REPLY OF A POLE TO A "MANCHESTER

MANUFACTURER."

The author of a pamphlet, under the title of "Russia,” by a Manchester Manufacturer, has undertaken to prove, not only that the mistrust and apprehension entertained in England against Russia are exaggerated and unjustifiable, but that even the eventual acquisitions of Russia, including the occupation of Constantinople, could not sufficiently af fect the interests of England to engage her to oppose them by the force of arms. This ultra-utilitarian author appears unwilling to admit that, under any circumstance, the moral interests of an individual or of a people can be allowed any weight whatever, in comparison with its material interests. The preservation of the latter absorbs his exclusive attention, and one can easily conceive that, with such views, the Polish cause could find no favour in his sight. But to plead the non-intervention of Great Britain in the affairs of that unhappy country, and at the same time to inveigh against its present and past condition, are two very different things. The author is not contented with maintaining that England has too little direct interest in the fate of Poland, to sacrifice to it her useful relations with Russia; he even pretends that Poland has fully deserved to be effaced from the list of the independent nations of Europe, and sneeringly adds, that she is at the present moment happier than ever. Let us examine more closely the value of these sweeping assertions.

The author begins by informing his readers that he cannot sufficiently condemn, with them, the perfidy and violence by means of which Ancient Poland was dismembered. But immediately after this oratorical precaution, he sets to work,

on the authority of some passages from the Manual of Modern History, by Professor Heeren, of Gottingen, to describe Ancient Poland as an anarchical, depraved, disorganized, ignorant, and irreligious society," in which the nobility was incessantly at war with the neighbouring states," and in which "the people enjoyed no power over property of any kind, and possessed less security of life and limb than has been lately extended to the cattle of this island by Mr. Martin's Bill;" in which, in fine, the country "groaned and bled, with scarcely the slightest intermission, from 1572 until the period of the first partition." "At the present day," continues the author, "what a difference: read the Encyclopædia of Doctor Lardner, and the report of Mr. Jacob; you will there see that the peasants in Poland enjoy personal freedom and may acquire every kind of property; that agricultural and manufacturing industry have made an astonishing progress in that country; and that the nobility alone has lost its ancient privileges and its political preponderance; it is therefore only to regain these privileges that this nobility plunged Poland, in 1831, into all the miseries of an unequal and bloody contest."

"The peasants joined, to a considerable extent, the standard of revolt; but this was to be expected, (we continue to quote from our author) in consequence of the influence necessarily exercised over them by the superior classes, and because patriotism or nationality is an instinctive virtue, that sometimes burns the brightest in the rudest and least reasoning minds; and its manifestation bears no proportion to the value of the possessions defended, or the object to be gained."

The fall of ancient Poland, therefore, according to the "Manchester Manufacturer," was only "the triumph of Justice;" and the present fate of Poland appears to him to be "infinitely more happy" than it would have been if the

nobility had succeeded, in 1831, in imposing anew its iron yoke on the other classes of the inhabitants. Such is the succinct and faithful summary of the arguments, in which ignorance disputes the palm with honesty. We shall, first of all, prove the latter.

Having before our eyes Heeren, Lardner, and Jacob, as comprising the whole erudition as regards Poland, and, on the other hand, the commonest elementary data on the modern history of Russia, we still defy any impartial man in the world to admit one or other of the suppositions with which the Manchester Author sets out, viz.-1st, that the dismemberment of ancient Poland was only the result of the tyranny and oppression exercised by the Polish nobility over the other classes; and, 2ndly, that Russia has improved the condition of these same classes. How happens it that the Author has never discovered in the works which he quotes that, if Poland has been continually weakened by the political faults of the nobility, that same nobility, ever since the reign of Poniatowski, made the most honourable efforts to ameliorate the form of government, to extend the protection of the laws to the other classes of society,-in short, to constitute itself in a European manner, at the very moment when the three neighbouring despots attacked it under the pretext of its jacobinical tendency?

Who is there so ignorant as not to know that, at the period when the Polish peasant was attached to the glebe, the same system existed equally in the greater part of the Austrian and Prussian possessions, and that slavery, such as never has existed in Poland, was the lot of the peasants in Russia? The latter country has kept up this state of slavery until our own days; and, far from having abolished serfage in the kingdom of Poland, where the Code Napoleon, introduced in 1808 and 1810, had destroyed the very traces of it, Russia herself has constantly refused, in her other

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Polish provinces, to sanction the enfranchisements which different Assemblies of the nobles, like that of Wilna, under the Presidency of Romer, had proposed of their own accord. In the face of such a state of things, what writer with any pretensions to honesty would think of attributing results favourable to the welfare of the mass in Poland to the civilizing rule of the Russians? What Mr. Jacob and Dr. Lardner say of the material progress by the kingdom of Poland, since 1815, is very true; but it has only been the natural result of fifteen years of peace, and, above all, of the institutions, laws, and national administrative forms, which all the despotism of the Russian Czars had hitherto been unable to wrest from a kingdom, bound to their empire by a separate Constitution. Four Diets took place in the kingdom of Poland, before the last Revolution. Their records of observations and petitions, presented to the Emperor Alexander and to Nicholas, contain the indestructible evidence that, far from favouring the most numerous and the poorest classes of society, the Russian Government never even satisfied the generous demands addressed to it in favour of those very classes, by the Polish Representatives. This fact alone relieves us from the necessity of demonstrating any further the disgraceful injustice with which the author of the above pamphlet has allowed himself to judge of the recent state of Poland. We shall proceed to examine with what incorrectness and levity he pretends to retrace to us its past history.

First of all he describes, in long and emphatic phrases, the interminable contests between Poland and the neighbouring States. "Devastated by foreign and civil wars, and by famine and the plague, that followed in their train, the exhaustion of peace itself now served but to develop new miseries. Fanaticism and bigotry armed themselves with the sword, as soon as abandoned by the worshippers of

Mars; and they waged a warfare against the souls and bodies of their enemies, with a fury that knew no bounds." Nevertheless, all history proves that the most important territorial acquisitions of Poland, such as the re-union of Lithuania, of Prussia, of Courland, and of Livonia, took place in a pacific manner, and with the free consent of the interested countries; and, as for the taste for conquests, the kings and the nobility of Poland, far from having been ever able to indulge in it, had, alas! too much to do to defend themselves incessantly against the continual invasions of the Muscovite, Turkish, and Tartar hordes, as well as against the unjust aggressions-first, of the Emperors of Germany, the Kings of Bohemia, and the Teutonic Knights; then of the conquerors, such as Gustavus Adolphus, Charles Gustavus, and Charles the XII. of Sweden. In the eighteenth century, Poland was almost continually occupied by Russian troops, which does not prevent the Manchester author from representing us as always animated by a spirit of violence, formidable to our neighbours. The civil wars which followed the royal elections, from 1572 to 1764, lasted, perhaps, altogether one or two years; for the only encounters of this kind which may be termed serious took place only in 1588, 1697, and 1733, when the party of one of the pretenders, supported by foreign forces, offered resistance to the other; whilst the long struggle which followed the accession of Stanislaus Leczinzki, in 1704, cannot be characterized as a civil war, resulting from an election to the Throne, because it was only a simple incident in the great war of the North against Charles XII., Augustus of Saxony, and Peter I. of Russia. What, then, are we to say of the description of this religious fanaticism, which, according to the Manchester author, exterminated the population in Poland? But it was Poland that received under her protection the Jews, successively banished from almost every part