1831.] Poland, Past and Present. 15 



were a price that the remorseless lust of dominion never stopped to 

 contemplate. Its armies were ordered to march, and the fire and 

 sword executed the law. 



The change of the duchy of Warsaw into a kingdom by Russia was a 

 royal fraud. The name of independence had none of the realities of 

 freedom. The governor was a tyrant, publicly declared to be unfit even 

 for a Russian throne ! The only authority was the Russian sword. 

 Every act of government emanate'd from St. Petersburg}!. The whole 

 nation was in a state of surveillance. Every man who dared to utter a 

 manly sentiment j every writer whose views did not perfectly coincide 

 w r ith the dictates of the Russian cabinet ; every mind superior to the 

 brute, was in perpetual danger of Siberia. What would be the feeling 

 of England, if a doubt of the wisdom of a ministry whispered over the 

 table, much more declared in a public journal, would expose the doubter 

 to instant denunciation by a spy, to instant seizure by a police-officer, 

 and then, without further inquiry without trial, without being con- 

 fronted with the accuser to banishmeut to the farthest corner of the 

 world, to a region of horrors ten thousand miles from every face that 

 he had ever known ? How is it possible to wonder that men should 

 feel indignant under this hideous state of being? that they should disdain 

 life thus shamed and stung ? that they should rejoicingly embrace the 

 first opportunity to struggle for the common rights of existence, and 

 think all things better than to leave the legacy of chains to their chil- 

 dren ? 



This is no fancied picture. There is not an individual under any of 

 the despotic thrones of Europe, whose liberty does not depend on the 

 contempt or the caprice of the monarch ; who may not be undone in a 

 moment at the nod of a Minister ; who dares to utter a sentiment doubt- 

 ing the wisdom or integrity of any man in power. Where is the political 

 philosopher of the Continent, the profound investigator of the principles 

 by which nations are made wiser and better, the generous defender of 

 the privileges of the nation, the honourable and manly detector of abuses 

 and errors? No w r here; or, if any where, in the dungeon. Those 

 characters, by which the whole greatness of England has grown, her 

 past light and strength, and on which she must rest for her noblest 

 dependence in all her future days of struggle, on the Continent are all 

 proscribed. How long would a man like Burke have been suffered to 

 unmask the prodigality of a continental court? How long would a 

 Locke have lived after developing the nakedness of the divine right of 

 kings ? How soon would the dungeon have stifled the eloquence of a 

 Chatham upbraiding the criminal folly of a profligate ministry ! How 

 long since would every leading mind of our legislature, every public 

 journal, and every vigorous and honest writer of England, have been 

 silenced, or persecuted to their ruin, by the hand of power, if their lot 

 had been cast on the Continent ? Hating, as we sincerely do, all unpro- 

 voked violence, and deprecating all unnecessary change, it is impossible 

 for us, without abandoning our human feelings, to refuse the deepest 

 sympathy to the efforts of our fellow-men, in throwing off a despotism 

 ruinous to every advance of nations, degrading to every faculty of the 

 human mind, and hostile to every principle alike of Justice, Virtue, and 

 Christianity. 



Our knowledge of the preparation of the Polish people is still imper- 

 fect ; but we must believe that they would not have so daringly defied 



