member that Catharine II., in 1764, had solemnly declared by her
ambassadors, Kayserling and Repnin, that she had no right to Russias or
Ruthenias in Poland: 'Declaramus suam Imperatoriam Majestatem Dominam
nostram clementissimam ex usu _tituli totius Rossiae_, nec sibi, nec
successoribus suis neque Imperio suo _jus ullum_ in ditiones et terrae
quae _sub nomine Russiae_ a Regno Poloniae magnoque ducatu Lithuaniae
possiduntur,' etc.

The prediction of the reestablishment of serfdom as a result aimed at in
the present Polish struggle, is not only rash but preposterous, and has
no foundation except in a fixed purpose to direct all sympathy toward
Rossia.

The true bondage that tied man in Poland to the soil, began with the
introduction of police, passports, censors or _skaski_, recruiting,
conscription, and taxation, introduced by Prussia, Austria, and Rossia,
as so-called _improvements_. Poland had more free peasants, called
Ziemianin, Kmiec, Kozak, than there were in France during the _regime_
of the Gabeles or Leibeigenschaft in Germany. That they entirely
disappeared after the fall of Poland was surely not her fault. The
peasants on the estates attached to the clergy of all denominations, to
public schools, to the crown, and to the nation, were in a much better
condition, materially and morally, than are at present those in some
parts of Hainault and Thuringen. Individual abuses by an unconscientious
lord were to be seen as well in Connaught as near Debretschyn, near the
Saone as on the Necker. Times--contemporary with independent Poland, and
hence not very far back--beheld these sins against humanity committed on
a larger scale, and in lands in otherwise happier conditions. The phrase
_bonded labor_ is known under the best institutions. But this excuses no
one. Poland, without any compulsive cause, in 1764 and 1768, took these
questions into consideration; in 1791, was even more explicit; and in
1792, Kosciuszko distinctly settled the condition of the Polish peasant,
and that without opposition from the Polish nobility--a measure
immediately overruled and suppressed by Prussia and Rossia, both
accusing Poland of being a _dangerous_ nest of Jacobinism. In 1807, in
the grand duchy of Warsaw, after it was retaken from Prussia, the
condition of the peasantry was far more clear and protected than even
now promised by the Czar Alexander II., and was probably better
preserved than it can be under the crowd of employes and m