what the Poles wanted was not administrative autonomy, but political independence, with the frontiers which existed before the first partition!  Trusting to the expected assistance of the Western Powers and the secret connivance of Austria, they raised the standard of insurrection, and some trifling successes were magnified by the pro-Polish Press into important victories.  As the news of the rising spread over Russia, there was a moment of hesitation.  Those who had been for some years habitually extolling liberty and self-government as the normal conditions of progress, who had been sympathising warmly with every Liberal movement, whether at home or abroad, and who had put forward a voluntary federation of independent Communes as the ideal State organism, could not well frown on the political aspirations of the Polish patriots.  The Liberal sentiment of that time was so extremely philosophical and cosmopolitan that it hardly distinguished between Poles and Russians, and liberty was supposed to be the birthright of every man and woman to whatever nationality they might happen to belong.  But underneath these beautiful artificial clouds of cosmopolitan Liberal sentiment lay the volcano of national patriotism, dormant for the moment, but by no means extinct.  Though the Russians are in some respects the most cosmopolitan of European nations, they are at the same time capable of indulging in violent outbursts of patriotic fanaticism; and events in Warsaw brought into hostile contact these two contradictory elements in the national character.  The struggle was only momentary.  Ere long the patriotic feelings gained the upper hand and crushed all cosmopolitan sympathy with political freedom.  The Moscow Gazette, the first of the papers to recover its mental equilibrium, thundered against the pseudo-Liberal sentimentalism, which would, if unchecked, necessarily lead to the dismemberment of the Empire, and its editor, Katkoff, became for a time the most influential private individual in the country.  A few, indeed, remained true to their convictions.  Herzen, for instance, wrote in the Kolokol a glowing panegyric on two Russian officers who had refused to fire on the insurgents; and here and there a good Orthodox Russian might be found who confessed that he was ashamed of Muravieff’s extreme severity in Lithuania.  But such men were few, and were commonly regarded as traitors, especially after the ill-advised diplomatic intervention of the Western Powers.  Even Herzen, by his publicly expressed sympathy with the insurgents, lost entirely his popularity and influence among his fellow-countrymen.  The great majority of the public thoroughly approved of the severe energetic measures adopted by the Government, and when the insurrection was suppressed, men who had a few months previously spoken and written in magniloquent terms about humanitarian Liberalism joined in the ovations offered to Muravieff!  At a great dinner given in his honour, that ruthless administrator