suited to its new humiliation.  Her King was making her the laughing-stock of Europe—­but before long the name Poland was to become another name for tragedy.  Kosciusko had fought in the War of the American Revolution.  When he returned, with the badge of the Order of the Cincinnati upon his breast and filled with dreams of the regeneration of his own land by the magic of this new political freedom, he was the chosen leader of the patriots.

The partition of Poland was not all accomplished at one time.  It took three repasts to finish the banquet (the partitions of 1792-1793-1794), and then some time more was required to sweep up the fragments and to efface its name from the map of Europe.  Kosciusko and his followers made their last vain and desperate stand in 1794, and when he fell covered with wounds at the battle of Kaminski, Poland fell with him.  The Poles were to survive only as a more or less unhappy element among nations where they were aliens.  Their race affinities were with Russia, for they were a Slavonic people; their religious affinities were with Catholic Austria; but with Protestant Prussia there was not one thing in common, and that was the bitterest servitude of all.  The Poles in Russia were to some extent autonomous.  They were permitted to continue their local governments under a viceroy appointed by the Tsar; their Slavonic system of communes was not disturbed, nor their language nor customs.  Still it was only a privileged servitude after all, and the time was coming when it was to become an unmitigated one.  But effaced as a political sovereignty, Poland was to survive as a nationality of genius.  Her sons were going to sing their songs in other lands, but Mickiewiz and Sienkiewicz and Chopin are Polish, not Russian.

The alliance of the three sovereigns engaged in this dismemberment was about as friendly as is that of three dogs who have run down a hare and are engaged in picking nice morsels from its bones.  If Russia was getting more than her share, the Turks would be incited by Austria or Prussia to attack her in the South; and many times did Catherine’s armies desert Poland to march down and defend the Crimea, and her new fort at Sebastopol, and her fleet on the Black Sea.  In 1787, accompanied by her grandsons, the Grand Dukes Alexander and Constantine, she made that famous journey down the Dnieper; visited the ancient shrines about Kief; stood in the picturesque old capital of Sarai, on the spot where Russian Grand Princes had groveled at the feet of the Khans; and then, looked upon Sebastopol, which marked the limit of the new frontier which she had created.