dawn of a new life is beginning
for you. In this dawn let the sign of the cross, the symbol of the
sufferings and the resurrection of the people, shine."

How clearly this manifesto, with its surprising love of liberty, its
pious reference to the cross, bore the stamp of having been enforced by
circumstances, and how accustomed one had become to disregard promises
from the Russian Government of full constitutional liberty and the like,
as those given before had not meant very much either in Finland or in
Russia itself. Still the manifesto, as a sign of the time, was well apt
to make an impression on the great masses who had always heard the
authorities stamp as criminal plots, as high treason, what was now
suddenly called from the supreme place "the holy dream of the
forefathers."

The purpose of the proclamation was probably, above all, to prevent a
revolt in Russian Poland the moment hostile troops invaded it. On the
Austrian Poles the manifesto seems to have failed to produce its effect.
As these Poles enjoy full autonomy in Galicia, and for a century have
witnessed the severity and cruelty with which their kinsmen in Russian
Poland have been oppressed, they received the proclamation with loud
vows of faithfulness to the house of Hapsburg; nay, all the _sokol_
societies which in time of peace (keeping a decision in view) had
trained their members in games and the use of arms, placed themselves as
Polish legions at the disposal of the Government against the Russians.
But that was not all. The Ruthenian inhabitants of Galicia, one-half the
population of the country, founded _a League for the Release of Ukraine_
and flooded Europe from the 25th of August with notifications and
descriptions hostile to Russia. The founders did not withhold their
names. They are D. Donzow, W. Doroschenko, M. Melenewsky, A.
Skoropyss-Joltuchowsky, N. Zalizniak and A. Zuk.

And it has very soon proved that, in spite of the proclamation of the
independence of Poland, the Czar, at any rate, includes East Galicia in
Poland as little as the inhabitants are regarded or treated as Poles or
Ruthenians. The Russians were hardly in Lemberg, before this town and
the whole of East Galicia were called in the orders of the day old
Russian land and the inhabitants described as Russians, whom their
brothers had now come to set free.

What impression the imperial manifesto made in Posen can scarcely be
proved, as each hostile remark against Prussia wou