rong
a Country, and turn its back on Russia. No, truly; nor, except by
miraculous suspension of the Laws of Nature, is there danger of that.
But neither need Poland lie utterly lame and prostrate, useless to
Russia; and be tortured on its sick-bed with Dissident Questions and
Anarchies, curable by a strong Sovereign, of whom much is expected by
Voltaire and the leading spirits of mankind.

What we shall have to say with perfect certainty, and what alone
concerns us in our own affair, is, FIRST, that Catharine did proceed
by this method, of crowning, fitting out and otherwise setting up
Stanislaus; did attempt settlement (and at one time thought she had
settled) the Dissident Question and some curable Anarchies,--but stirred
up such legions of incurable, waxing on her hands, day after day, year
after year, as were abundantly provoking and astonishing:--and that
within the next eight years she had arrived, with Poland and her cargo
of anarchies, at results which struck the whole world dumb. Dumb with
astonishment, for some time; and then into tempests of vociferation
more or less delirious, which have never yet quite ended, though sinking
gradually to lower and lower stages of human vocality. Fact FIRST is
abundantly manifest. Nor is fact SECOND any longer doubtful, That King
Friedrich, in regard to all this, till a real crisis elsewhere had
risen, took little or no visible interest whatever; had one unvarying
course of conduct, that of punctually following Czarish Majesty in
every respect; instructing his Minister at Warsaw always to second
and reinforce the Russian one, as his one rule of policy in that
Country,--whose distracted procedures, imbecilities and anarchies, are,
beyond this point of keeping well with a grandiose Czarina concerned in
it, of no apparent practical interest to Prussia or its King.

Friedrich, for a long time, passed with the Public for contriver of the
Catastrophe of Poland,--"felonious mortal," "monster of maleficence,"
and what not, in consequence. Rulhiere, whose notion of him is none of
the friendliest nor correctest, acquits him of this atrocity; declares
him, till the very end, mainly or altogether passive in it. Which I
think is a little more than the truth,--and only a little, as perhaps
may appear by and by. Beyond dispute, these Polish events did at last
grow interesting enough to Prussia and its King;--and it will be our
task, sufficient in this place, to extricate and riddle out wha