tumult, he deplored, that, unless they
remedied the existing evils, reformed their pretended free elections,
and renounced their personal privileges, the noble kingdom would become
the prey of other nations. Nor was this the first warning. The Jesuit
Peter Skarga (1536--1612), an indefatigable denunciator of the vices of
the ruling classes, told them in 1605 that their dissensions would bring
them under the yoke of those who hated them, deprive them of king and
country, drive them into exile, and make them despised by those
who formerly feared and respected them. But these warnings remained
unheeded, and the prophecies were fulfilled to the letter. Elective
kingship, pacta conventa, [Footnote: Terms which a 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 d