"And who are they?" continued Skshetuski. "Have
they come from Germany or from Turkey? Is it not the
blood of your blood, and the bone of your bone? Are not
the nobility yours, and the princelets yours? If that is
true, then woe to thee, Hetman; for thou art raising up the
younger brothers against the elder, and making parricides
of them. Oh, in God's name, even if they were wicked, -
even if all of them, as many as there are, have trampled
upon justice, violated rights, - let God judge them in
heaven, and the Diet on earth, but not you, O Hetman!
Are you able to say that among yours there are only just
men? Have yours never been guilty, that you have a right
to cast a stone at another for his guilt? And if you ask
me, Where are the rights of the Cossacks, I answer: Not
kinglets betrayed them, but Zaporojians, - Loboda, Sasko,
Nalivaika, and Pavlyuk, of whom you falsely say that he
was roasted in a brazen bull, for you know well that this is
not true! Your seditions, your disturbances and attacks,
made like attacks of Tartars, were put down. Who let the
Tartars into the boundaries of the Commonwealth, so that
when they were coming back laden with booty, they might
be attacked? You! Who - God guard us! - gave their
own Christian people into captivity? Who raised the
greatest disturbances? You! Before whom is neither
noble nor merchant nor village safe? Before you! Who
has inflamed domestic war, who has sent up in smoke the
villages and towns of the Ukraine, plundered the sanctuaries
of God, violated women? You! you! What do you want,
then? Do you want that the rights of making civil war and
of robbing and plundering should be granted you? In truth,
more has been forgiven you than taken away! We wished
to cure putrid members instead of cutting them off, and I
know no power in the world but the Commonwealth that
would exhibit equal patience and clemency by permitting
such an ulcer in its own bosom. But what is your gratitude
in response? There sleeps your ally, but the raging enemy
of the Commonwealth, - your friend, but the foe of the cross
and Christianity, - not a kinglet of the Ukraine, but a murza
of the Crimea; and with him you will go to burn your own
home, and with him to judge your own brother. But he will
lord it over you, and you will be forced to hold his stirrup."

Hmelnitski emptied another glass of vudka. "When
we, with Barabash, were with his Majesty the King, and
when we wept over the oppression and injustice practised