The city has a very unfinished appearance: there are splendid public edifices near by others that seem only begun, or neglected in the midst of building. Revolutions and the fears of revolution have made its prosperity precarious, and the inhabitants lack the highest stimulus to enterprise and exertion, the hope of permanent possession and enjoyment. The splendid government houses are in many cases the palaces of the old Polish nobility, now decayed or extinct families. Many of the former owners, who once rolled in hereditary wealth, have long since been exiled to the desolate wilds of Siberia, and their places will never know them again. A pall, like a perpetual cloud, is on the face of Poland, and by degrees the spirit of liberty will be extinguished. The language and rule of Russia will become universal. There is no hope in the future for the nationality of Poland. In 1863 a spy of the Russian government was stopping at the _Hôtel de l’Europe_ in Warsaw, where we are now writing; and, his business being suspected, the patriotic Poles, who are not likely to abide the presence of such a fellow if they know him, took the liberty of murdering him in his bed. The Russian government seized the house, shut it up, and for some years it has stood closed, a monument and a warning. Russia will not allow her spies to be murdered without visiting her vengeance on the house itself in which the murder is committed. As this hotel was formerly the palace of one of the noble Polish families, and the only hotel of large proportions, it was a serious injury to the city as well as to the proprietors. And I do not apprehend that the Poles will be any more gentle in their treatment of Russian spies, because their largest tavern was shut up half a dozen years. Out of my window I see a soldier standing with his back against the wall; he has a soldier’s cap and long cloak reaching nearly to the ground; he has been there five or six hours, marching now and then a few rods and returning to his post: five soldiers come and stand in front of him, one of them takes off the cloak and puts it on his own shoulders, and, stepping into his place, mounts guard; and this process is continued and repeated all over the city, day and night, year after year. Thousands of Russian soldiers are thus quartered on the city continually: lazy, intemperate, and licentious, they are a moral pestilence; using their power to compel the subject people to submit to their insolence, and corrupting by their example and association those with whom they come into contact.