supremacy exists, the subject or citizen may enjoy his property or exercise his industry in peace, and the security he feels as an individual will be felt in its turn by the Government under which he lives.

Partial tumults, secret conspiracies, and the interference of cosmopolite strangers, will not shake the firm edifice of such a government.

This element of stability is likewise wanting in Poland. The religious liberty guaranteed by the solemn declarations of the Empress Catherine, the political freedom granted by. the deliberate Charter of the Emperor Alexander I., have alike been abrogated by succeeding Governments, and have been only partially revived by the present Emperor.

It is no easy task to restore the confidence which has been lost, and to regain the peace which is now every where broken.

Her Majesty's Government would deem themselves guilty of great presumption if they were to express an assurance that vague declarations of good intentions, or even the enactment of some wise laws, would make such an impression on the minds of the Polish people as to obtain peace and restore obedience.

In present circumstances, it appears to Her Majesty's Government that nothing less than the following outline of measures should be adopted as the bases of pacification :

1. Complete and general amnesty.

2. National representation, with powers similar to those which are fixed by the Charter of the 15th (27th) November,

1815.

3. Poles to be named to public offices in such a manner as to form a distinct national Administration, having the confidence of the country.

4. Full and entire liberty of conscience; repeal of the restrictions imposed on Catholic worship.

5. The Polish language recognized in the kingdom as the official language, and used as such in the administration of the law and in education.

6. The establishment of a regular and legal system of recruiting.

These six points might serve as the indications of measures to be adopted, after calm and full deliberation.

But it is difficult, nay, almost impossible, to create the requisite confidence and calm while the passions of men are becoming daily more excited, their hatreds more deadly, their determination to succeed or perish more fixed and immoveable.

Your Lordship has sent me an extract

from the St. Petersburgh Gazette of the 7th (19th) of May. I could send your Lordship, in return, extracts from London newspapers, giving accounts of atrocities equally horrible committed by men acting on behalf of Russian authority.

It is not for Her Majesty's Government to discriminate between the real facts and the exaggerations of hostile parties.

Many of the allegations of each are probably unfounded, but some must in all probability be true. How, then, are we to hope to conduct to any good end a negotiation carried on between parties thus exasperated?

In an ordinary war, the successes of fleets and armies who fight with courage, but without hatred, may be balanced in a negotiation carried on in the midst of hostilities. An island more or less to be transferred, a boundary more or less to be extended, might express the value of the latest victory or conquest. But where the object is to attain civil peace, and to induce men to live under those against whom they have fought with rancour and desperation, the case is different. The first thing to be done, therefore, in the opinion of Her Majesty's Government, is to establish a suspension of hostilities. This might be done, in the name of humanity, by a proclamation of the Emperor of Russia, without any derogation of his dignity. The Poles, of course, would not be entitled to the benefit of such an act unless they themselves refrained from hostilities of every kind during the suspension.

Tranquillity thus for the moment restored, the next thing is to consult the powers who signed the treaty of Vienna. Prussia, Spain, Sweden, and Portugal must be asked to give their opinion as to the best mode of giving effect to a treaty to which they were contracting parties.

What Her Majesty's Government propose, therefore, consists in these three propositions :

1st. The adoption of the six points enumerated as bases of negotiation.

2nd. A provisional suspension of arms, to be proclaimed by the Emperor of Russia.

3rd. A conference of the eight Powers who signed the treaty of Vienna.

Your Excellency will read and give a copy of this despatch to Prince Gortchakoff. am, &c. (Signed) RUSSELL.

Prince Gortchakoff to Baron Brunnow. (Communicated to Earl Russell by Baron Brunnow, July 18.)

(Translation.)

St. Petersburgh, July 1, 1863.
M. le Baron,

Lord Napier has been instructed to give me the annexed despatch from Her Britannic Majesty's Principal Secretary of State to read, and a copy of it.

We have pleasure in learning that Lord Russell admits with us the barren nature of a prolonged controversy relative to the signification of the 1st Article of the treaty of Vienna; and that with us, likewise, he desires to place the question upon ground which should offer more opportunities for arriving at a practical solution.

Before taking our stand upon this ground, we deem it useful to put in a clear light our positions respectively.

The Imperial Cabinet admits the principle that every power signing a treaty has the right to interpret the sense thereof from its own point of view, provided always that that interpretation remains within the limits of the meaning that is possible to be put upon it according to the text itself.

