Poles' overtures to Austria any happy result. The
Austrian Government gave secret orders to arrest Kosciuszko and
Madalinski if they crossed the frontier, and the Austrian regiments
received instructions to attack any Polish insurgents who should pass
over into Galicia, providing that the Austrians were superior in number.
The favourable answer obtained through a French intermediary from the
Porte arrived after Kosciuszko was in a Russian prison. By the irony of
fate he never heard it, and it was only divulged thirty years after his
death. Thus every diplomatic means failed the patriot, who was no match
for the machinations of the European statecraft which has borne its
lamentable fruits in the recent cataclysm we have all witnessed. He was
thrown on the resources with which he was more familiar: those of an
ennobling idea and of the exactions of self-devotion in its cause.
Immediately after his eyes had been opened at Szczekociny to the new
peril that had burst upon his country he sent out another order, bidding
his commanders to "go over the Prussian and Russian boundaries" into the
provinces that were lawfully Poland's but which had been filched from
her at the partitions, "and proclaiming there the freedom and the rising
of the Poles, summon the peasants oppressed and ground down with slavery
to join us and universally arm against the usurpers and their
oppression:" to do the same in Russia proper and Prussia, to all "who
are desirous of returning to the sweet liberties of their own country or
desirous to obtain a free country."[1]

[Footnote 1: T. Korzon, _Kosciuszko_.]

A peasant war could at the moment be only a chimera, impossible of
realization. Does this manifesto prove that Kosciuszko, in a most
perilous situation, abandoned by Europe, was pushed to a measure that he
himself knew was a desperate hope? Or was it the generous prompting of a
great dream that beats down, that refuses to be disconcerted by the
obstacles that stand before it--that in its failure we call visionary,
but in its success the reform for which the world has waited? Be that as
it may, the proclamation was not without its response. The Supreme
Council modified its wording, and sent it into Great Poland--the
so-called "Prussian" Poland--with the result that the Poles there took
up arms.

A lion striving in the toils:--such is the simile by which a Polish
historian describes the position of Kosciuszko. Not one word or sign of
sympathy for