THE CONGRESS KINGDOM 243Oppression, murder, rapine, torture, lust,
All cruelty, in each appalling form:
Most deadly fruit of blind despotic rage,
That like the feigned Promethean bird of hell
By gorging human flesh more ravenous grows...
But Russia, thou! in guilt and might supreme
To deal with thee, how shall the Muse essay?
What spell, what power invoke? For words are vain.
Yet wouldst thou list awhile, thou mightst perchance
Some new-found truth like hidden treasures find
And gain the knowledge that was never thine
To know thyself, and all thou call'st thine own;
As in a mirror, thou thyself might'st view,
And learn to loathe what others loathing see...^20Dissenting opinions were voiced from only two sources. Several MPs protested
against the pointless expression of inflammatory sentiments by people who had
no intention of matching their words with deeds. Richard Cobden was alone in
protesting against the prevailing Russophobia on the grounds that Poland's fate
represented 'the triumph of justice'. In a study of Russia, published in 1835,
Cobden argued that the kind of catastrophes which had happened to Poland
'only befall neglected, decayed, disorganised, ignorant, and irreligious societies,
and their anarchic governments'. Whilst praising the prosperity of Prussia and
the prospects of expanded Anglo-Russian trade, he maintained that the Polish
Rising was caused by the desperate attempts of a licentious nobility to recover
their former privileges. Like many of his heirs and successors on the radical Left,
the apostle of Manchester Liberalism was so eager to demonstrate his brilliant
powers of social analysis that he was tempted to score a cheap success by attack-
ing a defenceless target abroad. In so doing, he uttered some of the harshest
words ever directed against Poland. Like many western liberals today, in his
haste to discredit the prevailing attitudes of the Establishment of his own coun-
try, he was led into the ridiculous position of absolving the despotic practices of
a foreign Autocracy which were the very antithesis of what he really stood for.^21
Russian retribution fell hard on the prostrate Polish provinces. In the Kingdom,
Paskievitch, now 'Prince of Warsaw', richly earned his more popular title, the
'Hound of Mogilev'. In Lithuania, the practised cruelty of General Mikhail
Muraviev (1796—1866) amply justified his sobriquet of 'the Hangman'. Since a
conspirator sharing his surname had been executed during the Decembrist
Revolt, the General was at some pains to point out that he was 'not one of the
Muravievs that get themselves hanged, but one that does the hanging'.
Punishments were inflicted in a harsh and methodical manner. All Polish
officers who had served during the Rising were automatically cashiered and, in