upon the poor dying or dead
carcass, and flaying and burying it, with amicable sharing of skin and
shoes! If it even were certain that the wretched Polish Nation, for the
last forty years hastening with especial speed towards death, did in
present circumstances, with such a howling canaille of Turk Janissaries
and vultures of creation busy round it, actually require prompt surgery,
in the usual method, by neighbors,--the neighbors shall and must do that
function at their own risk. If Heaven did appoint them to it, Heaven,
for certain, will at last justify them; and in the mean while, for a
generation or two, the same Heaven (I can believe) has appointed
that Earth shall pretty unanimously condemn them. The shrieks, the
foam-lipped curses of mistaken mankind, in such case, are mankind's one
security against over-promptitude (which is so dreadfully possible) on
the part of surgical neighbors.

Alas, yes, my articulate-speaking friends; here, as so often elsewhere,
the solution of the riddle is not Logic, but Silence. When a dark human
Individual has filled the measure of his wicked blockheadisms, sins and
brutal nuisancings, there are Gibbets provided, there are Laws provided;
and you can, in an articulate regular manner, hang him and finish him,
to general satisfaction. Nations too, you may depend on it as certain,
do require the same process, and do infallibly get it withal; Heaven's
Justice, with written Laws or without, being the most indispensable and
the inevitablest thing I know of in this Universe. No doing without it;
and it is sure to come:--and the Judges and Executioners, we observe,
are NOT, in that latter case, escorted in and out by the Sheriffs of
Counties and general ringing of bells; not so, in that latter case, but
far otherwise!--

And now, leaving that vexed question, we will throw one glance--only one
is permitted--into the far more profitable question, which probably
will one day be the sole one on this matter, What became of poor
West-Preussen under Friedrich? Had it to sit, weeping unconsolably, or
not? Herr Dr. Freytag, a man of good repute in Literature, has, in one
of his late Books of Popular History, [G. Freytag, _Neue Bilder aus dem
Leben des deutschen Volkes_ (Leipzig, 1862).] gone into this subject,
in a serious way, and certainly with opportunities far beyond mine for
informing himself upon it:--from him these Passages have been excerpted,
labelled and translated by a good hand:--

AC