In virtue of this principle the Imperial Cabinet does not dispute this right in any one of the eight powers which have concurred in the general proceedings of Vienna of 1815. Experience has, it is true, demonstrated that the exercise of such right issues in no practical result. The experiments made already, in 1831, have had no issue but to place on record the divergence of opinions.

Nevertheless this right exists. It extends as far as the limits which I have indicated above, and is incapable of obtaining a wider range but with the express consent of the contracting party most directly interested.

Accordingly it depended upon the Imperial Cabinet to maintain the strict application of this principle, observing the line of action taken towards them in the course of the month of April last, with respect to events which occurred in the kingdom of Poland.

If, in reply to that appeal, they went further into the subject, it was entirely owing to their perfect readiness to seek to conciliate, and in order to reply with courtesy to an appeal which bore a similar character.

I will add that another cause was, that in the intentions which His Majesty the Emperor cherishes towards his Polish

subjects, there was no purpose which could dispose us to remove them from the light.

This consideration was perfectly brought out by your Excellency, when you informed the Principal Secretary of State of Her Britannic Majesty that the Imperial Cabinet was ready to enter upon an exchange of views upon the basis and within the limits of the treaties of 1815.

That declaration we adhere to, and my despatch of this day will furnish the best proof of our perseverance in the same disposition.

Having thus confirmed the genuine and sole character of the invitation which we have addressed to the English Cabinet, we will permit ourselves, after Lord Russell's example, to precede the observations which we have to communicate to his Excellency by some reflections in reply to the questions which he has entered upon and proposed at the outset.

The Principal Secretary of State of Her Britannic Majesty says that the basis of Government is in every case the confidence which it inspires in the governed, and that the ascendancy of the law over the arbitrary element must be the foundation for order and stability.

A priori, we subscribe to these principles. We will only recall to mind that their indispensable corollary is respect for authority. The confidence with which a Government inspires the governed depends not alone on the goodness of its intentions, but also on the conviction imparted that it has the power of carrying them into effect.

If Lord Russell affirms that partial tumults, secret conspiracies, and the influence of cosmopolite strangers will not shake a Government based upon confidence and respect for the laws, he will also admit that neither confidence nor legal conduct would be possible were that Government to allow that a fraction of the people was vested with the right of seeking elsewhere than under the legitimately constituted authority, by armed rebellion supported by hostile or foreign parties, the well-being and the prosperity which they might declare that they could not realize without the aid of inspirations from abroad.

Lord Russell places before us six Articles which he considers to be of a nature to provide for the pacification of the kingdom of Poland.

In communicating them to us, Her Britannic Majesty's Principal Secretary of State adopts in part the point of view put forward by my despatch of the 14th of April.

This is an exchange of sentiments, and

to that form of expression we have no objection to raise.

I have clearly indicated in the despatch to which I refer, the germs of practical conduct laid down by our august master, and the developments reserved in His Majesty's purpose to be given them when he should deem the proper time to be

come.

In comparing them with his own views, Lord Russell will convince himself that the greater part of the measures which he points to have already been either decreed or prepared on the initiative of our august master.

The Principal Secretary of State of Her Britannic Majesty expresses the hope that the adoption of these measures would lead to the complete and permanent pacification of the kingdom of Poland.

We are unable to share this hope without certain reserves. Viewing the subject as we do, reorganization of the kingdom must in all cases be preceded by the re-establishment of order in the country. That result is dependent upon a condition to which we had called the attention of the Government of Her Britannic Majesty, and which is not only unfulfilled, but is not even alluded to in the despatch of Lord Russell; we refer to the material assistance and moral encouragements obtained from abroad by the insurrectionists.

We are not aware from what sources of information the Government of Her Britannic Majesty have formed their judgment of the state of affairs in Poland; we must presume that they are not of impartial origin. Indeed, we find Lord Russell himself establishing a kind of similarity between the news published by the St. Petersburgh journal from statements furnished under the control and upon the responsibility of the recognized agents of the Government, and the information of every kind which the London journals borrow, without discernment or any guarantee, from the most suspected publications of the Polish revolutionary press.

The confidence inspired by these publications has more than once given cause for declarations which, in spite of the formal denials given to them by daily events, have contributed to mislead opinion in England.

In this manner have been propagated, in relation to the brave Russian soldiers who fulfil in Poland a painful duty with devotion and self-denial, calumnies and outrages which all Russia has felt with profound indignation.

