phistry
in the world," writes Mr. Nisbet Bain, "can extenuate the villainy of the
Second Partition. The theft of territory is its least offensive feature. It
is the forcible suppression of a national movement of reform, the hurling
back into the abyss of anarchy and corruption of a people who, by
incredible efforts and sacrifices, had struggled back to liberty and order,
which makes this great political crime so wholly infamous. Yet here again
the methods of the Russian Empress were less vile than those of the
Prussian King. Catherine openly took the risk of a bandit who attacks an
enemy against whom he has a grudge; Frederick William II. came up, when the
fight was over, to help pillage a victim whom he had sworn to defend."[1]
After this the end came rapidly. The heroic patriot Kosciuszko headed a
popular rising against Russia; but after a remarkable resistance to the
combined forces of the three partitioning powers, the insurrection was
finally suppressed in torrents of blood. The crowned bandits nearly
quarrelled between themselves over the booty, but eventually in 1795
Austria, Russia, and Prussia signed a treaty which left nothing of Poland
on the map at all.

[Footnote 1: _Slavonic Europe_, p. 404.]

The effect upon the subsequent history of the world of this crime against
humanity, carried out by the three most absolute dynasties in Europe, was
incalculable. "The annihilation of the Polish nationality has probably
done more to endanger the monarchies of Europe than any one political act
accomplished since the monarchies of Europe were first founded. To trace
its effects in all their various ramifications would lead us a long way.
It is sufficient here to notice that the destruction of Poland, like the
destruction of Jerusalem, produced a "dispersion," and that as the Jews
of the dispersion have discharged a peculiar office in the economy of the
world as usurers and financiers, so, too, have the Poles of the dispersion
as agents and vectors of revolution. In all the republican movements of the
Continent the Poles have taken a leading part. They are to be found in
the Saxon riots of '48; in the Berlin barricades; in the struggle for the
Republic in Baden; in the Italian and Hungarian wars of liberation; in
the Chartist movement, and in the French Commune. Homeless and fearless,
schooled in war and made reckless by calamity, they have been the nerve
of revolution wherever they have been scattered by the winds of
m