It is striking and significant that it was in 1775, the very year when the Americans rose in revolt against the British Crown in defence of their liberties, that the armed forces of Catherine the Great destroyed the Zaporozhian Sich and ended once and for all the old institution that had carried Ukraine in the preceding century to a height unparalleled since the early days of Kiev. When we compare the power and population of the American colonies and of the Kozak Host in the days of Khmelnitsky and then again in 1775, we shall see how the ideas of liberty brought rich dividends to America and how the obscuring of them by the actions of foreign rulers and internal discord wrought havoc in Ukraine. The old system perished just at the very moment when in the New World those principles of individual initiative and of political liberty for which the Sich and the Kozak Host had always stood were winning their great triumph. It came to its end just as the American Revolution was breaking out, just when the “shot heard round the world” at Concord Bridge was ringing out a new appeal to mankind to fight and die for liberty and for freedom. It came to its end just as the thinkers of Western Europe dared to proclaim again the rights of man and the eternal principles of justice and of law. The old Ukraine disappeared just at the moment when conditions were becoming favorable for its continuation, when the power of public opinion was again being invoked to justify a struggle against tyranny and oppression. It was only fourteen years before the French Revolution was to carry into Europe itself those ideals and principles that men had fought to win in the New World. It was by such a narrow margin that Ukraine failed to be one of the states which could aspire to political continuity, to the passing from autocratic domination to liberty with its old forms preserved, with old traditions living in written statute as well as in the memory of the people. Then came the revival, but it was a slow and painful process, for the Ukrainian leaders had to struggle for every concession from the autocratic rulers who held the country. The very existence of the country was denied, the name was abolished, the language was mocked as an uncouth peasant dialect. Such a seer and a prophet as Shevchenko had to pay for his devotion to his country with years of exile and imprisonment in the Russian army. Yet step by step the struggle went on. All through the nineteenth century, the demand for a true Ukrainian solution of the Ukrainian question gained strength in the underground of the consciousness of the people. The sense of unity in all branches of the Ukrainian people, whether in Russia or in Austria-Hungary, grew and spread. It was not spectacular. There could not be any open proclamation of its hopes and its aspirations. There could be no open economic strengthening of the people for their own good. Yet they continued to work, to hope and to pray.