"If I had had suspicions, they might have been justified, for I hardly know you; but I give you my word of honour that I do not belong to any such conspiracy, nor to any secret society. I am ready, however, to give my life when the hour of the supreme holocaust arrives."
"I believe you; but your heroism is inconceivable. To be willing to die with those who do not confide in you is strange."
"It is not so strange, and it is not heroism. It will only be the accomplishment of my duty, and a proof that there are some Jews who deserve a country, and that some of us love Poland."
"Will you save her by your devotion?"
"No. And we ourselves will perish; but we shall have contracted an alliance of blood with this country."
"All that is very fine and very poetic, but politics require something else; they do not rely on sentimental pity. By her reiterated heroisms, Poland has weakened herself and perishes. Calculation, opportunity, and stratagem may save her. Why does she not seek to make allies of her own oppressors, when nothing could be easier? Why has she given up her place in the government of Russia to the Germans? Why has she not sought to take up all governmental interests, to endear herself to us, and to communicate to us her liberalism, her brilliant civilization? Why has she not been more politic? She has furnished us only some nobles with great names but without worth, lackeys in court dress; but men of real importance, not one. They have all kept aloof. In one century, since the first partition of your country, what has been your influence? The Poles are much more enlightened than the Russians; could you not have been benefactors? In a century so little has been done. You have dissipated the years in frivolity, and each generation has thrown itself entirely unprepared into a revolution, always cruelly repressed, the result of which was exile and oppression. Wives have left their luxurious homes and accompanied their husbands to Siberia. You have harangued, written, and revealed to the Russian government your own weakness, so that they know how to strike and how you will take the blow. The Poles have the chivalrous instinct too fully developed; you do not dissemble enough. My word for it, you must meet intrigue with intrigue. If you do not, you will perish utterly, and you will have deserved it by your candour."
"A generation will perish, perhaps," said Jacob, "but not Poland. Under Russian oppression, under the knout and the gallows, she will learn to be more serious, more persevering, and more wise. The cowardly will be terrorized, but they will be the exception."
"Do you know what your spiritual writer, Rzewuski, said to a Russian general?"
"No; I have not heard it."
"'I have a wonderful way of discovering the honesty of a Russian and the good sense of a Pole.'