308 Chapter XIII
emies within the state by sudden changes; don’t in your attempts at reform lose
the liberties that you have.^1 His diagnosis nevertheless went to the root of the
matter. The trouble with Poland, he thought, was that it had no consistance, no
staying power to resist pressure and infiltration from outside. What it needed was
character, a character of its own, resting on the collective consciousness or will of
its people—“national institutions which form the genius, the character, the tastes,
and the customs of the people, which make them what they are and not some-
thing else, and inspire that warm love of country founded on habits impossible
to uproot.”^2 He deplored the appalling class divisions in Poland, by which bur-
ghers were “nothing,” and peasants “less than nothing,” and he favored a gradual
emancipation and a humanizing of the serfs. The inequalities of wealth between
rich nobles and poor nobles seemed to him altogether too great. In practice, he
addressed himself only to the nobles, the one political class in the country, but to
them he tried to impart a fundamental message: that if only they would form a
general will and acquire certain civic and moral virtues, including respect for each
other as equals and a willingness to support each other and their state as the
vehicle of their freedom, Poland might yet be saved.
John Adams also drew a lesson. In London in 1787, writing his Defense of the
Constitutions of the United States, and surveying all known republics, ancient, me-
dieval, and modern, he came to the “regal republic” of Poland, and he found in it
abundant confirmation of his principal doctrines. He was horrified to learn that
in Poland a “gentleman” was fined only fifteen livres for killing a peasant. Poland,
with its feeble monarchy, proved to Adams that the welfare of the people required
a strong king, “meaning by the word king a first magistrate possessed exclusively
of the executive power.” A government without three independent branches, he
insisted, would degenerate either into absolute monarchy or into aristocracy, as in
Poland, and in an aristocracy the “nobility will annihilate the people, and attended
with their horses, hounds and vassals, will run down the king as they would hunt
a deer.”^3
A country ruined by having no spiritual solidarity or common basis of loyalty—
thus Rousseau. A country ruined by one- class rule and by having no executive
government—thus Adams. Most historians have agreed with them.
The Gentry Republic
Poland in 1788, like the Dutch Republic, lived under a constitution “guaranteed”
by outside powers. In both cases the guarantee was designed to preserve the his-
toric liberties and the existing upper classes of the country. The Polish constitution,
guaranteed by Russia in 1773 after the First Partition, was essentially the old Pol-
ish constitution as it had developed over the past two centuries. Except in age, in
aristocratic complexion, and in dependence on foreign support, the Polish and
1 Considérations sur le gouvernement de la Pologne, in Oeuvres (Paris, 1827), X, 146, 15.
2 Ibid., 23.
3 Work s (1851), IV, 371.