Page:A Chapter on Slavery.djvu/31

 no rights to defend. "The Polish serf," says a writer, "drowned in brandy all activity of mind, for his motto was, — ‘Only what I drink is mine.’ At the same time the masters were divided among themselves, engaged in perpetual dissensions, and living in luxury and corruption. The throne was sold to the highest bidder. In its moral tone, too, which aimed at uniting French wit and frivolousness with excess and rudeness, Poland had gone back many steps towards the times of violence. Religious animosities, also, raged through the country. Encroachments were made by the Catholics on the constitutional rights of the Dissidents, that is, the Protestants and Greek Church; and this destruction of religious freedom was a main cause of the civil war which plunged Poland into the wildest disorder, and accelerated the ruin of the state. Russia embraced the cause of the Dissidents; foreign troops laid waste the country; and the lawless conduct of some of the Polish party chiefs excited among the neighboring Powers such a contempt of the natural rights of the Poles, that, to use the expression of Catherine, they deemed Poland. a country in which it was ‘only necessary to stoop to pick up something.’" Such was the distracted state of the nation when the infamous plan of partition was formed by the three neighboring Powers; and this, their own death-warrant, was, under Russian compulsion, signed by the Polish Diet itself. Could any-thing have brought the nation to such ignominy, but their own internal weakness, the result of moral unworthiness? No excuse whatever, indeed, is this for the infamous conduct of the oppressors and partitioners of