vated. Meanwhile the Pole was the Frenchman of Eastern Europe,-gay-hearted, prodigal, thoughtless, dividing his time between the faro-table and his seraglio. But whereas the French nobility-held in check by the towns, decimated by civil war, and controlled by able sovereigns--had surrendered the essentials of power and clung only to the most meaningless and vexatious privileges, the Polish nobles had seized the opportunity of the dying out of the Jagellons to establish their own power on the ruins of the throne. In 1572 the crown for

the first time was thrown open to the world by the fatal advice of a Zamoiski, and the right of election extended to the lesser nobility; that is, from 200 or 300 magnates to 100,000 gentlemen. From that hour the ruin of Poland was sealed. Under competent kingship it might have done almost any thing in the sixteenth century, at the period of Russia's greatest weakness and of the Thirty Years' War. But with its kings mere titular presidents it lost provinces even under the ablest: under Sigismund III., who burned Moscow, and under John Sobieski, who saved Vienna.

Admitting all this, and without seeking to extenuate the excesses of a rampant liberty, we can hardly regard it as the very worst form of political error. The Polish nobles were perhaps not more factious than the Swedish; the difference was that the former were placed between great powers, whose interest it was to maintain disorder. From the time of Sobieski to the first partition, the country had three sovereigns; the first an Elector of Saxony, nominated by Austria and maintained by Russia; the second his son, nominated by Russia and Austria; and the third an old lover of Catherine II., nominated by a Muscovite army. Great political virtue in all classes of the nation might still have saved the country, or retarded its fall; but the eighteenth century was not the epoch of great political virtues in Europe generally. The Poles fell, as we have said, unjustly, but not undeservedly. The question really is, whether they are to be condemned to all time for having committed a gross political blunder in the sixteenth century, which they clung to as a privilege in the seventeenth, and which they were not allowed to reform in the eighteenth. For the influence of the Saxon court and Russian arms were steadily employed to maintain the Polish constitution in its most obnoxious form. In 1773 the partitioning powers declared, as fundamental laws which they would not allow to be disputed, that the crown should be elective for ever, and that no son or grandson should succeed his father until after an interval of two reigns; and further, that the republican form of government should be maintained. In 1788-1791 the Polish

Diet, notwithstanding, declared the throne hereditary, gave political rights to the middle classes and peasants, and reformed other flagrant abuses of the old system. The reforms were made the excuse of the second partition.

There is a common idea in England that nations are born free, and without special natural endowment cannot be made fit for constitutional government. It is the fashion to assume, accordingly, that the past failures of the Poles are decisive against them; that having enjoyed and lost liberty, they are clearly unfit for it. We venture to think that this view is at least overstrained. Even, taking our own country, it may fairly be asked whether an observer in 1689, recalling the history of the past fifty years,-the misgovernment of Charles I., the rebellion, Cromwell's military government, the servility of all classes under Charles II., and the open defiance of law by his Catholic brother,-might not have pronounced representative institutions an utter failure in England, and only possible in states like Holland or Sweden. But there are even better instances at hand. Down to 1815 Norway was a Danish province, with absolutely no rights; since then it has had the freest government in Europe. Spain failed for forty years, and has yet succeeded within the last ten in making her constitution work. Italy seemed to want almost every element of the system; the people were of the Latin race, unused to selfgovernment, with the aristocracy abased, and the peasantry uneducated; yet the Italian Chambers are not sensibly below the English standard The fact is, Europe generally has become familiarised with the parliamentary system, and the errors of the first French experimentalists have been fruitful of good to their successors. But, besides this, there is a sensible difference between generations of the same people. The pictures of Vandyke and Reynolds tell their own tale. The Polish gentleman would be more or less than human, if the events of the last century, the struggles and sufferings of at least three generations, had not left their impress on the national character. A French traveller in the seventeenth century remarked a general carelessness about religion; the Times correspondent now speaks of a morbidly religious sentiment. The people was the most outspoken of all; it is now one vast conspiracy under a secret government. Two generations have grown up under the Code Napoléon. But, above all, the position of classes is changed. There is now a large middle class of native tradesmen and artisans; it is, in fact, the only part of the population that tends steadily to increase. The peasants were serfs; they are now not only free, but copyhold proprietors, the only question unadjusted being that of compensation to their landlords.

Railroads and steamers are binding the different provinces together. A national literature of singular fertility and depth has grown up. It is, of course, impossible to say beforehand that even these advantages would enable the Poles to govern themselves well; but we may fairly regard them as elements of hope, if a new trial were given. That trial, be it remembered, has never been vouchsafed since the Treaty of Vienna, except for a few years under Alexander; and the success then was considerable. Even the secret government may be fairly cited as proof of the people's capacity. In spite of its immense difficulties, it commands the entire confidence of the nation, and beats the Russian police on their own ground. We are constantly told, in "inspired" newspapers, of disunion among the leaders. Differences of opinion there no doubt are and must be, but there are no signs as yet of disunion, or even of such opposition as Fox and his followers maintained throughout our greatest national struggle. Even the class jealousies which have existed in Poland, as every where, and which the Russian government has steadily fostered, appear to melt away before partnership in danger.