If Lord Russell were exactly informed of what passes in the kingdom of Poland,

he would know, as we do, that wherever the armed rebellion has striven to acquire substance, to give itself a visible head, it has been crushed. The masses have kept aloof from it, the rural population evinces even hostility to it, because the disorders by which agitators live ruin the industrial classes. The insurrection sustains itself alone by a terrorism unprecedented in history. The bands are recruited principally from elements foreign to the country. They gather together in the woods, and disperse at the first attack to reunite in other places. When they are too closely pressed they cross the frontier to re-enter the country at another point.

Politically, it is a stage display intended to act upon Europe. The principle of action of the directing committees from without is to keep up agitation at all cost, in order to give food for the declarations of the press, to abuse public opinion, and to harass the Governments, by furnishing an occasion and a pretext for a diplomatic intervention which should lead to military action. All the hope of the armed insurrection is in this, it is the object at which it has laboured from its rise.

Lord Russell will admit that in this situation the measures which he recommends to us would with difficulty find application practically. The greater part, I repeat it, have already been decreed; the state of the country has, up to the present time, paralyzed their execution. As long as that condition of things shall subsist, the same causes will produce the same effects. The presence of armed bands, the terrorism of the Central Committee, and the appearance of an immediate pressure from without, would moreover take from these measures the fitness of time, the dignity, and the effectiveness which we could promise ourselves in their spontaneous adoption.

We will go farther. Even when they could be put into execution with the full extension with which they are invested in the mind of the Principal Secretary of State of Her Britannic Majesty, they would have no prospect whatever of attaining the result which he has in view, that of pacifying the country.

If Lord Russell follows attentively the productions of the press devoted to the Polish rebellion, he must be aware that the insurgents demand neither an amnesty, nor an autonomy, nor a representation either more or less complete. The absolute independence of the kingdom even would be for them only a means for arriving at the final object of their aspirations. This object is dominion over provinces where the immense majority

are Russian by race or by religion; in a word, it is Poland extended to the two seas, which would inevitably bring about a claim to the Polish provinces belonging to other neighbouring powers.

We desire to pronounce no judgment upon these aspirations. It suffices for us to prove that they exist and that the Polish insurgents do not conceal them. The final result in which they would arrive cannot be doubtful. It would be a general conflagration which the elements of disorder scattered through all countries would be brought to complicate, and which seek for an opportunity to subvert Europe.

We have too much confidence in the justice of the Principal Secretary of State of Her Britannic Majesty to allow that he can approve an object as irreconcileable with the peace and with the equilibrium of Europe, with which are bound up the interests of Great Britain, as they are with the maintenance of the treaties of 1815, the only basis and the only startingpoint of the overtures which he has just made to us.

Lord Russell quotes a passage related by Lord Castlereagh of a conversation which that statesman had with the Emperor Alexander I. in 1815, and which mentions the project formed by this sovereign to combine the Duchy of Warsaw "with the Polish provinces anciently dismembered, into a kingdom under the sovereignty of Russia, with an administration in accordance with the wishes of the people."

This idea was a passing inclination of the Emperor Alexander I., and one which that sovereign did not accomplish when he was enabled to consider more maturely the interests of his kingdom. At all events, this question must be excluded even in an exchange of ideas made within the limits of the treaties of 1815.

The only stipulation of these treaties which can have made it appear doubtful that the Emperor of Russia possessed the kingdom of Poland by the same title as that by which he holds his other possessions, the only one which might have made his rights dependent upon any condition whatever, and which explains the possibility of an exchange of ideas with foreign Courts upon the subject of his relations with that portion of his dominions, is the vague phrase of Article I., which says

"That the Emperor of Russia reserves it to himself to give to this State enjoying a distinct administration, such an internal extension as he shall deem advisable.”

And that Article, which says"That the Poles, the respective subjects of the high contracting parties, shall ob

tain representation and national institutions, regulated in conformity with the mode of the political existence which each of the Governments to which they belong shall deem it expedient and proper to bestow upon them."

But the history of this period is not so remote that the remembrance can be lost of the position which Russia held at the termination of the European crisis which was brought to an end by the treaty of Vienna.

From that time we should not be far from the truth if we affirmed that the 1st Article of the treaty of Vienna was prepared by and directly emanated from His Majesty the Emperor Alexander I. The conversation with Lord Castlereagh cited by Lord Russell is an additional evidence of this fact.

