What was Russia about all this time? Quite disconcerted, and more astonished than enlightened by what she saw happening under her eyes, she waited, and day by day the movement seemed to slip away from her. At that time she was represented in Warsaw by Prince Michael Gortchakof, the Lieutenant of the Tzar--a man who was a good soldier, and who had shown a great deal of vigour in the defence of Sebastopol. He had lived fear many years at Warsaw, when head of the Staff to Prince Paskievitch; he knew Poland, and he liked living in it. To his soldierly nature extreme measures of repression were repugnant, and it troubled him to have recourse to them. But unfortunately, in the heart of the administration of which he was the ostensible chief, one man was, under shelter of the Prince’s name, omnipotent--M. Muchanof, Minister of the Interior, of public instruction, and of religion. He was a Russian of the old school of Nicholas the Tzar--a vulgar instrument of that inflexible system which had no other object but the denationalisation of Poland. The dismissal of Count Skarbek, the Minister of Finance, had been effected by him, because the Count was an enlightened man, an author of celebrity, who had entertained the revolutionary notion of asking (as for a right) for a college at Warsaw. M. Muchanof was at war, in short, with everything that looked like an awakening or an act of individual life in the country--with Temperance Leagues, with the Agricultural Society, and with a taste for a more liberal style of education. The only exception he could make was in favour of the School of Arts. ‘Let them paint, by all means,’ he would say, ‘and then they will not think.’ Between the gradually excited population of Poland and Russia, when thus represented and thus divided in her councils, a dialogue was to be commenced, which, stretching over a year, was to be furnished with such bloody interludes that the very Russian generals themselves seemed to grow weary, and to feel a secret aversion to the parts given them to act.