tter. What little there was, was in the hands of the
Jews and foreigners, the nobles not being allowed to meddle with such
base matters, and the degraded descendants of the industrious and
enterprising ancient burghers having neither the means nor the spirit to
undertake anything of the sort. Hence the strong contrast of wealth and
poverty, luxury and distress, that in every part of Poland, in town and
country, struck so forcibly and painfully all foreign travellers. Of the
Polish provinces that in 1773 came under Prussian rule we read that--

the country people hardly knew such a thing as bread, many
had never in their life tasted such a delicacy; few villages
had an oven. A weaving-loom was rare; the spinning-wheel
unknown. The main article of furniture, in this bare scene of
squalor, was the crucifix and vessel of holy-water under
it....It was a desolate land without discipline, without law,
without a master. On 9,000 English square miles lived 500,000
souls: not 55 to the square mile. [Footnote: Carlyle.
Frederick the Great, vol. x., p. 40.]

And this poverty and squalor were not to be found only in one part of
Poland, they seem to have been general. Abbe de Mably when seeing, in
1771, the misery of the country (campagne) and the bad condition of the
roads, imagined himself in Tartary. William Coxe, the English historian
and writer of travels, who visited Poland after the first partition,
relates, in speaking of the district called Podlachia, that he visited
between Bjelsk and Woyszki villages in which there was nothing but the
bare walls, and he was told at the table of the ------ that knives,
forks, and spoons were conveniences unknown to the peasants. He says he
never saw--

a road so barren of interesting scenes as that from Cracow to
Warsaw--for the most part level, with little variation of
surface; chiefly overspread with tracts of thick forest;
where open, the distant horizon was always skirted with wood
(chiefly pines and firs, intermixed with beech, birch, and
small oaks). The occasional breaks presented some pasture-
ground, with here and there a few meagre crops of corn. The
natives were poorer, humbler, and more miserable than any
people we had yet observed in the course of our travels:
whenever we stopped they flocked around us in crowds; and,
asking for charity, used the most abject gestures....The
Polish peasants are cringing and servi