authority and
importance when and inasmuch as I decide this with the nation, as
regards my opinion, I frankly confess that, entertaining a loyal respect
for the throne, I hold the person of Your Royal Majesty excepted from
the power conferred upon me of nominating personages to the Supreme
Council. As to the nation, the conduct of Your Royal Majesty in the
course of the present Rising, the restored public confidence in Your
Royal Majesty that was weakened by the Confederation of Targowica, the
constancy with which Your Royal Majesty declares that, albeit at the
cost of great personal misfortune, you will not forsake the country and
nation, will contribute, I doubt not, to the securing for Your Royal
Majesty of the authority in the Diet that will be most agreeable to the
welfare of the country. I have written separately to the Supreme Council
upon the duty of imparting to Your Royal Majesty an account of its chief
actions, and this in the conviction that Your Royal Majesty will not
only be a source of enlightenment to it, but of assistance inasmuch as
circumstances permit. Likewise the needs of Your Royal Majesty which you
mention at the end of your letter I have recommended to the attention
and care of the Supreme Council. Thanking Your Royal Majesty for your
good wishes concerning my person, I declare that the prosperity of Your
Royal Majesty is not separated in my heart and mind from the prosperity
of the country, and I assure Your Royal Majesty of my deep respect."[1]

Until the month of May Kosciuszko had been governing single-handed. He
had drawn up the decrees that were of such moment to his country in the
primitive conditions of a camp in a soldier's tent, with the
collaboration of only his council of three friends, Kollontaj, Ignacy
Potocki, and Wejssenhof. Throughout his sole dictatorship he had
combined a scrupulous respect for existing laws with a firm declaration
of those reforms which must be carried out without delay, if Poland were
to win in her struggle for freedom. No trace of Jacobinism is to be met
with in Kosciuszko's government. Defending himself with a hint of
wounded feeling against some reproach apparently addressed to him by his
old friend, Princess Czartoryska:

"How far you are as yet from knowing my heart!" he answers. "How you
wrong my feelings and manner of thinking, and how little you credit me
with foresight and attachment to our country, if I could avail myself of
such impossible and s