Note 29 — Front matter (continued 2)

The dictatorship may be said to have been the first of our misfortunes. The Dictator, acting in contradiction to the spirit of the revolution, did not take advantage of that enthusiasm with which the revolution commenced and by which prodigies might have been achieved. But not only did he neglect to make use of that enthusiasm, or to foster it, he even took measures which had a tendency to repress it. The first fault with which he was reproached by the Patriotic Club, was his having given permission to the Grand Duke to leave the kingdom with his corps, taking with them their arms and accoutrements, which were really Polish property. The retaining of the Grand Duke would have been of the greatest importance to us. No historian could have blamed such an act; for if the justice of our revolution be once acknowledged, every energetic and decisive act which would favor its happy result must also be justified in the view of history. The Russians indeed have regarded our conduct on this point as an indication of weakness and timidity rather than as an act of delicacy and magnanimity, in which light Chlopicki intended that it should be considered. That same corps, attached to the Grand Duke, consisting, as we have said, of 7,000 men and 24 cannon, with the Grand Duke himself, did not regard it in this light, for they fought against us in the very first battle. Another fault of general Chlopicki was, not to have taken immediately the offensive, passed the Bug, and entered the brother provinces which had been incorporated with Russia. The Russian troops, especially those in Lithuania, were not in a state to resist the first impetuosity of our national forces. The Russian soldiers, as the reader probably knows, are not, except in the large cities, concentrated in barracks, as in other states of Europe, but are dispersed in quarters throughout the country, in small bodies; so that sometimes a single regiment may be spread to a circumference which may embrace eighty to a hundred villages, with perhaps from ten to thirty soldiers only, in each. In fact, the soldiers of a company may have often from six to twelve miles march to reach the quarters of their captain. All this made the concentration of these forces an affair of time and difficulty; and one regiment after another could have been fallen upon, and their whole forces annihilated in detail, and that without much effusion of blood. Besides this, the Russian corps of Lithuania was composed, in part, of our brethren enrolled in that province, and even commanded, in part, by officers natives of that province. They would of course have united themselves with us, and the revolution would have spread, with the rapidity of lightning, to the very borders of the Dwina and the Dnieper; and after this, not four millions alone, but sixteen millions of Poles, would have been united in one cause. At a later period, all this was no longer possible. Russia began to become alive to the danger of the occurrence of such a state of things, and all the regiments with Polish soldiers in their ranks were withdrawn into the interior, and three hundred Polish officers in the Russian service were sent to take commands in regiments posted in the regions about the Caucasus, in Asia.

The Dictator, who gave as a reason for not having taken the above course, that the neighboring cabinets would have taken umbrage at it as a violation of a foreign territory, can with difficulty be conceived to have really felt that this would have been the case. Even if such apprehensions were well founded, are diplomatic formalities to be regarded, on an occasion like this? Should we, in such a cause, forbear, from apprehensions of this kind, to press on to the delivery of our brethren from the despotism under which they were suffering? But, in fact, the true interests of those cabinets were to be found in, what every sagacious observer of European history has pointed out as the great safeguard of Europe, the establishment of the Polish kingdom as a barrier against the threatening preponderance of our barbarous enemy. It was indeed ridiculous to require of the Poles that they should regard, as their only limits, the little kingdom into which the violence and fraud of the combined sovereigns had contracted them. The Poles, in entering those provinces, would have been still on the soil of their ancient country; and, in fact, the revolution was equally justifiable at Wilna, Kiow, and Smolensk, as at Warsaw. The patriots, indeed, who began the latter, did not think of their own sufferings alone, they bore in mind also the even greater sufferings of their brethren who were more absolutely in the power of despotism. It was indeed the great end of the patriots and of the nation, the union of all the provinces of ancient Poland, which was abandoned by the Dictator. Nothing else, in fact, but the forcing of the frontiers, would have subdued the arrogance of the Emperor, and forced him to listen to our claims. The unanimous voice of sixteen millions of Poles could not have safely been despised. This compulsory amelioration of our condition would have also spared Nicholas the remorse with which he must reflect on the sacrifice of nearly 200,000 lives, and the death or suffering to which he has condemned, and is still condemning, the best spirits of Poland.