Frederic Chopin as a Man and Musician, vol 1 | Page 6

bring
them under the yoke of those who hated them, deprive them of king
and country, drive them into exile, and make them despised by those

who formerly feared and respected them. But these warnings remained
unheeded, and the prophecies were fulfilled to the letter. Elective
kingship, pacta conventa, [Footnote: Terms which a candidate for the
throne had to subscribe on his election. They were of course dictated by
the electors--i.e., by the selfish interest of one class, the szlachta
(nobility), or rather the most powerful of them.] liberum veto,
[Footnote: The right of any member to stop the proceedings of the Diet
by pronouncing the words "Nie pozwalam" (I do not permit), or others
of the same import.] degradation of the burgher class, enslavement of
the peasantry, and other devices of an ever-encroaching nobility,
transformed the once powerful and flourishing commonwealth into one
"lying as if broken-backed on the public highway; a nation anarchic
every fibre of it, and under the feet and hoofs of travelling neighbours."
[Footnote: Thomas Carlyle, Frederick the Great, vol. viii., p. 105.] In
the rottenness of the social organism, venality, unprincipled ambition,
and religious intolerance found a congenial soil; and favoured by and
favouring foreign intrigues and interferences, they bore deadly
fruit--confederations, civil wars, Russian occupation of the country and
dominion over king, council, and diet, and the beginning of the end, the
first partition (1772) by which Poland lost a third of her territory with
five millions of inhabitants. Even worse, however, was to come. For
the partitioning powers--Russia, Prussia, and Austria-- knew how by
bribes and threats to induce the Diet not only to sanction the spoliation,
but also so to alter the constitution as to enable them to have a
permanent influence over the internal affairs of the Republic.
The Pole Francis Grzymala remarks truly that if instead of some
thousand individuals swaying the destinies of Poland, the whole nation
had enjoyed equal rights, and, instead of being plunged in darkness and
ignorance, the people had been free and consequently capable of
feeling and thinking, the national cause, imperilled by the indolence
and perversity of one part of the citizens, would have been saved by
those who now looked on without giving a sign of life. The "some
thousands" here spoken of are of course the nobles, who had grasped
all the political power and almost all the wealth of the nation, and,
imitating the proud language of Louis XIV, could, without
exaggeration, have said: "L'etat c'est nous." As for the king and the
commonalty, the one had been deprived of almost all his prerogatives,

and the other had become a rightless rabble of wretched peasants,
impoverished burghers, and chaffering Jews. Rousseau, in his
Considerations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, says pithily that the
three orders of which the Republic of Poland was composed were not,
as had been so often and illogically stated, the equestrian order, the
senate, and the king, but the nobles who were everything, the burghers
who were nothing, and the peasants who were less than nothing. The
nobility of Poland differed from that of Other countries not only in its
supreme political and social position, but also in its numerousness,
character, and internal constitution.
[Footnote: The statistics concerning old Poland are provokingly
contradictory. One authority calculates that the nobility comprised
120,000 families, or one fourteenth of the population (which, before the
first partition, is variously estimated at from fifteen to twenty millions);
another counts only 100,000 families; and a third states that between
1788 and 1792 (i.e., after the first partition) there were 38,314 families
of nobles.]
All nobles were equal in rank, and as every French soldier was said to
carry a marshal's staff in his knapsack, so every Polish noble was born
a candidate for the throne. This equality, however, was rather de jure
than de facto; legal decrees could not fill the chasm which separated
families distinguished by wealth and fame--such as the Sapiehas,
Radziwills, Czartoryskis, Zamoyskis, Potockis, and Branickis--from
obscure noblemen whose possessions amount to no more than "a few
acres of land, a sword, and a pair of moustaches that extend from one
ear to the other," or perhaps amounted only to the last two items. With
some insignificant exceptions, the land not belonging to the state or the
church was in the hands of the nobles, a few of whom had estates of the
extent of principalities. Many of the poorer amongst the nobility
attached themselves to their better-situated brethren, becoming their
dependents and willing tools. The relation of the nobility to the
peasantry is well characterised in a passage of Mickiewicz's epic poem
Pan Tadeusz, where a peasant, on humbly suggesting that the nobility
suffered less from the measures of their foreign rulers than his own
class, is told by one