May 4.—A storm of indignation was raised by the arrival of the _Indépendance Belge_ with the report of a speech delivered by Pope Pius IX. in the Consistory upon the occasion of a canonization. His Holiness, while in the same breath disclaiming any intention of fomenting revolt or of encouraging treason, made a furious attack upon the Tsar for his policy in Poland. He accused him of endeavouring to uproot the Roman Catholic religion, of exciting rebellion under the pretence of quelling it, of transporting whole populations to frozen and desolate regions, and of removing bishops from the functions to which the Church had called them. There is nothing so dangerous, nothing so misleading as falsehood with a thin veneer of truth. No one can deny that great numbers of Poles had been deported; but many, if not most, of them had been sent to Samara, a province in the south-east of European Russia, rich in that famous black earth which makes a farmers’ paradise, in which numbers of prosperous German colonists were doing a thriving trade in wheat, tobacco, cattle and horses, while even those who were sent to Siberia were described to me by an Englishman who had just come from there as quite happy and comfortably established with their families. Siberia is by no means the cruel country about which such terrible tales have been served up for European consumption, dressed with all the condiments of fanatic hatred. Even Dostoievski—no friend to the Russian Government—when writing against the prison system of Siberia, to which he was sent for political reasons, speaks almost with affection of the country itself. It was the life of the criminal convict in Siberia which was such a nightmare, and with that the transported Poles had nothing to do. But Siberia was always a good name of terror, and as such the Pope made rhetorical capital of it. As regards the question of uprooting the Roman Catholic Church in Poland, there can be no doubt that the Greek Church has always been very intolerant. There was indeed a time—in the Middle Ages—when the followers of other creeds were not looked upon as Christians; the Russian chroniclers called the Roman Catholics “unbaptized Latins,” holding that there could be no baptism without total immersion; and when the Tsar received ambassadors it was customary for him to give them his hand, but in the audience hall there was kept a golden vessel in which the autocrat might wash off the contamination. Though these prejudices were dead and matters of history, the hatred which inspired them was very much alive, and the fighting in Poland was in a great measure a war of religion. Still it was simply an invention of the priests, wishful to keep up the spirit of rebellion, to say that there was any desire on the part of the Government to extirpate their faith.