Note 47 — Front matter (continued 3)

This letter, written at the moment when our army was victorious, and when a revolution, ready to break out in all the Polish provinces attached to Russia, made the position of the Russian army extremely dangerous, was couched in most conciliatory terms, having for its sole object the termination of a fraternal struggle. In this letter, the generalissimo sought to convince marshal Diebitsch, that this was not a war undertaken on our part at the instigation of a few individuals, but that it was espoused by the whole nation, and that the people were forced to take up arms by the enormity of those acts of tyranny, which were not perhaps even known to the monarch. He urged him to consider the amount of blood which had been already shed, and the indefinite prolongation to which such a struggle might be extended. He urged him also, to make known these representations to the monarch, and to invite him to lay aside all enmity, to visit and hear in person the complaints of the nation, who would receive him with sincerity, and who demanded of him only the confirmation and observance of the rights granted by the constitution, and the extension of the same rights to our brethren in the Russo-Polish provinces. What an opportunity was here presented to the Emperor Nicholas to act with magnanimity, and to extend a conciliatory hand to the Polish nation! Those letters will be an eternal testimony, that the Poles attempted every amicable means, to establish upon an equal basis their own happiness and civilization, and that of the whole north, and that all the responsibility of the bloody struggle which was continued, rests on the side of despotism.