Page:Undivine Comedy - Zygmunt Krasiński, tr. Martha Walker Cook.djvu/16

 10 vain. Have we any life of the great and good Kosciuszko, or the brave and fiery Pulaski?

In 1855 the astute Russian, Pogodin, wrote to his own government: “The time has come in which we should seek an alliance with America.” If an assassin can obtain the friendship and recommendation of a powerful friend of known honor and magnanimity, his nefarious schemes against the innocent may be pursued in comparative safety. Much has been said on the unbridled license of an untrammeled Press, but as great a danger lies in its purchased silence. Falsehood and exaggeration o’erleap their aims, destroy themselves, and perish in the light of liberty; but silence veils ghastly secrets, and crime securely revels under its close shroud. How is the alliance of America to be won? Silence! Stifle the cries of the victims who for the last hundred years have been crimsoning with their blood the white deserts of Siberia; the rattling of chains in the wastes of Tobolsk and the mountains of the Caucasus; the moans and sobs of an entire People we have resolved to destroy; the multitudinous cries of widows and bereaved orphans! This subtle policy has been skillfully pursued; and where silence has been impossible, history has been falsified, ethnography outraged, religious prejudices evoked, and the character of the Polish People traduced, that the deception might be complete. For, with Poland crushed and Constantinople won, Europe lies at the feet of the Mongolian-German, and, robed as an angel of emancipation and communistic light, he may Russify civilization at leisure.

With every generation since her partition, Poland has entered her united rejection of the iniquitous rule of her foes, by an attempted revolution, in which the awful protest has been signed in the blood of her martyred children,—men, women, and children alike ready to die in this solemn denial of voluntary subjugation.

The last disastrous attempt of Poland to arise from her sepulchre, occasioned by measures insulting to universal humanity, occurred during our own civil war. Russia endeavored to make it appear that the rebellion in America and the attempted revolution of the Poles were