Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/119

 gradually formed a majority for the new constitution (of the 3rd May, 1791), which gave political rights to the middle class and admitted their representatives into the Parliament, took the peasants under the protection of the law, introduced a hereditary monarchy, a modern organisation of government, and a standing army.

There was no time for the completion of the great work. Taking advantage of the French Revolution which engaged the western and eastern European powers, Prussia and Russia, with the collaboration of Austria, completed the destruction of the Polish State. But the reforming movement of the eighteenth century was the beginning of a New Poland that lived, struggled and progressed after the partitions.

This movement strengthened the ties between Poland and other European nations and laid the foundations of new national life. The reformed schools of the second half of the eighteenth century produced a new generation of enlightened men standing, in their knowledge and in their ideas, on the highest western level. Those men led Poland through the Napoleonic era, and they ruled her in the Duchy of Warsaw founded by Napoleon, and in the Kingdom of Poland established by the Congress of Vienna—which kingdom, in spite of its difficult conditions, was one of the best governed and most rapidly progressing countries in Europe. The first decades of the nineteenth century are a period of the greatest upheaval, not only as regards Polish political efforts, but also in the intellectual life of the nation. Outside of the Kingdom, the Polish university of Vilna, the capital of Lithuania, becomes