Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/34



the commencement of the century what was the condition of this people on which this pressure of foreign rule rests, which, sundered into three parts, with an imperial eagle over each part of its divided body, still lives and seeks to convince indifferent Europe of its power and vitality?

It was a people which at the brightest time of its regeneration fell a victim to the breach of faith and covetousness of a foreign power.

From the close of the fourteenth to the close of the sixteenth century Poland had been the important power of Eastern Europe, and had extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea, from the Elbe and the Oder to the Dnieper, over a territory of more than 20,000 square miles. Poland was a great republic, with an elective king, or more exactly, a great democracy of nobles; for the nobility was so numerous, so accessible, so zealous to maintain the political equality of every single noble with greater peers, that the constitution, though it conferred rights only on the nobility, had a democratic stamp. The organisation of the diet carried out the idea of almost unlimited freedom for the individual.

The weak point in the state organisation was that the nobility (Szlachta) was only a class of from 800,000 to 1,000,000 men in a population of from 8,000,000 to 13,000,000, and that the ruling class, after having realised its ideal of freedom and vitality, stood still in a dead conservatism. Until the middle of the eighteenth century society was immovable, because the nobility regarded every reform as an attack upon their freedom, and enthusiastically upheld not only the free choice of a king, which had