arkness 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 ha