In the second half of the eighteenth century there were two centres of liberal ideas on the continent of Europe:  France and Poland.  On an impartial survey one may say without exaggeration that then France was relatively every bit as weak as Poland; even, perhaps, more so.  But France’s geographical position made her much less vulnerable.  She had no powerful neighbours on her frontier; a decayed Spain in the south and a conglomeration of small German Principalities on the east were her happy lot.  The only States which dreaded the contamination of the new principles and had enough power to combat it were Prussia, Austria, and Russia, and they had another centre of forbidden ideas to deal with in defenceless Poland, unprotected by nature, and offering an immediate satisfaction to their cupidity.  They made their choice, and the untold sufferings of a nation which would not die was the price exacted by fate for the triumph of revolutionary ideals.

Thus even a crime may become a moral agent by the lapse of time and the course of history.  Progress leaves its dead by the way, for progress is only a great adventure as its leaders and chiefs know very well in their hearts.  It is a march into an undiscovered country; and in such an enterprise the victims do not count.  As an emotional outlet for the oratory of freedom it was convenient enough to remember the Crime now and then:  the Crime being the murder of a State and the carving of its body into three pieces.  There was really nothing to do but to drop a few tears and a few flowers of rhetoric upon the grave.  But the spirit of the nation refused to rest therein.  It haunted the territories of the Old Republic in the manner of a ghost haunting its ancestral mansion where strangers are making themselves at home; a calumniated, ridiculed, and pooh-pooh’d ghost, and yet never ceasing to inspire a sort of awe, a strange uneasiness, in the hearts of the unlawful possessors.  Poland deprived of its independence, of its historical continuity, with its religion and language persecuted and repressed, became a mere geographical expression.  And even that, itself, seemed strangely vague, had lost its definite character, was rendered doubtful by the theories and the claims of the spoliators who, by a strange effect of uneasy conscience, while strenuously denying the moral guilt of the transaction, were always trying to throw a veil of high rectitude over the Crime.  What was most annoying to their righteousness was the fact that the nation, stabbed to the heart, refused to grow insensible and cold.  That persistent and almost uncanny vitality was sometimes very inconvenient to the rest of Europe also.  It would intrude its irresistible claim into every problem of European politics, into the theory of European equilibrium, into the question of the Near East, the Italian question, the question of Schleswig-Holstein, and into the doctrine of nationalities.  That ghost, not content with making its ancestral halls uncomfortable for the thieves, haunted also the Cabinets of Europe, waved indecently its bloodstained robes in the solemn atmosphere of Council-rooms, where congresses and conferences sit with closed windows.  It would not be exorcised by the brutal jeers of Bismarck and the fine railleries of Gorchakov.