Petersburg and Warsaw. By Augustin P. O'Brien. (R. Bentley.)— The
writer gives us the narrative of what he himself saw and heard in these two capitals last year, and while he admits that the Russians
carried out military law with groat severity, he absolutely denies the stories of torture, flogging of women, and similar atrocities which filled the newspapers of the West. He declares them to have been pure inventions, and that while in Warsaw he read accounts of the flogging of ladies with whom he was in almost daily intercourse.
There can, we think, be little doubt that the peasantry never took much part in the movement, except under the terrorism of the agents of the National Association, and that the great landowners soon tired of it.
But even Mr. O'Brien tells us of " younglads —schoolboys—lying wounded in the hospitals." The enthusiasm of the middle-class and their hatred of Russia cannot bo disputed. The evidence of the author and Mr.
Grant Duff as to the condition of the prisons in the large towns is con- clusive, but the narrative of a clergyman, lately noticed in these columns, of his own temporary imprisonment shows that in the minor establish- ments things are different.
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