No one can doubt or deny that the interest of various Governments, and the sense of justice among nations, gave the Poles a right to expect foreign aid. The assurances of certain politicians and statesmen even gave reasonable expectation of such a result. Such aid would of course neither be rejected nor treated with indifference. But the assertion that the Poles relied solely on such aid is (in the face of the manifesto of January 22d and July 31st, 1863) either a proof of ill will, or of entire ignorance of the resources upon which Poland was bound to rely, and which could not be intrusted to the discretion of every volunteer or pretended well-wisher to the Polish nation.
Continuing his imputations, the accuser says he only learned afterward why seven thousand Parisian workmen, registered at M. d'Harcourt's committee, 'were not sent forth.' The probable purport of this reproach is: 'They were not sent for fear of the introduction of liberal elements—and the proletariat—into Poland.' As to the latter, we may at once confidently answer that, were Poland free to-day, the condition of the laboring class in Western Europe need not be dreaded for a hundred years to come. As to the liberal element, does the author indeed think that Poland has had no Liberalists similar to Voltaire, La Mennais, Victor Hugo, L. Blanc, Mazzini, or Hertzen? Does he fancy that Modzewski (in the sixteenth century), Skarga (a Catholic preacher in the seventeenth), Morsztyn, Jezierski, Andrew Zamoyski, Hugo Kollontay, Loyko (in the eighteenth), Staszye, Lelewel, Mochnacki, Ostrowski, Czynski, Mieroslawski, and a host of others, contented with the private good they did, and forced to shun the jealous watchfulness of suspicious rulers—does he, we say, fancy that all these needed to be inspired by the liberality of Parisian workmen, or even that all the aforesaid workmen would apply themselves to the dissemination of liberal opinions? It is indeed a great disadvantage to Polish Liberalists, philosophers, and poets, that they speak and write in a tongue unknown to the noble philanthropists of the West. A greater amount of knowledge would have saved hasty tourists, veracious lecturers, and all-knowing diplomatists many errors in statement and conception, and much aversion toward a noble people, who, if vanquished, will not be crushed, and will always reserve the right of protest.
At all events, this last conclusion of our correspondent leads us to suspect that he may perchance never have been in Poland—perhaps never even in Paris—since this non-sending forth of seven thousand Parisians was better understood by every gamin du faubourg than apparently by the sincere narrator of 'Tardy Truths.'
The writer says further, that he expected to find in Kracow 'activity and infinite means.' Now, the author and the confidence of the Poles must have been quite strangers to one another, or his imagination must have misled him farther than was becoming in a man of knowledge and reflection. He does not mention the date of his journey, but we know about the period referred to. It is true that at that time Kracow had not yet been declared in a state of siege by M. Pouilly de Mensdorf, but, as a personal friend of the Czar, he had then held Galicia and Kracow during the past year under a more uncertain condition than even the declaration of a state of siege would have produced. Twenty thousand chosen officers and soldiers, with discretionary and greatly enlarged powers, and almost as many policemen and spies, with early fed and increasing covetousness for rewards, promotions, and orders, kept constant watch over the ancient capital of Poland, the last remnant of Polish nationality which had been engulfed in the European peace of 1846.
We may then safely assert that our author has given us sketches from his whims and fancies, rather than the mature results of his judgment, and that he has also neglected to direct his researches into the history of the past. It is doubtless true that he was not desired as a volunteer, and that he found danger only, and not fortune, which, indeed, we think his own sagacity might have taught him from the first.
We would be forced to doubt that any one understood the policy of the Polish Committee in Warsaw who should apply the epithet 'mercenary' to the Polish soldiers. We would not ask our author how much he gave per diem to those under his own command: we have no wish to rival the wit of a Russian proclamation which appeared last winter in Warsaw, in which the Poles in general, including those who fought at Orsza, Wielikie Luki, Kirchholm, Chocim, Smolensk, Vienna, Zurich, Hohenlinden, Samocierros, Pultusk, Grochow, Iganie, Zyzyny, Opatow, etc., etc., were stigmatized as poltroons and cowards!
It is certainly true that the battles of late have not represented a file of twenty thousand men, but to call them on that account frontier demonstrations, is to add subtle calumny to ungenerous irony; it is a deviation even from the very 'tardy truths.' It is an assertion not made in an impartial spirit, but calculated in favor of, and determinately stated with the intention of sustaining those who are exerting themselves to prove that Minsk, Grodno, Mohilew, Wolhynia, Podole, Plock, Augustow, Lithuania, Samogitia, Liefland, etc., were ancient dependencies of Russia, before she had herself an existence either in name or fact! If the originator of the term frontier demonstrations would take the trouble to study the map, he would not be able to cherish the delusion that his intelligent readers could believe that battles fought near Kowno, Oszmiana, Upita, Poniewiez, Lida, Ihumen, Dubno, Pinsk, Mscislaw, etc., were really frontier demonstrations!
This declaration of the letter from Paris to America would not be of much service to The Journal of St. Petersburg or The Invalid, of Moscow, or increase their exhilaration over the extermination of the Polish race, the destruction of Polish principles. There is nothing more natural than that a rebuke to the Siècle, Opinion Nationale, Patrie, and perhaps even others, should follow such statements—their views undoubtedly stand in complete opposition to those held by M. de Girardin, and advocated in La Presse.
The assertion that the Polish National Government had no object in view but to excite and await the intervention of France; that Galicia was the principal focus of the rebellion, and that the unknown Government had no actual existence, is, on the one hand, an unskilful attempt to justify the Governments of Russia and Austria, and, on the other, by the ignoring of all the reports of the Polish National Government—all its obvious facts, its printed documents, its acts everywhere known and seen, its seizures of papers and documents—and to portray it as a fraud, a myth, a dream of the imagination, a wild hallucination of a disordered brain, it suggests to us the thought that the tardy and present truths here given us of Poland may perhaps have the same origin as that famous description in one of the St. Petersburg papers, of 'the at last truly discovered leader of the Polish insurrection,' which was but a portraiture of a certain, not mentioned but easily guessed, personage in Paris.
We have no reply to make to this reproach (we can only wonder that under the circumstances they should ever have been made) that the Polish volunteers were badly armed and illy managed—possibly they might have been better even in a partisan war. But as to the want of skill in the officers, including such as Skarzynski, Bosak, Padlewski, we wonder that the writer or his friend F. could not succeed in making their talents known and valued, and become at least leaders among the blind. Of course he had to contend with cross-eyed jealousy. Yet if, as a foreigner, and a learned one too, he was, as he himself informs us, intimately admitted into various chateaux, it seems almost impossible he should have had no opportunity to become major, colonel, or even general, since it is well known, and every foreigner will bear witness to the fact, that in these chateaux there has always been too much attention and too great preference shown to foreigners—a preference, however, in which the lower classes do not participate.