What makes these new events so important, is that they form part of a European situation, at the same time that they are the outward and visible signs of a profound and inward work, of which Russian Poland is the centre (most active and most prominent at present), but which has also revealed, in the Grand Duchy of Posen, in Galicia, in short, everywhere, that, in spite of treaties and congresses, Polish feeling, the last and indestructible tie of a riven country, still lives. This question of Poland has its roots deep in the past, and I am not ignorant that it is so. Whether politically or diplomatically, it goes back, like so many more, to the transactions of 1815, and when the attempt is made to draw closer the knot of European affairs, whence come the crises of which this question has been the unhappy and the perennial source? Is it not because these treaties have manifestly been an immense and avowed violation of an imprescriptable right, or rather the fatal and complaisant consecration of all previous violations? One of the most essential causes of the tribulation and disorder in the politics of the time--a cause which now appears in all its distinctness--is the ever-growing contradiction between the dispositions of the solemn act of Vienna and the real state to which the different parts of Poland are reduced; so that, if there have been, if there shall again be, revolutionists, we must settle this in our minds, that it is not the Poles who are such. An example has been given them in this matter, and they have been left with this sad conviction, that, according to the rights of 1815, they have the right on their side. It is, indeed, a curious thing that the people of Poland have been the ‘last to step down into the arena of to-day at that name of “nationality” which serves as a watchword to all other revolting populations.’ Yet Poland was the first and the only country in whose favour such a word was hinted at by the Congress of Vienna, when it was inscribed in treaties, as if to render a marked homage to heroic misfortune, and, while tempering by guarantees the way in which Poland was abandoned, to maintain the mockery of an ideal ‘nationality,’ in spite of territorial division.