hoped that France would support the Rising financially, and persuade Turkey with French encouragement to declare war on Russia. France, preoccupied with internal revolution, had no thought to spare for Polish affairs, and her assistance was never gained. Nor had the Poles' overtures to Austria any happy result. The Austrian Government gave secret orders to arrest Kościuszko and Madalinski if they crossed the frontier, and the Austrian regiments received instructions to attack any Polish insurgents who should pass over into Galicia, providing that the Austrians were superior in number. The favourable answer obtained through a French intermediary from the Porte arrived after Kościuszko was in a Russian prison. By the irony of fate he never heard it, and it was only divulged thirty years after his death. Thus every diplomatic means failed the patriot, who was no match for the machinations of the European statecraft which has borne its lamentable fruits in the recent cataclysm we have all witnessed. He was thrown on the resources with which he was more familiar: those of an ennobling idea and of the exactions of self-devotion in its cause. Immediately after his eyes had been opened at Szczekociny to the new peril that had burst upon his country he sent out another order, bidding his commanders to "go over the Prussian and Russian boundaries" into the provinces that were lawfully Poland's but which had been filched from her at the partitions, "and proclaiming there the freedom and the rising of the Poles, summon the peasants oppressed and ground down with slavery to join us and universally arm against the usurpers and their oppression:" to do the same in Russia
