contribution to the
feelings which agitated the hearts of thousands of our naturalized
citizens during the Russian excitement in New York. Heartily
grateful as we may be to Russia for her timely sympathy, our
country is pledged to Eternal Justice, and ought never to forget
that she is the hope of mankind, and should be its model.]

On the evening of the thirtieth of November last, the large hall
of the Cooper Institute--that forum of public opinion in the city
of New York, which has so often been the theatre of interesting
manifestations--witnessed a scene almost entirely novel. Flags,
decorated with emblems unknown, were unfolded over the platform; young
girls, daughters of a distant land, or at least of exiles from it,
appeared in their national costume, and sang melodious strains in a
foreign tongue, which charmed tears into the eyes of those who
understood them; a straightened scythe, fixed to the end of a pole, was
exhibited, not as a specimen of the agricultural implements of the
country from which those homeless men and children had sprung, but as a
weapon with which its people, in absence of more efficient arms, was
wont to fight for liberty and independence; the bust of the father of
the American republic was placed prominently in face of the large
gathering, and at its side that of a man bearing the features of a
different race, and apparently not less revered.

If I say that this man was Kosciuszko, I have explained all. Every
reader not entirely ignorant of history will know which was the land,
the people, what the meaning of the weapon, of the song. Who has never
yet wept over the narrative of the fall of that unhappy country east and
west of the Vistula, so shamelessly torn, quartered, and preyed upon by
ravenous neighboring empires? Whose heart has never yet throbbed with
admiration for the sons of that land who to this day protest with their
blood, poured in streams, against that greatest of all crimes recorded
in history, the partition of their country, and that blasphemous lie
written upon one of its bloodiest pages: _Finis Poloniae_? who, abandoned
by the world, betrayed by their neighbors, trampled upon as no nation
ever was before, again and again rise, and in 1794, under the lead of
Kosciuszko, eclipse the deeds of those who, in 1768, flocked to the
banners of Pulaski; in 1830-'31, on the battle fields of Grochow and
Ostrolenka, show themselves more powerful than under t