CHAPTER XIII
THE LESSONS OF POLAND
What is the subject of any country? It makes no difference, slave black or white, he
is a man, in no way unlike us. In Europe and in any part of the world, he is our
equal, a citizen of the earth.
—HUGO KOLLONTAY, 1790
Yet we must be fair. Considering where the people of Poland began, they have made
relatively as great a leap toward liberty as we have.
—CAMILLE DESMOULINS, 1791
It has been the fate of Poland, more than of most countries, that outsiders have
been mainly concerned to see in it a spectacular object lesson, hurrying on from
interest in the Poles themselves to find evidence for general truths of wider appli-
cation. Very much this same treatment will be accorded to Poland in this chapter,
which is a compressed account of the Four Years’ Diet of 1788–1792 and its back-
ground; but it may be said, as an apology to the Poles, that in this book the affairs
of all other countries are presented in the same way, so as to fit them into a story of
political disturbance in the Western World as a whole. Poland will first be exhib-
ited as a land of aristocracy triumphant. The question will then be asked, as it was
asked of the American Revolution in Chapter VII, whether the Polish Revolution
of 1791 was a revolution at all, and if so in what sense; and what observers in other
countries—such as Burke in England, the revolutionaries in France, and the rulers
of Prussia and Russia—thought that they learned from it.
Jean- Jacques Rousseau drew lessons from Poland in 1771. With the country
dissolving in civil war, subverted by Russia, and sinking into the First Partition,
the author of the Social Contract, at the request of certain Polish patriots, offered
his diagnosis of their situation. The conservatism of his advice has often been
pointed out. “Don’t shake the machine too abruptly,” he said; don’t multiply en-