fession first in the military school at Warsaw. I An early disappointment in love caused him to leave Poland for a time; and he proceeded to Paris, where he resumed his military studies. He was still young when he returned to Poland, and he applied to Stanislaus, the then King, for an appointment in the army, but was refused. At this time the war of Independence was going on between England and her American colonies; and Kosciusko, who had formed the acquaintance of Lafayette at Paris, now joined him and the other French volunteers, who crossed the Atlantic to offer their swords in what they deemed the cause of justice and freedom. Kosciusko served for several campaigns under Gates and Washington, and acquired a high reputation both for personal bravery and for skill. He rose to the rank of general in the American army. At the end of the war he returned to his own country, where he lived in retirement, until the opportunity came of serving her with his counsel and his word. The first spoliation of the Polish territory by the crowned conspirators who ruled the three great empires of Austria, Russia, and Prussia, had taken place in 1772. A century had not then elapsed since the rescue of Austria from the Turks, by the Poles under King Sobieski. Little more than a century and a half had passed from the time when the Polish armies of King Sigismund conquered Russia, dethroned her Czar, and gave away the Russian crown in captured Moscow. The Prussian dukes had been long the vassals of the Jagellon Polish kings; and of the three powers that have blotted Poland out from the list of the living nationalities of Europe, there is not one that has not formerly been her humble and submissive inferior: and it was in her that Christendom found for ages its bravest and best barrier against the tide of Mahometan invasion. But while other states had been consolidating their strength, Poland had been gradually sinking into weakness, and becoming the prey of dissension and anarchy. The mass of her population were serfs. The inhabitants of her cities and towns had no social rank or political power. And her nobility, though numerous and brave, were turbulent and lawless, regarding with equal jealousy the masses below them, and the king whom they elected to be over them. The Russian Empress, Catherine, found ready pretext for interfering in the royal elections, and in the civil wars that were continually breaking out among the Poles. Frederick of Prussia was even more ambitious and unscrupulous

than the Czarina; and the Austrian Empress, Maria Theresa, was persuaded, though with difficulty, to become an accomplice in the greatest national crime that had been committed since Christian Europe emerged from the chaos and strife of the Dark Ages.

The troops of these three sovereigns were in possession of all Poland, when, in April, 1773, the Polish King, Stanislaus, was compelled by his Russian rulers to convene a mock assembly at Warsaw, for the purpose of ratifying the treaty by which the partitioning powers had, in the preceding August, divided amongst themselves the coveted provinces of the Polish territory. Under the menaces of Russian bayonets the Diet was convened, and the treaty sanctioned; and then the allies withdrew from Warsaw, and the portion of Poland which they were pleased, for a time, to leave in nominal independence and peace.

This terrible blow at last awoke the Poles to the necessity of reforming the wretched state of their national institutions. The wisest of their sovereigns, Sobieski and John Casimir, had vainly predicted the coming calamty, and vainly urged their countrymen to lay aside their dissensions, and to abandon their arbitrary and wild usages for a more just and rational form of government. Taught by experience, but taught when the lesson came too late, Poland now earnestly employed herself in the task of self-reform: and, in 1791, a new constitution was enthusiastically adopted, which commanded the respect of the sagest minds; and which, if foreign interference had been averted or repelled, might even yet have rescued the Polish nation from ruin. By this constitution a system of public education was provided; the partial emancipation of the serfs, with a view to their gradual elevation to all the rights of freemen, was decreed; the throne was declared hereditary in the Saxon royal branch, after the death of King Stanislaus; the "Liberum Veto," by which a single dissident in the Diets had been able to nullify every resolution, was abolished, and the consent of a majority was declared sufficient. Moreover, the cities and towns acquired representatives; and thus, at last, this important element of European civilization, the municipal, was called into activity in Poland. The wisdom of this reform may be best judged of from the remarks made upon it by Burke, at the very time when that statesman was signalizing himself by his denunciations of revolutionary innovation :—

"In contemplating that change, humanity

has everything to rejoice and glory in, nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to suffer. Anarchy and servitude were at once removed; a throne was strengthened for the protection of the people, without trenching on their liberties; foreign cabal abolished, by changing the crown from elective to hereditary; a reigning king, from an heroic love to his country, exerted himself in favor of a family of strangers, as if it had been his own. Ten millions of men were placed in a way to be freed gradually, and therefore to themselves safely, not from civil or political chains, which, bad as they seem, only fetter the mind, but from substantial personal bondage. Inhabitants of cities, before without privileges, were placed in the consideration which belongs to that improved and connecting situation of social life. One of the most numerous, proud, and fierce bodies of nobility in the world, was arranged only in the foremost rank of free citizens. All, from the king to the laborer, were improved in their condition. Everything was kept in its place and order, but in that place and order everything was bettered. Not one drop of blood was spilled; there was no treachery, no outrage; no slander, more cruel than the sword; no studied insult on religions, morals, or manners; no spoil or confiscation; no citizen was beggared; none imprisoned, none exiled; but the whole was effected with a policy and discretion, a unanimity and secrecy, such as have never been before known on any occasion."

