RECENT ATROCITIES IN POLAND. 61 5 



The indomitable spirit of the gallant Poles keeps the Russian 

 authorities constantly on the alert. During the day, of late, the streets 

 are constantly patrolled by strong Russian detachments, and more 

 than once the garrison has bivouacked all night in the streets and 

 public squares. So fearful are they lest their troops should imbibe 

 any local attachments, that all intercourse between the Russian officers 

 and the Polish inhabitants is strictly forbidden. The cantonments 

 of their regiments are constantly changed, and it is the intention of 

 the Russian government to relieve their army of occupation every 

 six months rather an expensive measure, we apprehend, for the 

 exhausted treasury of Nicholas Paulovitch. 



From the stern and lofty resignation of the gallant Poles there are 

 some sanguine spirits, who fondly imagine that the regeneration of 

 their ill-fated land may yet be achieved, and that the first " coup de 

 canon" fired in Europe would be the trumpet of Polish resurrection. 

 But even were the prospects of a general war less remote than they 

 really are, such a glorious consummation is now a political dream. 

 The energies of Poland may be unsubdued, but her resources are 

 exhausted ; her elements of resistance are scattered, while she writhes 

 within the iron grasp of her gigantic and ruthless foe beyond the 

 power of redemption. No ! the fate of that gallant people is 

 irrevocably sealed ; the favourable moment for action has been twice 

 allowed, within the space of twenty years to escape, and Poland will 

 remain to the latest posterity a monument of the false policy of two 

 different but not remote periods. The first was, the political error of 

 Napoleon, the non-re-organization of that ancient kingdom at the 

 period of the invasion of Russia in 1812. We allow that the failure of 

 that great enterprise may be attributed to military causes, to the viola- 

 tion of the principle of a base, and to the extension upon too gigantic a 

 scale of the line of operations still it was a fatal political error that 

 materially influenced the final direction of the tide of affairs. But 

 equally fatal, if not more so, to the future independence of western 

 Europe, will prove the temporizing inertia, the drivelling policy of 

 the governments of France and England, who have deserved the 

 curses of future generations. 



Well do we recollect that when a universal cry of sympathy re- 

 sounded through regenerated France in favour of heroic Poland, that 

 Sebastiani strove in a Machiavellian discourse to convince the Chamber 

 of Deputies of the strategic impossibility of an armed intervention on 

 the part of France in favour of Poland, by holding up to them the 

 gigantic military means of the powers of the north. Never was 

 legislative assembly so cajoled and deceived. Not only was the opera- 

 tion practicable, but we boldly assert that the issue of the campaign 

 would have been widely different : it was not necessary to march 

 across Germany. Had France or England have only despatched a 

 squadron to the Baltic, it would have acted upon the very line of 

 communication of the Russian army it might also have thrown into 

 Polangen both arms and ammunition, of which the Poles stood in such 

 need, that the third rank of their regular regiments, and the entire of 

 their partisan corps, were armed only with scythes. Again, while 

 the manly effects of this intervention upon the population of Poland 



