It would, indeed, be useless to tell how bureaucracy and officials have for the last thirty years swayed the Government of Poland: and I shall content myself with reminding my readers and the public, that one day the Emperor Nicholas did ‘with his own hand and with a quiet mind’ (adds his minister) order the _transplantation_ to the Caucasus of forty-five thousand families, all ‘formerly Polish gentry, but bearing henceforward the name of freemen and burghers,’ as it is phrased in this strange Government language. We have often heard that a painful yoke is laid by their rulers on the people of Lombardy, of the pontifical States, or of the old kingdom of the two Sicilies: nor is this said without reason; but we must also remember that there is a country where, in the daylight of this present century, it has been possible to _transplant_ forty-five thousand families guilty of no other crime than of being suspected of patriotism, and of ‘exciting the suspicion of the Government.’ From this specimen we may understand how unintentionally cruel and how mournfully deceptive were those words of Alexander II.--‘All that my father did, he did well’--words which were also, at least, an unfortunate answer to that expression of European sympathy which had been checked at the threshold of this Congress of Paris in 1856. It has been the mistake of all Russian policy for the last thirty years, to believe that an absence of all law means _order_, and to suppose that the omnipotence of force is at once illimitable and undefined. No doubt for the moment such policy succeeds. It can command silence, it can veil difficulties, and adjourn the discussion of them to another day. But it brings affairs at last into that impossible situation, of which illegality is the essence, and where we find a new nation, independent of all organisation and of all hierarchies, rising in spite of a monstrous system of repression--a nation which, as M. Tymowski expresses it, ‘is undistrainable and yet ingenious in making arms for itself out of everything, even out of its own contempt of death.’ Poland, though beyond the bounds of the law, has a profound sense of law, and this M. Tymowski again acknowledges. Having no public representation she has arranged one for herself, for she had that Agricultural Society, which at a given day proved itself to be a sort of national representation. No regular outlet was provided for the utterance of her wishes, instincts, or wants, but she has thrown herself into a passionate worship of her traditions, her popular festivals, and religious rites. Indeed, the time has come in which she has occupied herself for a year in reviewing her anniversaries and her recollections. She could not, certainly, dream of engaging in an armed strife, but she retired into herself; she appealed to moral power, and opened her soul to the strangest of all sentiments--that of voluntary sacrifice--till a whole nation adopted that terrible