an insurrection which had been carefully planned in secret, and was ordered and guided by a Central Committee of Social Democrats in London. The movement was not, therefore, a national one in its origin, though resistance to the conscription had drawn a large body of the nobles and the middle classes into the ranks of the insurgents. In order to free themselves from the dictation of the Socialists, they had made Langiewicz Dictator; but after a time he left them and fled to Austria. The Committee of Insurrection, which was then formed, had nothing to do with the Socialist Committee in London, and it was fighting, not for Constitutional reform under the Czar, but for the restoration of the Polish [Illustration: CORRIDOR, OSBORNE HOUSE. (_After a Photograph by J. Valentine and Sons, Dundee._)] Kingdom of 1772, an object of which England, as a party to the Treaties of 1815, could hardly approve. The insurgents had no military organisation or competent leaders, and they were carrying on guerilla warfare with the tenacity of despair.[159] As for the peasants, they had no reason to love their old tyrants, the nobles. For them the Government of the Czar was a lesser evil than the _régime_ of 1772, and so they held aloof.[160] Still, some steps had to be taken to satisfy public opinion and ward off attacks in Parliament. Ministers accordingly decided to remonstrate gently with Russia--the excuse being that the Treaties of 1815 gave England a moral right of interference between Russia and Poland. The policy of France, on the other hand, was interference, not on the basis of the Treaties of 1815, which, the Emperor declared in his Speech to the Chambers, were dead, but in the interests of humanity outraged at the excesses which Poles and Russians were alike committing. Austria, on the other hand, considered that she could only approach Russia as a neighbouring Power, like Prussia, possessing Polish subjects, whose institutions might with advantage be imitated in Russian Poland. The attitude of Prussia was that of declared friendliness to Russia.