the world by
M. Emile de Girardin, in his paper _La Presse_, and in pamphlet form.
This matter purports to have been written by a so-called _ex-commandant_
in the late Polish insurrection, a certain M. Fouquet, of Marseilles.

Poland has no reason to fear truth. On the contrary, the difficulty has
been to find means to set it forth, avenues to the public intelligence
and sense of justice, whereby those might be reached who forget the
Latin saying: _Audi et alteram partem_. The Poles are willing to hear
reproaches, if such as may be profited by, or if the self-constituted
judges be conscientious and unprejudiced.

But, may we not ask why it is that many of these _so-called_ truths,
professedly founded upon personal acquaintance with Polish localities,
men, and institutions, spring from sources in many respects similar to
that of the recent publication in _La Presse_, from individuals who
never were in Poland beyond a few hours spent in Warsaw--who have seen
nothing of the country, except as passing in a passenger car from Kracow
to Mohilew, a distance of about seven hundred miles, traversed in about
twenty-four hours--who never understood one word of Polish, of Rossian,
or of any of the cognate tongues--who have never conversed freely with
the inhabitants--who may have been entertained during a few hours by
Government employes or by cautious and distrustful patriots--who were in
a hurry to see St. Petersburg and its _elephant_, and who learned Polish
history in the Kremlin, in the saloons of some former prince from the
Altay or the Caucasus, or, at best, in the work of M. Koydanoff?

_La Presse_, in Paris, undertook the charge of saying things which her
franker sisters, _Le Nord_ and _La Nation_, the avowed organs of Rossian
czarism, did not venture to propound. M. de Girardin, whose paper has,
since a certain period, taken a liberalistic, even socialistic,
infection, is a living example of sundry anomalous eccentricities, such
as Alcibiades, Gracchus, Mirabeau, etc., who speak most liberally, and
act in a contrary manner. He seems to have been adopted by Rossian
diplomatists, and those sanguine of Rossian _destiny_, as a most
convenient defender of czarish ambition--the more so that they found in
him a revealer of things never thought of by the czar; as for instance,
liberality and even democracy in Great Rossia, on the plains of Okka and
Petschora.

We might compare M. Fouquet's account of Poland with Neumann's acco