down, and to punish, and it will be seen that I punish severely.’ This happened in the month of May 1856, immediately after the Congress of Paris. It is not without reason that I recall to-day a vain attempt at negotiation broken off by an illusory promise. It determines the events which have since arisen, in the same way that the debate at the Congress of Paris has governed events in Italy; it also in some sort puts on the recent crisis in Poland a mark of European sympathy, and proves an intelligent wish, while it shows further how Russia had conducted herself up to the time that this crisis arrived. ‘What my father did, he did well!’ an expression which was perhaps highly filial on the part of the Emperor Alexander II., but which was certainly an imprudent and impolitic dictum. What was really that _order_ established by Nicholas which he promised to maintain? I do not refer now to the guarantees by which the treaties of Vienna had striven to surround a nationality which they abandoned; I do not speak of the constitution of 1815, the work of the Emperor Alexander I., but of the _statut_ granted by the Emperor Nicholas himself in 1832--a _statut_ which was as a punishment, the penalty of a defeat sustained by Poland; and what had become of that? It was M. Tymowski, a Russian Minister of State, who last year, at the commencement of the affair, told us what _had_ become of it. In a private report he stated that this _statut_ had never been either abrogated, or put into execution. Of all the new authorities which it created, councils for towns, councils for palatinates and provincial assemblies, ‘with the right of deliberating on questions of general interest in the kingdom,’ not one has ever existed. There ought also to have been a Council of State, but that probably was held to be either too revolutionary a measure, or too visible a sign of autonomy. So in 1841 this Council of State was quietly replaced by two new departments of the directing Senate of St. Petersburg, which were called the ninth and tenth departments, and were transplanted to Warsaw. ‘In a word,’ added M. Tymowski, ‘it may be said that since 1831 the kingdom of Poland has been given up entirely to bureaucracy, and that without any regard to the _statut_ of 1831, it has also remained under the exclusive influence of officials, without the participation of any of its inhabitants, who are in this manner rendered incapable of sharing in the Government.’