such a scheme of these sciences as does not fit his spiritual, or religious condition, then there is a contradiction in his consciousness; and there is no peace until he has cast out the discordant element and so established unity.

Is religion to die out of the consciousness of man? Believe it not. There was never a time when Christendom was so pious-in love of God; so philanthropic-in love of man; so moral-in obedience to the law of God; so intellectual-knowing it so well; so rich-possessing such power over the material world. Yet through lack of a true idea of God, from want of institutions to teach and apply the Absolute Religion-there is not that conscious and total religious activity which is indispensable for the healthy and harmonious development of mankind.

What need there is of a new religious life!

THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

THE Church of England arose out of an ecclesiastical revolt; other communions out of a theological aspiration. Its original conception involved no serious modification of belief, no invention or recovery of strange usages, but a mere separation of the island branch from the Roman stem, that it might strike root and be as a native tree of life. The first alterations in doctrine were slight and merely incidental to this primary end : and the whole amount of change, instead of being determined by the intellectual dictatorship of a Luther or a Calvin, was the illogical result of social forces, seeking the equilibrium of practical compromise. The phenomenon therefore which we observed in the elder church is repeated in this younger offshoot: the several elements of faith coexist (though in greatly spoiled proportions) without unity or natural coherence: and the English Church, as the depository of a creed, occupies no place in the history of the human mind its individual great men must be put here or there in the records of thought, without regard to the accident of their ecclesiastical position. The one real idea which has permanently inspired its clergy and supporters is that of nationalism in religion. To the time of the Restoration they attempted, since then they have pretended, to represent the nation in its faith and worship. Once, their aim appeared to be a noble possibility, struggling still and unrealized, but unrefuted. Now, thousands of nonconformist chapels proclaim its meaning gone, and its language an affectation and an insolence. The English Church has become an outer reality without an inner idea.

Westminster Review.

POLAND.

MEMORANDUM OF THE POLISH CENTRAL DEMOCRATIC COMMITTEE :

TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

POLAND, every way oppressed as she is, may worthily understand the grandeur and the bearing of American policy. She does understand them; she appreciates both the inner meaning of the manifestations of American sympathy with the elements of the European future, and also the reserve imposed on those manifestations by existing international relations; and, respecting that reserve, but profiting by the last and perhaps the most significant of those manifestations, she, through us, would place in the hands of the Government of the New World those informations which she knows to be indispensable to every State preparing to actively influence the future destinies of Europe.

It is to this, by their position, by their power, by the renovating principle which in the strength of their youth they inaugurated in modern history, that the United States of North America seem to be called. In proclaiming themselves independent, and at the same time republican, in the face of a world yet altogether monarchical, they boldly took the initiative of that progressive movement which was to draw all peoples after them, and assured themselves the first place in the new order of things created by them.

And, as if the Republican principle itself had needed to preserve the affiliation of its historical development along the ages, the only great Republic of the worm-eaten Europe of that day, Poland, expiring under the violence of royal conspirators and the deleterious influence of monarchical elements which had been introduced into its bosom, sent the latest of the heroes of her past to die under the walls of Savannah, and borrowed from the war for American Independence the hero-initiator of her future-Kosciusko.

To the American monument of Pulawski responds the mound raised to Kosciusko upon his natal shore by the hands of all Poland; and, since the mighty shades hovering over them grasp hands athwart the thickness of the terrestrial globe, the indissoluble pact is sworn of the common destinies of America and Poland.

For since then Poland has not one instant ceased to live in the shroud with which the kings had wrapped her; and, at the moment in which America is preparing to give back to her old mother, Europe, that youthful life whose germs were hers, and to preside over her future destinies, Poland finds herself ready to reënter the lists and to reconquer the existence which the monarchies refuse her.

It is this last fact which should be known to America; it is of this that we are to inform her, and we are competent to do it: for, representing in the Emigration the renovating principle of Poland, that of its future vitality, we have, since 1830, mixed in all the manifestations of Polish national life, from those of the martyrs of the expedition of Colonel Zaliwski, in 1834, to those of the prisoners issuing triumphantly in 1848 from the dungeons of Berlin, and the unknown names which since, even until now, have borne witness to the vitality of their country before the inquisitors and the executioners of Vienna, of Berlin, of Warsaw, and of Petersburg.

It is also we, the Polish Democratic Society, who have furnished chiefs to those sons of Poland who, wanting battle-fields in their own country, have sought them, since 1849, in Hungary, in Italy, in Germany, bearing the Polish flag wherever floated that of Freedom, of which it was the inseparable companion.

But it is not of the subterranean life of Poland that we would bear witness, nor even of that eccentric life which, lacking scope to manifest itself within,. broke the vase and spread itself beyond, in the form of Emigration or of Legion. All that is known, ascertained, incontestable; and more, all that is of the past. What we would bear witness of is the near future of Poland and those elements of the present which already guarantee its infallible advent.

Confidants of the secret thoughts of our people through a thousand channels, worn underneath bars, frontier-barriers, and seas, by the repressed love of liberty on one side and the exile's love of country on the other, in order that they might communicate together and concert the means of reunion,—we simply tell you-IT IS so, and establish the fact. But if it is not permitted us to furnish the proofs of its existence, of that general, universal disposition of men's minds which but dissembles itself the more carefully as it thereby assures itself a prompter and completer satisfaction, of that sullen fermentation, progressing in a manner so uniform, though rapid, as to be imperceptible until the moment in which the vase is broken,‚—we can and are about to prove that it cannot be otherwise, and that if the Cabinets of our oppressors misunderstand this fact, and by the measures which they take and the events which they provoke are rendering it inevitable, it is because the principle upon which they base themselves is a principle of death, a fatality, blinding them, and pushing them to self-destruction.

