I read recently in the Allgemeine Zeitung that the Privy Councillor Friedrich von Raumer, who not long ago gained for himself the reputation of a royal Prussian revolutionist by revolting, as member of the Commission of censure, against its excessive severity, has now received the order to justify the proceedings of the Prussian Government as to Poland. The defence is finished, and the author has already received for it two hundred Prussian dollars. However, I hear that it has not given satisfaction to the camarilla of Brandenburg, because its style is not sufficiently servile. Trifling as this incident may seem, it is of importance as indicating the spirit of the ruling minds and of their subordinates. I knew by chance poor Frederic von Raumer, having seen him now and then walking in his blue-green little coat and grey-blue little cap under the lime-trees, and I heard him once in the chair as he depicted the
the individual, but it was politically inevitable. The serf went for absolutely nothing in Poland. A Polish Countess said to me in 1846 in Florence, in justification of this harsh rule, "Our serfs are even lower than those of Russia." In several works of the seventeenth century, e.g., in the Anthropodemus of J. Prætorius, the condition of the Polish serfs is dwelt on with much feeling, as that of the most cruelly treated race of men in Europe, of which there was also a song begining with the lines—
"Ich bin ein Polnischer Bauer,
Mein Leben wird mir sauer."
—Translator.
