s no prospect of gaining anything for Poland from
France, Kosciuszko remained in seclusion during his further stay in
Paris, writing in the blood-stained city the record to which we have
already alluded of the national war in which he had lately fought. In
this work he freely criticizes all the errors on the part of its leaders
which he had seen, and in vain pointed out to Poniatowski, during its
course; but nothing could shake his conviction that the Polish cause
could have triumphed. "If," he writes, "the whole army had been
assembled beyond the Vistula with volunteers and burghers from the
cities of Warsaw and Cracow, it would have risen to sixty thousand, and
with a king at its head, fighting for its country and independence, what
power, I ask, could have conquered it? "He refers to the sights he had
beheld in the American War as a proof of what soldiers could do without
pay, if animated by enthusiasm for a sacred cause. That patriotic fire,
says he, burned as brightly in his own country: the Polish soldier, the
Polish citizen, were equally ready to sacrifice all. "The spirit was
everywhere, but no use was made of their enthusiasm and patriotism. ...
The weakness of the King without military genius, without character or
love of his country, has now plunged our country, perhaps for ever, into
anarchy and subjection to Muscovy."[1]

[Footnote 1: MS. of Kosciuszko in _Pictures of Poles and of Poland in
the Eighteenth Century_, by Edward Raczynski.]

Thus wrote Kosciuszko in the day when a peasant soldiery was unknown in
Poland; and a few months later he was leading his regiments of reapers
and boatmen to the national Rising.

There was nothing more for him to do in Paris. His intended attempt in
England was given up, for Kollontaj received a broad hint from the
British representative in Saxony that Kosciuszko's presence would be
both unwelcome to George III and profitless to the Polish cause.
Kosciuszko may then have gone on from France to Brussels, but in the
summer of 1793 he was back in Leipzig in close consultation with Ignacy
Potocki.

The condition of Poland was by now lamentable. Her position was that of
a nation at the mercy of a foreign army, ravaged by war, although she
was not at war. Russians garrisoned every town. Russian soldiers were
systematically pillaging and devastating the country districts,
terrorizing village and town alike. Poles were arrested in their own
houses at the will of their Russian