In Lithuania, once also belonging to Poland, this second insurrection was visited with even greater severity under the administration of General Muravieff (suitably styled “The Hangman”), who was given unlimited power to punish the insurgents as he chose, and used that power with the utmost ability of his savage mind. He treated the Poles as enemies of the state, he shot the ringleaders, he destroyed whole Polish villages and sent their inhabitants to Siberia, he suppressed all Polish papers, he prohibited the use of the Polish language in public altogether, even in conversation in the streets, and in particular he inflicted heavy fines on landowners and clergy who did not fall under direct suspicion of having had any part in the insurrection, in order to render them more powerless for the future. The proof, even the suspicion of complicity, was not required: perfectly innocent men were deprived of the power of doing again what they had never done at all. No Pole was permitted to acquire land in Lithuania or Little Russia, so that any Pole who wished to sell his land, must sell it only to a Russian: this measure was supplemented by a further ukase in 1887 which provided that if any Pole not being a Russian subject, inherited real estate in Lithuania or Little Russia, he had to sell it within two years. Catholic churches were transformed into orthodox, orthodox monks were put in possession of Uniat monasteries. Now revolutions are dangerous things, and the state, among whose peoples occur such risings as the Polish insurrections of 1830 and 1863, is perfectly right to put them down, for the state’s first duty is to ensure its own safety. If it is a liberal and beneficent government, it will remedy the injustices that have given rise to discontent, but it is primarily its business to suppress what is dangerous to its own existence. But in the case of Russian Poland it must be remembered that it was the disregard of the Russian Government for the promises which it had made to its Polish acquisitions that directly produced these risings: it had shewn itself an irresponsible autocracy to whom its own treaties and obligations meant no more than they mean now-a-days to Germany, and having put down those risings, Russia in no way redressed the wrongs that had occasioned them, but aggravated the burdens and disabilities of the people to whom she had promised rights and liberty. In the democratic crisis that followed the Japanese war, it is true, certain concessions were made to the Poles, certain liberties granted them--they sent, for instance, thirty-four members to the Duma (a number reduced in 1907 to twelve)--but, broadly speaking, during the hundred years that succeeded the partitions, neither Russia nor Prussia shewed any sincere intention of fulfilling the obligations they had entered into after the Congress of Vienna, but both alike pursued the settled policy of extinguishing the national consciousness of the people whose