justice has never been a part of our conception of national manliness. In
all the history of Polish oppression there was only one shot fired which
was not in battle. Only one! And the man who fired it in Paris at the
Emperor Alexander II. was but an individual connected with no
organisation, representing no shade of Polish opinion. The only effect
in Poland was that of profound regret, not at the failure, but at the
mere fact of the attempt. The history of our captivity is free from that
stain; and whatever follies in the eyes of the world we may have
perpetrated, we have neither murdered our enemies nor acted treacherously
against them, nor yet have been reduced to the point of cursing each
other."

I could not gainsay the truth of that discourse, I saw as clearly as my
interlocutor the impossibility of the faintest sympathetic bond between
Poland and her neighbours ever being formed in the future. The only
course that remains to a reconstituted Poland is the elaboration,
establishment, and preservation of the most correct method of political
relations with neighbours to whom Poland's existence is bound to be a
humiliation and an offence. Calmly considered it is an appalling task,
yet one may put one's trust in that national temperament which is so
completely free from aggressiveness and revenge. Therein lie the
foundations of all hope. The success of renewed life for that nation
whose fate is to remain in exile, ever isolated from the West, amongst
hostile surroundings, depends on the sympathetic understanding of its
problems by its distant friends, the Western Powers, which in their
democratic development must recognise the moral and intellectual kinship
of that distant outpost of their own type of civilisation, which was the
only basis of Polish culture.

Whatever may be the future of Russia and the final organisation of