, through the intervening period, by protest against the annexation in 1830 and the suppression of the Republic of Cracow in 1846. It is irreproachably theirs to use whenever occasion arises; and their statesmen must know that now, if ever, the hour strikes.

Nor do we believe the right to re-establish the old military frontier of Germany to be embarrassed by any insuperable difficulty. You want to be secure from the aggressive designs of St. Petersburg. The very nation which, with Hungary and Venice, long garrisoned eastern Europe against the Ottoman advance, still lives upon the soil, and is ready for the same duty against a new barbarism. It is easy to desire and imagine a better protection, to complain of the responsibility of re-creating it, and to draw pictures of possible failure. But where is the practical measure of protection comparable with this in facility and completeness? Will you be content with dismantling the maritime fortresses of the Czar, and keeping his war-ships under water? His power is not naval, but continental; and it is by land that he will win the coasts of the Archipelago and the North Sea. Will you find your trusty police in the vigour of Turkey? or in the good faith and power of Austria? Will you set up the Principalities to keep watch and ward for you? It has already exceeded all the resources of your diplomacy and arms to save them from a double invasion and every curse permitted by the indulgence of a Vienna waroffice. Besides, is it easier to consolidate a new people, or to bid *The Polish Question from the German Point of View, p. 28.

an old one rise from its oppression and live again? Nations are not made in a day, or extinguished in a generation; but, in spite of energetic protocols, clean or dusty, remain for you a weakness or a power according to laws of God that are never moth-eaten. If the Western Powers, releasing themselves and each other from their original disclaimer of territorial designs, were to plant themselves on the Euxine, they would expose themselves to the charge of selfish aggrandisement and uncalled-for harshness towards a vanquished foe. In short, whilst Russia protrudes with her choicest provinces into the midst of Europe, with her grasping right hand suspended over Prussia and her left over Austria, holding both in permanent asphyxia, it is vain to seek for any real arrest of her great game. It is a visible check-mate; and play as you will the little pawns that are scattered on the board, they must all be knocked off in turn, and the stake be lost.

On the other hand, let Poland be once interposed between Europe and the Muscovite, and hold its line of posts from sea to sea; and there is scarcely a continental question that is not simplified, or a small progressive state that does not receive a new value in the scale. No remark is more common and less wise than that the German states, being the most deeply interested in dangers from the east, ought to take the lead in any reconstruction of Poland and resistance to Russia. Precisely because their interest is so intense, their participation is impossible. They are paralysed by their dependent position, and cannot take the initiative in a move which nevertheless they would gladly sce accomplished. They took their slices of Polish territory against their own convictions, and because otherwise Russia would have seized the whole; and, to be delivered from contact with their terrible patron, they would readily give them back, with some slight and unimportant exception. The pamphlet of " the German Statesman" discusses this question most ably, and shows that the courts of Vienna and Berlin have far stronger grounds than in 1815 for desiring to see a sovereign state at Warsaw; and are not likely tenaciously to withhold the contribution of their Polish provinces, if the sacrifice be reasonably compensated, and do not include the Dantzic littoral connecting East Prussia with West. Indeed, the German question would be thus disencumbered from an entanglement which, had there been no other difficulty, would have sufficed in 1848 to prevent its solution. No nationality is more intolerant of foreign elements than the Teutonic; and the determination of Austria to be admitted integrally into the projected German unity, bringing all her non-German subjects with her, was one main topic of hopeless dissension at the Frankfort assembly; while the duplicity of Prussia, in first commencing and then cancelling the separate organisation of Posen, embroiled