Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/110

 by the new conditions of agricultural development; they became a class of prosperous large and middle landowners. A large portion of that class, especially in Mazovia, where it was most numerous, remained poor and sat on small lots of land, many being even landless, but the majority became wealthy landed nobles. Economic prosperity strengthened the power of the nobility: they excluded from the Diet the representatives of the cities and reduced the free husbandmen to serfdom with the object of securing labour which they needed very much in the new conditions. From this time onwards the whole of Polish history is practically the work of the Polish landed nobility. They made the laws, they decreed the wars and they elected the kings, the election being limited throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the Lithuanian House of Jagiello, and becoming in the second half of the sixteenth century quite free. The nobility were free to choose from among foreign princes as well as from among themselves.

This ancient class of warriors which developed into the landed nobility had many great qualities, above all, chivalry, courage, a very severe code of honour and duty toward the country, great family virtues and a sense of decency in private life. But in the new conditions of prosperity they gradually lost their energy and their aggressiveness, lost to a great extent their ability for sacrifice and gradually substituted the cause of individual freedom for that of country. In the mass they were very ignorant. It is true that, after power and wealth had been acquired, there appeared a craving for enlightenment. In the fifteenth and sixteenth