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

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 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