After saying this, the Principal Secretary of State of Her Britannic Majesty will dispense us from giving an answer to the proposed arrangement for a suspension of hostilities. It would not resist a serious examination of the conditions necessary for carrying it into effect. If it were to be defined between whom it was to be negotiated, of what nature the status quo was to be which it would guarantee, and who was to watch over its execution, it would readily be perceived that the previsions of public law could not be applied to a situation which would be a flagrant violation of such law. His Majesty the Emperor owes to his faithful army which struggles for the maintenance of order, to the peaceable majority of Poles who suffer from these deplorable agitations, and to Russia on whom they impose painful sacrifices, to take energetic measures to terminate them. Desirable as it may be speedily to place a term to the effusion of blood, this object can only be attained by the insurgents throwing down their arms and surrendering themselves to the clemency of the Emperor. Every other arrangement would be incompatible with the dignity of our august master, and with the sentiments of the Russian nation.

It would, besides, have a result diametrically opposed to the one recommended by Lord Russell.

As to the idea of a conference of the eight powers who signed the treaty of Vienna, which should discuss the six points adopted as bases, it presents to us serious inconveniences, without our being able to see in it any advantage.

If the measures in question are sufficient for the pacification of the country, a conference would be without object. If the measures were to be submitted to ulterior deliberation, there would result a direct

interference of foreign powers in the most intimate details of the administration, an interference that no great power could admit, and which certainly England would not accept in her own affairs.

Such an interference would be neither in the spirit nor in the letter of the treaties of Vienna, on the base of which we have invited the powers to a friendly exchange of ideas. It would result in removing still further the end which they propose to themselves by depriving the Government of its prestige and its authority, and by further increasing the pretensions and illusions of the Polish agitators.

The course which was followed in 1815 appears to us to indicate clearly enough the nature of the deliberations which may take place upon questions bearing, on the one side, on the general interest, and, on the other, upon administrative details of the exclusive dominion of the neighbouring Sovereign States. At that epoch a distinction was practically established between these two classes of interests; the first have been the object of separate negotiations on the part of the Courts of Russia, Austria, and Prussia, between which the traditions of history, a permanent contact, and an immediate neighbourhood created a strict solidarity. All the arrangements destined to regulate the interior administration and the mutual relations of the Polish territories placed, since the congress of Vienna, under their respective dominions, have been laid down in treaties concluded directly between these three Courts on the 21st of April (3rd of May), 1815. They have been successively completed by a series of special conventions whenever circumstances have required it. The general principles mentioned in these treaties, and which could alone interest Europe, have been inserted in the Act of the Congress of Vienna, signed on the 27th of May (9th of June), by all the powers invited to concur in it.

At present it is not a question of these general principles, but the administrative details and ulterior arrangements would furnish useful matter for discussion by the three Courts in order to place the respective position of their Polish possessions, to which the stipulations of the treaties of 1815 extend, in harmony with present necessities, and the progress of time. The Imperial Cabinet declares itself from the present time ready to enter into a similar understanding with the Cabinets of Vienna and Berlin.

In any case, the re-establishment of order is an indispensable condition which must precede any serious application of

the measures destined for the pacification of the kingdom.

This condition depends greatly upon the resolution of the great powers not to lend themselves to calculations which the instigators of the Polish insurrection found on or expect from an active intervention in favour of their exaggerated aspirations.

Clear and categorical language on the part of those powers would contribute to dissipate these illusions, and to thwart these calculations which tend to prolong the disorder and excitement of public opinion.

They would thus bring nearer the moment which we invoke-that in which the tranquillization of passions and the return of material order will permit our august master to labour for the moral pacification of the country by putting into execution the measures which His Majesty maintains both in the germs already laid down, and in the developments of them which he has allowed to be foreseen.

Your Excellency will have the goodness to read and give a copy of this despatch to the Principal Secretary of State of Her Britannic Majesty.

Earl Russell to Lord Napier. Foreign Office, August 11, 1863. My Lord,

On the 18th of last month Baron Brunnow communicated to me a despatch which he had received the evening before from Prince Gortchakoff.

This despatch, of which I enclose a copy, is far from being a satisfactory answer to the representation which, in concert with France and Austria, Her Majesty's Government addressed to the Cabinet of St. Petersburgh.

The despatch begins, indeed, by stating that "the Imperial Cabinet admits the principle that every power signing a treaty has a right to interpret its sense from its own point of view, provided that the interpretation remains within the limits of the meaning that it is possible to put upon it according to the text itself." Prince Gortchakoff adds, "In virtue of this principle the Imperial Cabinet does not dispute this right on the part of any one of the eight powers which have concurred in the General Act of Vienna of 1815."

Prince Gortchakoff, however, departing widely from the question of the interpre