Page:Karl Marx - The Story of the Life of Lord Palmerston - ed. Eleanor Marx Aveling (1899).pdf/37

 Rh sent thither by the Black Sea, Moldavia, and Galicia, and even via Trieste; and which afterwards find their way to the surrounding countries. In the course of years it came into railway communication with the great lines of Bohemia, Prussia, and Austria. … It is also the central point of the important line of railway communication between the Adriatic and the Baltic. It will come into direct communication of the same description with Warsaw. … Looking, therefore, to the almost certainty of every great point of the Levant, and even of India and China, finding its way up the Adriatic, it cannot be denied that it must be of the greatest commercial importance, even to England, to have such a station as Cracow, in the centre of the great net of railways connecting the Western and Eastern Continents."

Lord Palmerston himself was obliged to confess to the House that the Cracow insurrection of 1846 had been intentionally provoked by the three Powers. "I believe the original entrance of the Austrian troops into the territory of Cracow was in consequence of an application from the Government." But, then, those Austrian troops retired. Why they retired has never yet been explained. With them retired the Government and the authorities of Cracow; the immediate, at least the early, consequence of that retirement, was the establishment of a Provisional Government at Cracow.—(House of Commons, August 17, 1846.)

On the 22nd of February, 1846, the forces of Austria, and afterwards those of Russia and Prussia, took possession of Cracow. On the 26th of the same month, the Prefect of Tarnow issued his proclamation calling upon the peasants to murder their landlords, promising them "a sufficient recompense in money," which proclamation was followed by the Galician atrocities, and the massacre of about 2,000 landed proprietors. On the 12th appeared the Austrian proclamation to the "faithful Galicians who have aroused themselves for the maintenance of order and law, and destroyed the enemies of order." In the official Gazette of April 28th, Prince Frederick of Schwarzenberg stated officially that "the acts that had taken place had been authorised by the Austrian Government," which, of course, acted on a common plan with Russia and with Prussia, the lackey of the Czar. Now, after all these abominations had