One of the grounds of security upon which our oppressors are so foolishly slumbering is the apparent inaction of Russian-Poland in 1848. This inaction was fatally imposed upon it by its position then, and this position is now reversed.

Nowhere more than in Poland has a general movement need of time to ripen and burst forth,-for a double reason peculiar to this country: on the one hand the want of great centres of population and the difficulty of communication between widely-strown villages, and on the other the marked separation between the people and the noble class.

This separation is one not only of interests, but also of habits, of beliefs, of affections, and, in most of the provinces, of dialect or language. The only

sentiment which unites them is their love of country, but that so differently conceived that the proper moment for rising could not be the same for both classes unless it should be imposed upon them both by European events. It is to the treasons of the nobility that the people attributes the defeat of the efforts in which it has taken part since 1794; and, though the nobles may be now ready to join in a popular movement because they are convinced that without it their own force would be insufficient, the people would not obey the appeal of the nobles unless it obtained from them farther guarantees than they have already given. For the Polish nobility alone the meaning of 1848 was clear so the people remained every where passive, except in the Grand Duchy of Posen, where, being nearer to events, it better understood them and responded with an ardour of patriotism which even the nobles, whose policy was one of expediency, thought it necessary to calm. Besides, it needed, for the mutual understanding of the two classes for a common movement, and still more for any concert between populations dispersed over an immense territory, more time than elapsed between the triumph of February and the fall of Rome and Hungary, without taking into consideration the bad effect produced on the public mind by the dealings of the French Government with the partitioning Cabinets, the massacres of June, and the triumphs of the Reaction at Vienna, Berlin, and Dresden, in Baden and in Lombardy, the bloody suppression under the very eyes of the French ambassador of the rising in the Grand Duchy of Posen, and the bombardment of Cracow and Lemberg. The Russians, waiting, were concentrated in Poland for the deadly blow they were purposing to inflict in Hungary upon the European Revolution; and Poland had to remain a moveless spectator of the grand drama played under her eyes without the great majority of her inhabitants comprehending what it meaned. Both time and a direct appeal were wanting.

Now she has already had the one and is about to hear the other.

And it was not at the first shot fired on the Danube that the time of preparation began, but indeed in that same year 1848 which appeared to have made so little impression upon the Polish people.

What the massacres of Gallicia, organized by Metternich and conducted by Szela, had hindered in 1846, the revolution of 1848 accomplished. The serfs of Gallicia were emancipated, were admitted to the national representation, saw their former lords hold out their hands to them and sit down beside them on the legislative benches; and, although the Austrian Government has endeavoured to have the honour of this attributed to itself, yet, since it has afterward exacted from the peasants the price of the ceded lands and the abolished soccage labour, since it has also done away with the Representative Chambers to which the revolution had called them, some hundred thousands of emancipated peasant-proprietors now in Gallicia are to the millions of Polish serfs under Russian domination a living testimony of what they have to expect from the revolution in Poland.

This great, this decisive question, of the future destinies of Poland,-this of the emancipation of the serf and of the throwing open the land to be cultivated by him for his own use, free from all feudal charge and without indem

nification for the proprietor, which had been discussed and affirmatively resolved in the Polish Emigration for a number of years,-has been since then regarded by the class of territorial proprietors in Poland as in fact decided; and the peasants' unbelief of the promises of their lords, till then not followed by deeds, has had to give way to the evidence of the accomplished fact in the provinces which the revolutionary movement had passed over. This immense progress toward the fusion of the classes, from which the independence of Poland must proceed, has been found accomplished since 1849. The propaganda of the alliance between the national and the social ideas thenceforth slowly extended among the unemancipated people and progressed there uninterruptedly, while above it each of the triumphs of the Reaction threw trouble, disheartening, and too often doubt and apostacy in the souls of the noble and privileged classes. From this arise the erroneous judgments of tourists in Poland as to the spirit of the populations, of which they never touch but a single surface-layer, without ever having time or means to sound its depth.

It was in this disposition of mind that the affairs of Turkey found Poland. Their action on the masses was doubly decisive.

Certainly the nobility could see and did see in it a complication from which the derangement of the European equilibrium might issue, and thence an occasion for new national efforts. But, accustomed to judge of events from the relations of the journals, and reading there how all the powers of Europe were determined to maintain peace, or at least the status quo of territorial divisions, by confining the war to the limits of Turkey, it thought, conscious of its own powerlessness, that it might content itself with waiting some deliverance from without, something like the Napoleonist intervention of old time in the affairs of Poland. From that nothing could result, except, at very most, a change of

masters.

But the people judges not from such premises; and consequently it arrives at very different conclusions. It has traditions, and believes in them; it has impulses, and it follows them. Its acts are determined by its feelings more than by its reason; or, rather, the popular reason, which we improperly call instinct, takes special count of its affections, its wants, its faith, and the facts which meet its understanding, without complicating them with calculations and arguments beyond its reach. Now, the events which are passing in Turkey, by their proximity as well as by their notoriety, are especially of a nature to impress it and to determine it to a rising.

For a year past it has seen its fields traversed by two immense avalanches of soldiers coming from the North and precipitating themselves southward into the two yawning gulfs of Wallachia and the Caucasus. There the Turkish scimitar lays them low; for the cannon roars, the Te-Deums in the churches resound unechoed, but none return to bear witness of the victories they have won. On the contrary, mysterious voices whisper in the ear that wordDefeat; and the faces of every regiment that arrives are more downcast and more pale than those that went before. And yet these armies are not enough, they are being exhausted, they are shriveling up for sealed papers come to the village-registrars, which, when they are opened, condemn nine of every