ferment, with a crowd of 100,000 spectators invited to assist in the funeral of the victims, perfect order was maintained. The success was a fatal one. "All the town obeys you," said Prince Gortschakoff, indignantly. "Things cannot remain in this state; I do not fear you; I have troops now." Five weeks later the Agricultural Society was dissolved. Its dissolution occasioned the second massacre, the crime of the victims being that they petitioned for its reëstablishment. Then power passed definitely into the hands of the Marquis Wielopolski; and in August 1862 Count André, having committed the crime of encouraging some hundred gentlemen to sign a petition to the Czar for national institutions and official union with the old provinces of Poland, was insulted by the Grand Duke, sent to St. Petersburg, and dismissed into honourable exile.

Those who care to follow out at length the complications of 1861-1862 must seek them in the excellent résumé of M. de Mazade, from which we have drawn freely. It is perhaps a misfortune that the book is made up of articles which have not been recast, so that the whole has a rather fragmentary character; but this fault of composition is abundantly redeemed by the author's thorough knowledge of his subject, and by his candour and breadth of view. Our own object is simply to point out, that ever since April 1861 Alexander II. has been carrying out his programme to govern Poland as his father did, and that the second tyranny has been even worse than the first. Except that the commissioners of roads are now to be elected by districts instead of by provinces, a change of very doubtful value, no single organic reform has been promulgated. On the other hand, schools have been shut up by hundreds, industrial enterprise has been discouraged, the clergy have been threatened, leading nobles and authors imprisoned or transported as a precautionary measure; and finally, a conscription organised with the express object of forcing the men most averse to service into the ranks. Since the revolt provoked by these measures, the government has set no limits to its severity. Twenty-three thousand men have been imprisoned as a precautionary measure. Hundreds are sent every week to Siberia Torture and flogging are now among the means employed to extract confessions. The country is filled with spies. In Lithuania the infamous Mouravieff has offered rewards of from three to five roubles (from nine shillings to fifteen shillings) for the head of every insurgent. He has levied a fluctuating property-tax of at least 10 per cent, or two years' income; and the goods of those who cannot at once discharge this monstrous imposition are put up to public auction at nominal prices. We have before us the list of 397 persons whose

estates, down to the 4th of July last, he had sequestered. He causes every village in which insurgents have been harboured to be burned down. For these and other such atrocities he enjoys the unbounded admiration of his countrymen, demoralised by the war, and has received the order of St. Andrew and a letter of thanks from his sovereign. Unhappily he has imitators among the Russian generals; and Annenkoff in Podolia, Kieff, and Volhynia, is said to be not inferior. But even when the Russian generals are humane, well-meaning men, they cannot control the troops under them, embittered by a guerrilla war and constantly drunk. Burning alive, burying alive, flogging, are among the horrors of the present campaign that relieve the ordinary incidents of violation and massacre. At first the Russian organs attempted to represent the revolt as excited by the emigrants, and exclusively carried on by the upper classes. Both statements have been emphatically disproved. Not only are the emigrants not in the national government, but the services of such a man as Mieroslawski have been steadily declined, for fear his reputation as a red republican should excite distrust in Europe. As regards the different classes of the nation, the list of official victims alone proves that all are represented, about half hitherto having been peasants, farmers, or artisans, though of course the higher heads are the first struck. But the strongest testimony has been that of the Russian general Boggawout, who excuses the disorders of his troops on the ground that the peasants burn the villages at their approach, and fly into the woods to join the insurgents. We will just add, that in two corps we ourselves saw in Poland above a third were peasants, and only a small proportion educated men. But the lower classes in towns, especially Warsaw, have no doubt furnished the chief number of combatants.

Is compromise possible? The Czar has in fact answered that question by rejecting all mediation, accepting solemnly the responsibility of his acts, and refusing to treat the insurgents as belligerents. After seven months' struggle, with from 20,000 to 30,000 men in the field against him and baffling his best troops, Alexander II. allows no exchange of prisoners, and shoots or even hangs as traitors the unhappy gentlemen who have formerly served against their will in the Russian army. Sierakofsky, who was dragged from the bed on which he lay wounded to the gallows, had made himself honourably famous through the length and breadth of the empire by procuring the abolition of corporal punishment in the army. To ask the Poles to lay down their arms after the bitterness of such a struggle, in blind reliance on the mercy of a prince who

permits these atrocities, would surely be to expect too much of human nature. Would any sane man like to pledge himself that the Czar-father would not respond to their confidence by sending them Mouravieff? But if Alexander II. were not the weak man he is,- qui a des velléités mais qui n'a pas de volonté, -and who is swayed by every impulse of popular animosity or rancour, a capitulation of the weak, considered as revolted subjects, to the strong, being a foreign despot, is hardly a measure to be taken while there are yet a hundred men with arms in their hands. What the Czar really counts on is the coming winter. His troops have been repeatedly beaten, and barely keep the field in spite of numbers and superior equipment. His treasury is bankrupt, and heavy arrears of pension and pay are even now said to be due. But he believes that four months' frost will save Russia again, as in the campaign against Napoleon. Having amused and baffled the Western powers by a half-evasive, half-insolent diplomacy, he now looks forward in confidence to extirpating their protégé during the winter. The weak will have learned a new lesson on the value of moral sympathies.

