r her
freedom, that he now made his way to beg a young Republic's assistance
for his country. He was not a diplomat himself; but Kollontaj and Ignacy
Potocki were behind him with their instructions. Fortune never favoured
Kosciuszko. He arrived in Paris shortly before the execution of Louis
XVI. He may even have been in the crowd around the scaffold, the witness
of a scene that, however strong his popular sympathies, would have
inspired a man of his stamp with nothing but horror and condemnation.
The European coalition was formed against France: and Poland was
forgotten. The second partition by which Russia and Prussia secured the
booty that they had, as we have seen, a few months previously arrogated
to themselves, was effected in a Europe convulsed with war, that little
noticed and scarcely protested against the dismemberment of a European
state and the aggrandizement of two others, with its fatal consequence
of Prussia's rise to power. The tale of the scene in the Diet of Grodno,
convoked under the compulsion of the Russian armies to ratify the
partition, is well known: how the few deputies who consented to attend
sat with Russian cannon turned upon them, while Russian troops barred
all the exits of the hall and carried off by night to Siberia those
members who protested against the overthrow of their nation: how the
group of Poles, deprived of all other means of defending their country,
opposed an absolute silence to every proposal of their enemies, till the
deed was signed that left only a shred of territory, in its turn doomed
to fresh destruction, to the Republic of Poland.

From Lebrun, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Kosciuszko
succeeded in winning the promise of financial assistance in the war for
Polish independence that the national party was projecting; but shortly
after his interview with Kosciuszko Lebrun lost liberty and office. With
Danton Kosciuszko would have nothing to do, and in the sanguinary scenes
of the Terror all public traces of the Pole are lost. It is certain that
he had no dealings with Robespierre or with any of the men who then sat
in the French revolutionary tribunals. How strongly he abhorred their
manner of revolution is proved not only from expressions he let drop
during his own dictatorship, but still more by his mode of proceeding
when he himself was responsible for a new government of state. He was a
democrat always; but in the best sense of the word.

Seeing that there wa