are placed, by securing, while we can, an American road to India, central
and national, for ourselves and our posterity, now and hereafter, for
thousands of years to come.
T. H. Benton.


LXXVII.

ADDRESS TO POLISH EXILES AT LONDON.

It is eighty-one years since Poland first was quartered by a nefarious act
of combined royalty, which the Swiss Tacitus, John Muller, well
characterized by saying that "God permitted the act, to show the morality
of kings;" and it is twenty-four years since down-trodden Poland made the
greatest--not the last--manifestation of her imperishable vitality, which
the cabinets of Europe were either too narrow-minded to understand, or too
corrupt to appreciate. Eighty-one years of still unretributed crime, and
twenty-four years of misery and exile! It is a long time to suffer, and not
to despair.

And all along this time, you, proscribed patriots of Poland, were
suffering, and did not despair. You stood up before the world, a living
statue, with unquenchable life-flame of patriotism streaming through its
petrified limbs; you stood up a protest of eternal right against the sway
of imperious might; a "Mene Tekel Upharsin," written in letters of burning
blood on the walls of overweening despotism. Time, misery, and sorrow have
thinned the ranks of your scattered Israel; you have carried your dead to
the grave, and those who survive went on to suffer and to hope. Wherever
oppressed Freedom reared a banner, you rallied around;--the living statue
changed to a fighting hero. Many of yours fell; and, when crime triumphed