The Sun.
London, England, 1860-07-05 00:00:00

POLAND.

The following very important speech was de-
ivered by General Count Zamoyski, at the annual

meeting of the Literary Association of the Friends
of Poland, held on the 26th of June last :
The Earl of ILCUESTER having moved, " That,
inasmuch as the claims of subjugated nations to
deliverance from oppression are now beginning to
exact and compel a degree of attention from Euro-
pean cabinets which they have never obtained be-
fore, it is the duty of Poland and her friends, in
this age of sudden and unexpected changes and
opportunities, to be ever ready to avail themselves
of every occasion of asserting her claim to national
independence."
General Count ZA.MOYSKI seconded the resolu-
tion. We are indeed (he said), I fully believe, en-
tering upon a new era—an era of justice and right,
of restoration, and I trust not of revolution— of re-
storation of the rights of nations, not of princes.
When the time will come for the restoration of
Poland's rights nobody can tell. But it seems to
me a striking feature of the day that whenever
other nations' grievances are brought to light and
' discussed, and contended for or resisted, Poland is,
as it were, unavoidably mentioned by all. Every
one feels, every one acknowledges, that there is no
right more sacred than hers—no grievances, no de-
solation, perhaps, equal to hers. But friends of
Poland, however convinced of these truths—how-
ever persevering in their advocacy, may inquire
whether the Polish nation herself remains faithful

to her past, and still worthy of the support of those
who feel that her dismemberment was a crime, but
know not whether life is not at this day extinct in
her. In fact, nearly 30 years have passed since
Poland for the last time exhibited before the world
in a glorious though unsuccessful struggle, her life,
vigour, and readiness for unlimited sacrifices; and no
less than 80 years have elapsed since vast provinces
of Poland were first torn fromher and have ever since
submitted to rulers bent upon utterly destroying in
the minds and hearts of the Poles the very remem-
brance of their former existence and of the crime
which had placedit in abeyance. I think, therefore,
my lords and gentlemen, you will be willing to
hear a few details showing what life there is in the
various parts of what was formerly called Poland,
parts which offer considerable differences in their
present condition. There are, as you know, the
two parts allotted to German governments, Austria
and Prussia; of the two other parts, under Russia,
the one, since 1815, bears the name of kingdom of
Poland; the other, comprising no less than ten
millions of souls, forms nine great provinces, called
governments, incorporated with the empire of
Russia. In the last and in the kingdom, the acces-
sion of a new czar and king, after the reign of
terror of Nicholas, was greeted with hopes derived
from a humane and liberal disposition attributed to
him. A few measures, indeed, seemed to justify
those expectations. First of all, the police was in-
structed to relax in the stringent rules which had
characterized their proceedings during the last 30
years. But of all things, the new reign was
marked by Alexander 11. proclaiming that, at the
request of the western (Polish) governments of his
empire (a request repeatedly addressed by the
Poles to the Emperor's predecessors), he had deter-
mined to put an end to slavery in his empire—a
measure which is to give civil liberty instead of
actual slavery to 55,000,000 of persons out of the
60,000,000 composing the total population of his
empire. What the result of that will of the Em-
peror will be is neither known at this day, nor is it
possible in any way to calculate whether it will end
in giving to the empire prosperity or ruin. How-
ever, the very compliment paid to his Polish sub-
jects in the eyes of the rest of the empire, of their
having been foremost in petitioning for the eman-
cipation of the serfs, emboldened them, wherever
he appeared in the various towns of Russian
Poland, to meet him with addresses so identical

and unanimous that they seemed stereotyped; they
invariably and exclusively petitioned that their
religion might not be interfered with, for restora-
tion of their language in public transactions and
courts of justice, and re-establishment of the
national schools suppressed by Nicholas. At
Witebsk, at Vilna, at Zytomir, and, in Novem•
ber last, again at Kamieniec Podolski, such
petitions were unflinchingly, though respect-
fully handed to him, or at leastunanimously signed
by the representatives of the landowners, even after
they had been warned that they would incur the
Czar's displeasure. In Austrian Poland a demand
to the very same effect was recently drawn up, and
received innumerable signatures of all classes of
the inhabitants, in the form of a spontaneous ad-
dress to three gentlemen, who had just been ap-
pointed by the Emperor of Austria to take seats
for the province of Galicia in what is called the
enlarged Council of the Empire. Restoration of
the Polish language in public transactions, in
courts, in schools, and permission, without incur-
ring suspicion, to give encouragement to national
literature, national history, and to the preservation
of monuments of a thousand years of national ex-
istence, was all that this address demanded at the
hands and through the endeavours, in the Council,
of their three countrymen. A word was added
to insist upon the deputies passing over in silence
any other grievance, though many were endured
from the foreign and inimical officers of the ad-
ministration, " Least of all," was it said in the ad-
dress, "do the inhabitants of Galicia care for any
new institutions of a more or less liberal kind, as
may be debated in the council, so long as what was
most dear and most essential to them, both in a
material and in a moral sense, was denied to the
province, viz., that they should be allowed to re-
main Poles ?" And what was the result ? By
order of the highest authority a warning was given
to all the prominent signers of the address, includ-
ing the bishops and first of the nobility, as well as
of the middle class, that they should abstain from
"punishable agitation." Of what bas been done
of late at Posen by the authorities of the place to
create " punishable agitation" among the inhabi-
tants of that grand duchy (Prussian Poland) you
have heard at length from several nohle and
honourable speakers in this very meeting. I really
think my noble friend (Lord Harrington) has truly
characterised, by ealling it "satanic," the system
of provocation, the unquestionable evidence
of which has been laid before the Prussian
Parliament in May last, by an eminent
and most deserving member, one of the
members for Posen. What I here wish

to insist upon is the total failure of the attempt.
During three years of an incessant provocation to
which a few countrymen of ours In this country,
infatuated as they were, or misled by destitution
into desperate attempts, were expected to act as
tools, not a single inhabitant of Prussian Poland
was caught in the prepared and wide-spread snares
—a proof of temperate wisdom for which, gentle-
men, I claim your acknowledgment. At Warsaw,
and in the kingdom of Poland, the recent and most
creditable sign of life has been evinced, as soon as
permission was given, in numerous and most orderly
meetings, held all over the country, for the promo-
tion of agriculture. An elected central committee
of and
anagricultural society.was authorised to act at
Warsaw, and to communicate with some 70 corres-
pondents,equally authorised, to reside in all parts
of the kingdom. Nearly five thousand members of
this society, paying a subscription similar to what
you, gentlemen, subscribe as friends of Poland,
namely, two guineas a
year,
committee a sum of about
nine gaveat n
thousande e o
pounds
yearly to spend in prize medals, shows, and t
en
ct 101
ua
-t
ragements of all sorts, including asylums for infants,
elementary schools of agriculture, useful publica-
tions, &c. In a country so long deprived of every
opportunity of discussing public affairs, and where
a dozen friends could hardly meet privately with-
out receiving threatening warnings from the police,
the liberty given to the inhabitants of meeting once
a year at Warsaw for a week in such large num-
bers (iu January last they numbered 1,200 members
present) caused necessarily some anxiety both among
the people themselves and among the Russian offi-
cials who were ever present at those meetings. But
to the Russians any imprudent language or act of
those assemblies might have been welcome; they
would not have failed to say, " See what can you
do with such an ungovernable people, which turns
every opportunity into a political riot, and ever
forces authority to keep them under the strictest
restraint." But, thank God, no such:thing hap-
pened; no pretext of the remotest kind was
found ; agriculture, its improvement, and the
improvement too of the agriculturist, both material