The design of bringing about a forced assimilation, and of making the Polish give way to the Russian element, is often shown in the most futile administrative details, in the simplest questions of trade, and other material interests. Having once entered on this system, Russia is condemned to fear everything, and to watch every event. Not very long ago, Prussia drew up a set of complicated rules with regard to the importation of cattle into its territories, and established such a quarantine as might preserve its herds from those epizootic disorders which ravaged the southern parts of Russia. Who suffered from these difficulties? Of course, the kingdom of Poland (a country essentially agricultural, but possessing in its cattle one element of wealth) could not but suffer. It was then timidly requested that, in order to have the restrictions, made for the sake of Prussia, removed, and in order to leave the trade between Germany and Poland free, such precautionary measures as had heretofore been in force at the Prussian frontier of the kingdom should also be put in practice on the marches of the Russian provinces in which the contagion obtained. But nothing of the sort was done; and for this reason, that the sanitary _cordon_ thus demanded must have been upon the old Polish boundary, and it would, oddly enough, have described the line of those frontiers which existed in 1792, and which the treaties of 1815 had laid down as the frame within which the commercial life of the different provinces of Poland was to exist. Russia was represented at Warsaw by a terrible man, a Director of the Interior, M. Muchanof, who could not bear to see Poland imaged even under the shape of a law of transit. Another fact ought to be noticed. During the last years, a great question, from which the Russian Empire has much to fear, has been in agitation, I mean the emancipation of the peasantry; a problem of which the Emperor Alexander II. has attempted the solution. My business is not with the discussion of the subject in itself, but only to remark, that there is a great difference in regard to it between Russia and the kingdom of Poland. In the kingdom all the principles of the French civil code remain in full vigour. There is equality of persons in the eye of the law; but the constitution of property is a different thing. Thus, our peasants still pay, it is true, a feudal fine, or _corvée_, on the fields which they cultivate; but this fine is not a sign of personal servitude. The labouring man has his civil individuality. Thus, in the different countries his condition differs essentially; and yet when the question arose the other day, Polish proprietors were forbidden to do otherwise than follow the programme traced by the Russian government solely with a view to Russia.