Page:Undivine Comedy - Zygmunt Krasiński, tr. Martha Walker Cook.djvu/18

 12 and the destruction of the Republic of Cracow. Poland has been literally drenched in blood ever since her last emancipatory act of 1863. It is about as fair to accuse Poland of the permission of serfage during the last hundred years as it would be to accuse Abraham Lincoln and Whittier of being promoters of slavery! Yet this is precisely what Russia did, in order to assimilate the insurrection of Poland with our own rebellion, representing it as originating in the desire to support feudalism, in the very face of the first words promulgated by the Polish Committee, January 22, 1863: “All the sons of Poland, without any distinction of faith or race, descent or station, are free and equal citizens of the country.”

Strong and startling are the contrasts between the United States and Poland. We are young, powerful, active, happy, the bulwark of freedom, the hope of oppressed Peoples;—Poland has lived through many centuries; has been since her dismemberment so fettered that all action, save in the spasms of her revolutions, has been impossible; has been rendered utterly wretched, her body mutilated and thrice stabbed to the heart, and all that is material about her stifled in a living sepulchre. And yet there are striking points of resemblance. Both nations are daringly brave; both are confederatively formed,—Poland, Lithuania, and Ruthenia, uniting in 1569, being the first voluntary confederation in Europe; both prefer elective governments; both are opposed to religious persecution and oppression; both detest foreign domination, and love liberty better than life. And as if Heaven itself would draw the two countries in still closer communion, the idolized heroes of both nations, Washington and Kosciuszko, bound by congenial friendship, stood breast to breast in the great contest for American freedom. Material aid being utterly impossible, and in every aspect impolitic, yet in the higher world of justice the moral sympathy of the triumphant with the wronged and murdered Nation must be deep and true; her injuries will be exposed by the statesmen of freedom, and the tortures to which she is constantly subjected will flow in the burning words of fiery indignation from the eloquent lips of the freemen of America! Is this so? Alas! silence! silence!