Frederic Chopin as a Man and Musician, vol 1 | Page 7

of his betters that this is a silly remark, seeing that
peasants, like eels, are accustomed to being skinned, whereas the
well-born are accustomed to live in liberty.

Nothing illustrates so well the condition of a people as the way in
which justice is administered. In Poland a nobleman was on his estate
prosecutor as well as judge, and could be arrested only after conviction,
or, in the case of high-treason, murder, and robbery, if taken in the act.
And whilst the nobleman enjoyed these high privileges, the peasant had,
as the law terms it, no facultatem standi in judicio, and his testimony
went for nothing in the courts of justice. More than a hundred laws in
the statutes of Poland are said to have been unfavourable to these poor
wretches. In short, the peasant was quite at the mercy of the privileged
class, and his master could do with him pretty much as he liked,
whipping and selling not excepted, nor did killing cost more than a fine
of a few shillings. The peasants on the state domains and of the clergy
were, however, somewhat better off; and the burghers, too, enjoyed
some shreds of their old privileges with more or less security. If we
look for a true and striking description of the comparative position of
the principal classes of the population of Poland, we find it in these
words of a writer of the eighteenth century: "Polonia coelum nobilium,
paradisus clericorum, infernus rusticorum."
The vast plain of Poland, although in many places boggy and sandy, is
on the whole fertile, especially in the flat river valleys, and in the east
at the sources of the Dnieper; indeed, it is so much so that it has been
called the granary of Europe. But as the pleasure-loving gentlemen had
nobler pursuits to attend to, and the miserable peasants, with whom it
was a saying that only what they spent in drink was their own, were not
very anxious to work more and better than they could help, agriculture
was in a very neglected condition. With manufacture and commerce it
stood not a whit better. What little there was, was in the hands of the
Jews and foreigners, the nobles not being allowed to meddle with such
base matters, and the degraded descendants of the industrious and
enterprising ancient burghers having neither the means nor the spirit to
undertake anything of the sort. Hence the strong contrast of wealth and
poverty, luxury and distress, that in every part of Poland, in town and
country, struck so forcibly and painfully all foreign travellers. Of the
Polish provinces that in 1773 came under Prussian rule we read that--
the country people hardly knew such a thing as bread, many had never
in their life tasted such a delicacy; few villages had an oven. A
weaving-loom was rare; the spinning-wheel unknown. The main article

of furniture, in this bare scene of squalor, was the crucifix and vessel of
holy-water under it....It was a desolate land without discipline, without
law, without a master. On 9,000 English square miles lived 500,000
souls: not 55 to the square mile. [Footnote: Carlyle. Frederick the Great,
vol. x., p. 40.]
And this poverty and squalor were not to be found only in one part of
Poland, they seem to have been general. Abbe de Mably when seeing,
in 1771, the misery of the country (campagne) and the bad condition of
the roads, imagined himself in Tartary. William Coxe, the English
historian and writer of travels, who visited Poland after the first
partition, relates, in speaking of the district called Podlachia, that he
visited between Bjelsk and Woyszki villages in which there was
nothing but the bare walls, and he was told at the table of the ------ that
knives, forks, and spoons were conveniences unknown to the peasants.
He says he never saw--
a road so barren of interesting scenes as that from Cracow to
Warsaw--for the most part level, with little variation of surface; chiefly
overspread with tracts of thick forest; where open, the distant horizon
was always skirted with wood (chiefly pines and firs, intermixed with
beech, birch, and small oaks). The occasional breaks presented some
pasture- ground, with here and there a few meagre crops of corn. The
natives were poorer, humbler, and more miserable than any people we
had yet observed in the course of our travels: whenever we stopped
they flocked around us in crowds; and, asking for charity, used the
most abject gestures....The Polish peasants are cringing and servile in
their expressions of respect; they bowed down to the ground; took off
their hats or caps and held them in their hands till we were out of sight;
stopped their carts on the first glimpse of our carriage; in short, their
whole behaviour gave