[Footnote 1:  Slavonic Europe, p. 404.]

The effect upon the subsequent history of the world of this crime against humanity, carried out by the three most absolute dynasties in Europe, was incalculable.  “The annihilation of the Polish nationality has probably done more to endanger the monarchies of Europe than any one political act accomplished since the monarchies of Europe were first founded.  To trace its effects in all their various ramifications would lead us a long way.  It is sufficient here to notice that the destruction of Poland, like the destruction of Jerusalem, produced a “dispersion,” and that as the Jews of the dispersion have discharged a peculiar office in the economy of the world as usurers and financiers, so, too, have the Poles of the dispersion as agents and vectors of revolution.  In all the republican movements of the Continent the Poles have taken a leading part.  They are to be found in the Saxon riots of ’48; in the Berlin barricades; in the struggle for the Republic in Baden; in the Italian and Hungarian wars of liberation; in the Chartist movement, and in the French Commune.  Homeless and fearless, schooled in war and made reckless by calamity, they have been the nerve of revolution wherever they have been scattered by the winds of misfortune."[1] And what Mr. Fisher, in this passage, puts in a concrete fashion, Lord Acton has expressed with equal emphasis, if more abstractly.  “This famous measure,” he writes of the final partition, “the most revolutionary act of the old absolutism, awakened the theory of nationality in Europe, converting a dormant right into an aspiration, and a sentiment into a political claim.  ‘No wise or honest man,’ wrote Edmund Burke, ’can approve of that partition, or can contemplate it without prognosticating great mischief from it to all countries at some future date.’  Thenceforward there was a nation demanding to be united in a State—­a soul, as it were, wandering in search of a body in which to begin life over again; and for the first time a cry was heard that the arrangement of States was unjust—­that their limits were unnatural, and that a whole people was deprived of its right to constitute an independent community.  Before that claim could be efficiently asserted against the overwhelming power of its opponents—­before it gained energy, after the last partition, to overcome the influence of long habits of submission, and of the contempt which previous disorders had brought upon Poland—­the ancient European system was in ruins, and a new world was rising in its place."[2]

[Footnote 1:  The Republican Tradition in Europe, pp. 212-213.]

[Footnote 2:  History of Freedom, p. 276.]

[Illustration:  Present State Boundaries—­THE PARTITION OF POLAND.]