It is not for us or for any one to predict the future. Considering the national jealousy of France, the dislike to commence a war of which the issue cannot be foreseen, and the weakness of the present ministry, who dare not have a decisive policy for good or evil, the chances are certainly considerable that England will remain at peace during the next six months, and that Austria will follow her example. We need not discuss the possibilities which are still talked of in Vienna of an Austrian army of occupation taking possession of Poland up to the gates of Warsaw. But there is more than one step short of war which would seriously derange the Russian combinations. The recall of the English, French, and Austrian ambassadors, in imitation of what was done in Naples in 1859, would be something more than a mere moral remonstrance. It would shake the prestige of the war-party; it would necessitate fresh armaments on the Baltic, and ruinous expenses throughout the empire. Another and even simpler step would be to acknowledge the Poles as a belligerent power. The Presse of Vienna-the Austrian Times-has already declared in favour of this step, and it is generally believed that Franz Joseph and his ministers only wait the signal from St. James's, and the assurance that they will not move alone. There are several precedents for this measure. In the conference held at London in July 1826, between the cabinets of London, Paris, and St. Petersburg, it was postulated "that an intervention is justifiable not only when the safety and essen

tial interests of a state are affected by the internal events taking place in a neighbouring state, but also when the rights of humanity are violated by the excesses of a cruel and barbarous government." The Porte refusing to grant an amnesty, the three powers at once recognised the belligerent rights of the Greeks. Similarly the belligerent rights of Belgium were recognised; and in this case England was not eventually drawn into any war with Holland. The insurrection of the Spanish colonies was recognised by England, the United States, and Sweden. We recognised the belligerent rights of the Southern Secessionists without even sufficient delay to show that they could hold their own against the government of Washington. Here then appears to be a distinct principle, that it is in the option of any power to recognise insurgents of any kind, and at any time during the struggle, as belligerents.

What, it may be said, would be gained by this? The immediate and immense gain would be the winter. During those very months when the Russians expect to draw their enemy, as in a net, the Polish combatants would emigrate into Austria, leaving perhaps a few of the best-seasoned bands to harass the enemy. The insurrection would become something impalpable and yet terribly near. It would buy its munitions of war at a fourth of their present price, and would recruit soldiers from every country in Europe. The men who are now imprisoned on suspicion by the Austrian police, and sent back over the frontier, would be allowed to traverse Gallicia at will, so long as they did not do it in regular companies. It is not too much to say that the whole labour of subjugation would have to be recommenced. Yet in one particular at least the war would have a tendency to be less bloody. It would be difficult for the Czar's government to persist in treating as brigands men whom the rest of Europe recognised as regular belligerents. We might fairly hope to hear of flags of truce between the two combatants and of mercy to the wounded.

It rests with Russia to prevent this recognition, and to reconcile herself with civilised Europe. She is still in a position, if she will only use it, to yield with dignity. The reconstruction of Congress Poland with a native parliament, under a Russian grand duke, and with international guarantees for the honest carrying out of the amnesty that has been so often talked about, would be nothing more than the Court of Peterhof is already pledged to by the Treaty of Vienna, and yet would suffice to satisfy public opinion. France and England have nothing to gain by the continuance of an internecine struggle, which occupies their diplomacy, produces constant fluctuations in the money-market, and keeps cabinets and press

in a wearisome state of tension. The fee-simple of Poland would not pay us for the disquietude of a year's European war. That the Poles would dislike such an accommodation as we have suggested is more than probable; but there is just sufficient equity about it to make it certain that they would forfeit the sympathies on which they now rely if they refused to entertain it. Besides, their faith in cabinets must by this time have undergone several disenchantments. As the scheme is in fact that which the Russian organs steadily represent as already contemplated, the only humiliation for the Emperor would be in admitting European intervention in the case of a province which he only holds in trust for Europe. The revolt of 1831 no more transferred Poland to the Russian empire than the revolt of 1848 in the Ionian Islands changed them from a trust into a dependency of the British empire. Sooner or later the Czar's government will discover that it is not wise to disregard public opinion and European treaties; and it may have occasion to learn before many months are over that there are other means of punishing bad faith than by drawing the sword.

ART. VI. THE ROYAL SUPREMACY, AND THE
HISTORY OF ITS INTRODUCTION.

State Papers of Henry VIII., published by Royal Commission.
Correspondence of Cromwell in the State-Paper Office.

THE anxiety of the episcopal bench to get rid of Bishop Colenso by some legitimate means brings us once more face to face with the Act of Supremacy and its authors. Hitherto, churchmen have upheld that statute with as much vehemence and tenacity as if the existence of the Church itself depended upon it. The greatest of English theologians, from the days of Hooker, have flourished it in the face of their enemies as a weapon of proof not less effective against Romanism than Dissent. To the old thick-and-thin supporter of "Church and State," the royal supremacy seemed a tower of strength. He was not ashamed to be told that he belonged to a church which owed its superiority solely to its political advantages. He would not have flinched from the assertion, that the Reformation was a political movement; that the state church was under greater obligations to the king than the bishops. He rather gloried in the fact. He saw in this alliance a pledge that the powers of the state should be employed in securing