Page:Undivine Comedy - Zygmunt Krasiński, tr. Martha Walker Cook.djvu/17

 Rh bearing a similar character. No idea could be more erroneous, for the struggle in Poland was to restore legitimate authority to its rightful holders, to a government truly liberal, representative, and Polish; while our revolted States sought to wrest authority from the legallyelected rulers, the Congress of the United States. The resurrection in Poland meant union, life; the rebellion, division and destruction. The one sought to bring about general emancipation, the other to prolong slavery.

But in the hands of Russia all facts are wax, which her political artists mould to serve their own purposes. While branding the Poles throughout her own realm and monarchic Europe as freethinkers, republicans, and jacobins, she makes a sudden turn, and denounces them here as bigots, aristocrats, slaveholders, and despots, and their insurrection as but an attempt of the nobility to regain their ancient status,—a feudal conspiracy! Hear, shade of Kosciuszko!

Poland has long been anxious for the emancipation of her serfs, not only as moved by the advancing humanity of the world, but as a means of national power. Sword in hand, she defended it in the confederation of Bar, in 1768; discussed it in the diets of 1776, 1780, 1788, and finally adopted it by the famous Constituent Assembly of 1791. Kosciuszko, May 7, 1794, then Dictator of Poland, issued a document giving entire personal freedom to all the serfs; and on the 22d of January, 1863, the members of the National Polish Government decreed that the peasants were not only free, but were entitled to a certain portion of land, of which they should be sole proprietors. But emancipation would have made Poland too strong for her enemies, by uniting all classes,—and the oppressor would not permit it! Only six months after the noble decree of Kosciuszko occurred the terrible massacre of Praga, which quenched the contemplated emancipation in gore, and the following year the very name of Poland was—at least for a time—effaced from the political chart of Europe! In later days, the petitions addressed to the Emperor Ferdinand I., by the States of Leopol, 26th September, 1845, for the suppression of serfage and corvee, led to the massacres in