Assuming, however, that the Poles have been misgoverned, and that they are capable of self-government, the question still remains whether they were justified in insurrection. We are most of us apt to think that it is better to endure certain grievances than to redress them at the risk of extinction. Could not the Poles have developed the institutions actually conceded to them by a certain exercise of political tact and long-suffering? And, if so, is Europe to bear the penalty of the impatience that preferred appealing to arms? A glance at the relations of Poland with Russia, and at the history of the last seven years, will answer this question. Poland and Russia represent two opposite civilisations. The central idea of Russian government, from time immemorial, has been the Czar-father, the paternal despot; of the Polish, the independence of a large governing class. Distinctions of rank in Russia are bureaucratic, and the pride of family is a modern exotic; in Poland, the feeling of race has often bordered on insanity. Leave a Russian village to itself, and its peasants organise a communistic system; in a Polish settlement the divisions of land are broadly marked and jealously guarded. Traditions and immobility are the principles of the Russian Church, and of its most powerful sectaries; it has no political ambition, except so far as its patriarch and priests are the instruments of the Czar. In Poland, the adopted land of Socinus, Catholicism has constantly represented, as it does even now, the divorce of church and state, and has thus been a principle of spiritual liberty. Lastly,

Polish civilisation has been Latin from the earliest times, and that of Russia has been Byzantine. Each nation, therefore, represents opposite principles of life. The experiment of Russian civilisation is one to which every thinking man must heartily wish success, not only for the sixty millions whose happiness is involved in it, but because the very novelty of the conditions under which it has been developed, promises to throw new light on the whole history of man. But the possession of Poland rather hinders than assists the working out of the problem. It produces the worst antagonism of all, the bitterness of the conqueror towards the conquered; and Russia, having reached a point where contact with the West has become necessary, is in danger of isolating herself from the sympathies and influences of all Europe. Political liberty and freedom of thought will be for ever proscribed in St. Petersburg, if they are put down at Warsaw.

We dwell upon this antagonism of character between the two nations because we believe it explains in great measure why they have never been able to assimilate. The idea at St. Petersburg has been that a propaganda of Panslavism would finally remove all difficulties. There have been moments when it had some chance of success. In 1846, when Austria encouraged the Jacquerie of the Gallician peasants against their landlords, Wielopolski called upon all his countrymen to sink their nationality in the Russian, that they might be revenged on their German enemies, and a deputation waited upon the Czar offering to put Gallicia into his hands; receiving the characteristic answer, that if he wished for the province he would conquer it, but would never take it as the gift of revolted subjects. At the accession of Alexander II., when milder measures were promulgated, the exiles released, and a certain liberty allowed, the comparison of Russia to Austria, not yet chastened by Solferino, was more than ever favourable to the former. Men hoped every thing from a young prince. But Alexander II., himself a partisan of new ideas, was under the influence of men of the old order. Poland, to the generation of Russians that has grown up under Nicholas, is a conquered province that must be absorbed. These men know nothing, think nothing, of the Treaty of Vienna, and of international obligations. They imagine that the war of 1831 has annulled all; as if a revolt provoked by misgovernment could cancel Russia's obligations to France, England, and Germany. Alexander II., reluctantly, it is said, but resolutely, made himself the mouthpiece of the old Muscovite party. Addressing a people who had thronged to do honour to him, he told them: I mean the order established by my father to be maintained.

Therefore, gentlemen, and before all, no dreams, no illusions. The happiness of Poland depends on its entire fusion with the other peoples of my empire. What my What my father has done, therefore, was well done, and I will maintain it. My reign shall be the continuation of his. . . Have you understood me? I love better to reward than to punish; but know, and take it as my word, gentlemen, that if need be, I shall know how to repress and to punish, and it shall be seen that I will punish severely." This speech, to say the least, was ungracious and unkingly from a sovereign to the subjects whom he saw for the first time. But words, after all, are words. It remains to be seen by what acts that declaration was commented on and explained.

The leading man among Poles for the last thirty years, and therefore a fair type of the national aspirations and character, on one side at least, has been the Count André Zamoiski. He belongs to a family which is professedly Anglomane, and several of whose members have been educated in England, while some of them are said to speak English better than their native tongue. Certainly no man could better represent than Count André the English horror of war, or our belief in material progress and in all gradual processes of constitutional growth. In Count Cavour, also a student of English institutions, the acquired culture was only subservient to a passionate Machiavellic Italian temperament, that would have wrapped Europe in flames at any moment to save a single province of Italy. But to Count André Zamoiski's temperament peace was necessary, as the condition of self-culture and self-government. His great works have been industrial enterprises: stud-stables, a line of steamers on the Vistula, a society for lending money on mortgage, and the famous Agricultural Society for improving the staple of Polish industry. In England such a man, however respected and respectable, would have no great political influence. In Poland he was regarded by his countrymen as the leader of the patriotic party, and by the Russians as a conspirator; the more dangerous because acting with steady legality. In fact, the Agricultural Society served first as a small bond of union between Polish gentlemen in distant counties, then as an excuse for meetings in which social questions, such as serf-emancipation, were discussed privately, within the limits of the existing laws. That a portion of its members would have liked to go further, and give the society a distinctly political character, is no doubt true; but their president never permitted this deviation from their statutes. At last, after the massacre of February, Prince Gortschakoff, trembling for the safety of the town, invited Count André to provide for public security. The result was, that during a week of unparalleled