Page:Constitutional Charter of the Kingdom of Poland, In the Year 1815.pdf/60

 The Emperor of Austria also gave in, by his plenipotentiary on the 21st February, a declaration which was deposited amongst the deeds of the Congress of the five powers. “The conduct of the Austrian emperor” said his plenipotentiaries in the important negociations which have just determined the fate of the duchy of “Warsaw, can have left no doubt in the mind of the allied powers, that the re-establishment of Poland as an independent State, with a national administration of its own, would have fully accomplished the wishes of his Imperial Majesty; and that he would even have been willing to make the greatest sacrifice to promote the restoration of that ancient and beneficial arrangement. This fact must be sufficient to show that the emperor is very far from entertaining any jealousy or anxiety as to the interference of the Polish nation with his empire. Austria has never considered free and independent Poland as an inimical or rival power, and the principles upon which his illustrious predecessors acted, and which guided his Imperial Majesty himself until the partition in 1773 and 1797, were abandoned only under the pressure of circumstances which the Sovereigns of Austria had it not in their power to controul.”

“Anxious from that time to fulfil the new engagements which he had contracted, and bound to the system of partition by express stipulations, the Emperor had not deviated from the principles adopted by the three courts.”

“His Imperial Majesty, not being able to regulate his government by an order of things which was then done away with, contented himself with watching over the happiness of his Polish subjects. The high cultivation and prosperity of GalliciaGalicia [sic] in its present state, as compared with what it was before its union with Austria, and before the reign of the Emperor, showed that his care had not been inefficient.”

“The Emperor having again, in the course of the present negotiation, sacrificed his wishes as to the restoration of Poland, to the important considerations which have induced the other powers to sanction the union of the larger part of the Duchy of Warsaw with the Russian Empire, his Imperial Majesty concurs, nevertheless, with the Emperor Alexander, in