and soldiers under his
command, and in days when wild and lawless acts were not unknown, and
not difficult of execution in a country where conditions were unsettled
and communications long, it would have been easy enough for him to have
carried his way by sheer force. But outrage and violence against
another's rights, defiance of law and honour, were foreign to
Kosciuszko's whole trend of character. Here, then, love passes out of
Kosciuszko's life, whose only passion henceforth will be that of
devotion to his country. Five years later Tekla married Kniaziewicz, the
friend of Kosciuszko who, with him, was to be sung in the most famous of
Poland's poems, the _Pan Tadeusz_ of Adam Mickiewicz.

CHAPTER IV

THE FIRST FIGHT FOR POLAND

In 1791, amidst an outburst of national rejoicing, was passed the Polish
Constitution of the 3rd of May. Polish music and song have commemorated
the day--to this hour the Polish nation dedicates each recurrent
anniversary to its memory--when Poland triumphantly burst the shackles
that were sapping her life and stood forth in the van of European states
with a legislation that evoked the admiration of Burke, Walpole, and the
foremost thinkers of the age. The old abuses were swept away. A
constitutional and hereditary monarchy was established. Burghers were
granted equal civic rights with the nobility, the condition of the
peasants was ameliorated. Freedom was proclaimed to all who set foot
upon the soil of Poland.

New life now lay before the transfigured Polish state. But an internally
strong and politically reformed Poland would have dealt the death-blow
to Russia's designs of conquest. Catherine II's policy was therefore to
force back internal anarchy upon the nation that had abjured it, and to
prevent the new Constitution from being carried into effect. She had in
her hand a minority of Polish nobles who had no mind to part with their
inordinate privileges that the new laws had abolished, and who regarded
a liberal constitution with distrust and disfavour. At the Empress's
instigation the chief of the malcontents, Felix Potocki, Xavery
Branicki, and Severin Rzewuski, went to Petersburg to lay their
grievances before her. Out of this handful of Polish traitors
Catherine formed a confederation, supported by Russia; and in the
spring of 1792 she formally declared war upon Poland. Such is the tragic
story of the Confederation of Targowica, the name that has gone down to
odium in the hi