That apparently, therefore, he must have considered Poland to be an exceptional case, unique in his experience: case of a moribund Anarchy, fallen down as carrion on the common highways of the world; belonging to nobody in particular; liable to be cut into (nay, for sanitary reasons requiring it, if one were a Rhadamanthus Errant, which one is not!)--liable to be cut into, on a great and critically stringent occasion; no question to be asked of IT; your only question the consent of by-standers, and the moderate certainty that nobody got a glaringly disproportionate share! That must have been, on the part of an equitable Friedrich, or even of a Friedrich accurate in Book-keeping by Double Entry, the notion silently formed about Poland.
Whether his notion was scientifically right, and conformable to actual fact, is a question I have no thought of entering on; still less, whether Friedrich was morally right, or whether there was not a higher rectitude, granting even the fact, in putting it in practice.

These are questions on which an Editor may have his opinion, partly complete for a long time past, partly not complete, or, in human language, completable or pronounceable at all; and may carefully forbear to obtrude it on his readers; and only advise them to look with their own best eyesight, to be deaf to the multiplex noises which are evidently blind, and to think what they find thinkablest on such a subject.

For, were it never so just, proper and needful, this is by nature a case of LYNCH LAW; upon which, in the way of approval or apology, no spoken word is permissible.
Lynch being so dangerous a Lawgiver, even when an indispensable one!-- For, granting that the Nation of Poland was for centuries past an Anarchy doomed by the Eternal Laws of Heaven to die, and then of course to get gradually buried, or eaten by neighbors, were it only for sanitary reasons,--it will by no means suit, to declare openly on behalf of terrestrial neighbors who have taken up such an idea (granting it were even a just one, and a true reading of the silent but inexorably certain purposes of Heaven), That they, those volunteer terrestrial neighbors, are justified in breaking in upon the poor dying or dead carcass, and flaying and burying it, with amicable sharing of skin and shoes! If it even were certain that the wretched Polish Nation, for the last forty years hastening with especial speed towards death, did in present circumstances, with such a howling canaille of Turk Janissaries and vultures of creation busy round it, actually require prompt surgery, in the usual method, by neighbors,--the neighbors shall and must do that function at their own risk.

If Heaven did appoint them to it, Heaven, for certain, will at last justify them; and in the mean while, for a generation or two, the same Heaven (I can believe) has appointed that Earth shall pretty unanimously condemn them.

The shrieks, the foam-lipped curses of mistaken mankind, in such case, are mankind's one security against over-promptitude (which is so dreadfully possible) on the part of surgical neighbors.
Alas, yes, my articulate-speaking friends; here, as so often elsewhere, the solution of the riddle is not Logic, but Silence.