It was the establishment of this constitution that was made the pretext for a fresh spoliation of Poland. The King of Prussia, in the most detestable spirit of treachery, had encouraged the Poles to proceed with their reforms, and had proffered the alliance of Prussia as a safeguard, in the event of any attack from Russia. A treaty was concluded in 1791, by which King Frederick William bound himself to protect Poland from foreign interference in any time or any manner. The Russian minister, with more insolence, but more candor, informed the Polish Diet that the least change in the constitution of their country would be looked on as an infraction of the peace between Poland and Russia. Poland completed her reforms, in defiance of this threat; and in the May of 1792, the Russian troops, a hundred thousand strong, entered her territory. Kosciusko, who had zealously co-operated with the chiefs of the great constitutional regeneration of his country, and whose career in America had inspired just confidence in his valor and con

duct, now received the command of one of the three divisions of the Polish army of defence. In the short campaign that ensued, he distinguished himself greatly, both for spirit and for judgment; and he won the admiration of all Europe by the gallant stand that he made at Dubienka on the 18th of July, where, at the head of five thousand Poles, he held his ground for many hours against seventeen thousand Russians, and, when at last compelled to retire, effected an orderly and steady retreat. The valor and the coolness which he exhibited in this engagement, marked him out to the Poles as their future military chief.

The vacillations and the cowardice of the Polish King, Stanislaus, paralyzed all the efforts of the national troops during this campaign; and, while the contest was still undecided, the King signed a treaty which placed Poland in the hands of the Russians. After this submission, the Polish army was partly disbanded, and partly scattered into small detachments throughout the country. The officers who had signalized themselves in the resistance to the Russian arms were dismissed; and Russian garrisons were posted in Warsaw and the other principal towns.

Early in 1793, the Prussian King, whose energies ought to have been devoted to meeting the real emergencies of the war in which he was engaged against republican France, revealed the base motives through which he had encouraged Poland to proceed with those reforms that drew on her the hostility of Russia. Neglecting his French foes and German friends on the Rhine, King Frederick William marched his troops into Great Poland, and seized the important cities of Thorn and Dantzic. He tried to justify these acts of violence by a manifesto, in which he declared that the Poles had behaved very ungratefully to his ally, the Empress of Russia, and that they had had the contumacy to make an obstinate resistance against the Russian troops. He complained that the Poles had imbibed the detestable principles of French democracy; and that this was especially the case in the province of Great Poland which adjoined his own dominions; so that he was compelled to have recourse to strong measures. The Russian Empress and the Austrian Emperor also put forth manifestoes about their love of peace and good government, and the consequent necessity for certain parts of Poland being incorporated in the dominions of her neighbors.

The Poles in vain appealed to the treaties made after the former partition in 1773,

had defeated at Raclavicé, was largely reinforced soon after the battle, so as to check Kosciusko from advancing on the capital. But the Polish commander, by compelling the enemy to concentrate their troops round Cracow, secured the insurgents in the rest of Poland free opportunity for action and organization. In the palatinate of Lublin, the district of Chelm, and the duchy of Lithuania, corps of Poles were collected, and important advantages over the Russians were obtained. A considerable garrison of Russian troops was posted in Warsaw ; but the citizens rose against them, and, after two days' hard fighting, nearly the whole of the foreign garrison was destroyed, and the capital of Poland was in the possession of the Polish troops and armed citizens. All readily acknowledged the authority of Kosciusko; and while professing allegiance to King Stanislaus, and declaring their intention of preserving their monarchy, the Poles placed themselves under the guidance of their Great Dictator, so long as the struggle against the enemy should continue. The Prussian troops now took an active part in the campaign against the Poles, whom the Russians, singlehanded, were plainly unable to subdue. An army of forty thousand Prussians marched upon Cracow, and united themselves with Denisoff's troops. Kosciusko attacked them at Scekocin, on the 8th June, but the disparity of numbers was too great, and, after some gallant fighting, he was obliged to retreat upon Kielce, leaving the road to Cracow open to the enemies. This city was soon obliged to surrender to a Prussian division, and, about the same time, a Polish corps under General Zaginczech was completely defeated by a Russian force under Defelden. These reverses were met by Kosciusko with unflinching fortitude. His army, though beaten at Scekocin, had not been routed; and while he rested and reinforced it at his camp at Kielce, he issued proclamations and orders to all the Polish generals on the frontiers, bidding them carry the war into the Prussian and Russian territories, and offer liberty to the enslaved and oppressed populations. But, in the meanwhile, scenes occurred at Warsaw which did serious injury to the Polish cause, and threatened to disgrace it as deeply as the cause of freedom had been disgraced in France. The mob of the capital broke out into the most furious violence, when the reverses of the national armies were known. On the same pretexts as those assigned by the Jacobins of Paris in

Kosciusko was, indeed, neither a sanguinary party chief, nor a fanatical democrat. He had the good sense to understand that the republican institutions which he had seen introduced into America were wholly unsuited for the Polish nation. He seems to have thought a limited hereditary monarchy, with a representative house of commons, and with fair privileges secured to the higher nobility, the best adapted for his country. He showed the equity and humanity of his disposition by the efforts that he made to ameliorate the condition of the serfs; though these efforts lost him the good-will and the co-operation of some of the great land-owners, who looked on their peasants as their chattels, and were more influenced by avarice than by humanity or patriotism. Simple in his habits, unaffected in his manners, amiable and mild to his comrades and associates, chivalrously bold in danger, and sternly resolute when duty required, he was the idol of his soldiers' hearts, and won the admiration and esteem even of his foes.

At the end of June an Austrian army entered Little Poland, and though it did not proceed to further hostilities, it necessarily weakened the forces of the defenders, by requiring a Polish corps of observation to be drafted from the other armies and employed in watching its movements. The combined Prussians and Russians now advanced from Cracow upon Warsaw. Kosciusko was too weak to fight a pitched battle with them, and he retreated before them to a stronglyfortified camp, which he had directed to be prepared a few miles from the city. He had also caused the fortifications of Warsaw to be strengthened, and the invaders were repulsed in several assaults upon the city; while, from the judicious position which Kosciusko had taken, he made it impossible for them to carry on a regular siege.