ons, but of the number of the lesser nobility, men, in short, in
search of shelter and fortune. A strange fortune, a marvellous shelter
indeed to reward the greed of the ambitious--exile, death, and torture!
Were the testimony of such witnesses to be relied upon, we might well
exclaim: 'Truth is indeed stranger than fiction.' Yet how is it that we
find among the seven hundred patriots who were hung so many Poles, less
than a half of whom were Catholics, many of whom were Jews, Protestants,
and even Rosso-Greeks of various classes? Among the forty thousand known
deported, torn ruthlessly away from their native homes for centuries, we
find nearly five thousand Israelites, ten thousand peasants (known), and
from four to six thousand of Greek and other creeds. The two villages
near Lida, two in the government of Grodno, the hundreds of villages and
thousands of huts near Dwina, Rzezyca, Mohilew, Witebsk, burned, razed
to the ground by an excited and hired rabble of Muscovite Muziks, who
had sought and found hospitality in Poland for hundreds of
years--certainly all these villages and huts were not inhabited even by
the 'lesser nobility.' And it is also certain that the dwellers were not
so cruelly punished for denouncing the 'dogs of nobles'--an expression,
if we are not mistaken, taken from the vocabulary of the corporal or
subaltern officials, and which has never reached the fourteenth
class--from which the Rossian begins to reckon humanity.

The allegation of the existence of unrooted feudalism in Poland, because
such a system was known to the whole of Middle Europe, must be accounted
for by the evident ignorance of Polish history; and we assure both
teachers and readers, notwithstanding the evident wish to find it in
Poland, that it was unknown to her, nor could it subsist in the presence
of Polish institutions, habits, customs, and geography.

We can scarcely suppose it possible that our author means to insinuate
that thousands of noble families bought and transported arms for the
purpose of speculation. Notwithstanding the evidence he had of one such
bad business transaction for the purpose of sustaining and upholding the
insurrection, his frequent intimations of the incorrigible and unruly
character of the few Poles left, would almost authorize us in believing
that such was the intention of the writer when speaking of the aforesaid
arms.

Oh, in the name of common sense, for the sake of the men whose country
has be