on them while spending the best portion of their
lives in the Russian service. For them to serve
in the Russian army, under the conditions there
inevitable, is more than equivalent to the punishment
of death. Russia is not so short-sighted
as to excite the indignation of Europe by
shedding torrents of human blood. She prefers
to kill quietly in the shade, and to torture her
victims leisurely. The Gazette of Silesia, last
November, announced that forty-two Polish
officers were broken, declared infamous, and
condemned to be first whipped and then
transported to Siberia, for having taken part in the
late revolutionary attempts. It can only have
been for such purposes that the discretional
recruitment was invented.

The fact, indeed, was openly stated by the
Journal of St. Petersburg in February last:
"We by no means deny that the measures,
which have caused the recruitment to weigh
heavily on the populace of towns by exempting
the country population, are abnormal measures.
The government was perfectly aware that the
recruitment would be the signal for an explosion,
always imminent and only delayed. But
the head being out of our reach, we had to
cripple the arms, seize the weapons, and render
the instruments inoffensive: which is what the
Russian government has done."

The Warsaw correspondence of the Patrie
gives credible details of the manner in which
the recruitment was executed in the night of
the 14th-15th of January last. It is already
known that steps had been taken to have an
adequate force at hand, in case of resistance.
At eleven o'clock at night the squares and the
principal streets were occupied by military.
The regiments of the Guards, recently arrived
at Warsaw, were distributed about the different
quarters of the town, under the direction of the
police. At the same time strong patrols of
cavalry were on the move from street to street.
About midnight the kidnapping of the recruits
began.

Police-agents, followed by five or six soldiers
with fixed bayonets, entered the houses, holding
the previously prepared lists of names, and
arrested all the parties so designated. The
majority were found at home, and suffered
themselves to be led away without resistance. The
unhappy men so arrested were at first conducted
to the Hôtel de Ville. There they were divided
into columns of from twenty to five-and-twenty,
and were thence transferred, with their hands
bound, under good escort to the citadel. The
conscripts — in Poland, proscripts is the usual
word — seemed in general resigned to their lot. A
few of them chanted patriotic songs on their way.
But the mothers from whom their sons had been
torn, the old men who had lost their only support,
the women from whom their husbands had been
taken, filled the air with wailing and lamentation.
A great number followed the recruits up to the
gates of the citadel. Never was a more pitiable
spectacle exhibited.

Finally, the operation was concluded without
any serious conflict or outbreak of resistance.
But a government reduced to employ such
methods in order to enforce its laws and recruit
its army, proclaims by the very act that it has
no hold on the country where it assumes to
maintain its authority, and that it reigns by
force alone. The Poles were to be congratulated
on having displayed submission and
resignation, rather than compromise the cause of
their country by unavailing and desperate efforts.
Public opinion attributed to them a moral
victory for which it was impossible not to give
them credit. They had set a heroic example ;
for the recruitment was not to be attempted in
the provinces until it had been concluded in the
capital.

Such self-denial, however, did not fall in with
Russian views, which wanted to provoke a
bloody conflict at any price. The grand-duke
and the marquis, well aware of the natural
indignation felt throughout all Poland, threw in
the last drop which made the vessel overflow,
by inserting in the official journal of Warsaw a
long article, of which the following is the
principal passage: " Never, for the last thirty years,
has the recruitment been effected with so much
ease and expedition! The conscripts brought
to the citadel were full of joy. They manifested
their delight at entering the School of Order
called the army, and at resuming there an active
and serious existence, after so many years spent
in the disorder of pernicious dreams."

As M. de Montalembert eloquently says, the
Polish insurrection is not a rash outbreak (like
that at Athens six months ago, or that at Paris
fifteen years ago), in which the bewildered
conquerors are more embarrassed than elated with
their easy victory. Nor is it a plot hatched in
the dark, and speculating on the gains of the
bloody game of war, like that which produced
the Lombard war and the Italian revolution. It
is a sudden and spontaneous explosion provoked
by the conscription — a conscription imposed not
with the equitable and unvarying forms annually
practised in France, but with the same savage
treachery with which negroes are kidnapped on
the Guinea coast; — intended, not to arm the
nation, but to decimate it; and having for its
result the deportation for life of twenty-five
thousand young Poles, previously marked by
the Russian police! Its consequence is that,
for the present, the cruel boast can no longer be
made that " Order reigns at Warsaw."

As the Russians have begun so are they
continuing. Not long ago they committed a
frightful murder in the village of Wisniew,
between Ostrowic and Wichkow, on the line of
railway between Warsaw and St. Petersburg.
The Cossacks, after cutting the throat of M.
Seewald, a conservator of forests, in whose
house two insurgents had taken refuge, carried
his head about at the end of a lance, and then
tossed it to his own dog. M. Seewald's wife
was severely wounded. His sister (both whose
hands were shot through) and his child contrived
to escape.

On the 26th of February a small body of
three hundred Poles, leaving the town of