The Lessons of Poland 309
Dutch arrangements were diametrical opposites, for, in the United Netherlands
even the patricians were burghers, while in Poland they were exclusively agrarian
landlords, the Dutch being the most commercial people of Western Civilization,
the Poles nearly the least so.
The Republic of Poland, whose titular head was an elected king, comprised two
parts: the “kingdom of Poland,” or Poland proper, and the grand duchy of Lithua-
nia to the east.^4 The two parts, in the 1780’s, had somewhat over 8,000,000 people,
or about the population of England. Population density was only a third of that of
England or France. About 725,000 persons were of families somewhat mislead-
ingly translated into French and English as “noble.” About 500,000 persons were
of the town classes, not counting the 900,000 Jews, who were mostly scattered in
very small businesses in the smallest towns and in the open country. Though the
tendency of recent Polish historians is to emphasize the Polish nationality of the
burgher class, it is agreed that a significant number of them spoke German and felt
as transplanted Germans, while a certain number were Greeks or Armenians, and
since the Jews spoke Yiddish, lived apart, or were concentrated in ghettoes, the
classes corresponding to the townspeople of Western Europe were prevented by
language and religion from developing any feeling of unity. Warsaw was rapidly
growing, leaping in size from 30,000 to 120,000 people between 1764 and 1791,
but most other places were small, and all the people in the fifty largest towns taken
together—of whom few could be called “bourgeoisie”—were only a little over half
as numerous as the nobles.
Three- quarters of the population were peasants, most of them serfs, as in the
Hapsburg empire, Prussia, and Russia. As in these countries, and indeed more so,
the mass of the country population were subjects of their lords, not of the King.
“The nobility,” according to a Polish lawbook of 1742, “has the right of life and
death over its subjects attached to the soil (glebae adscriptos), not otherwise than as
slaves were considered to be among the Romans.”^5 Though such information is
hard to come by, it may be assumed that there was in Poland very little of the in-
termarriage and family relationship between townspeople and peasantry that were
so common in France, since in Poland the countryman, as a serf, was not free to
move, and might even speak a different language. The sharp separation between
town and country, the inability of burghers and agricultural people to enter into
each other’s interests and points of view, characteristic also of Germany in lesser
degree, was one of the fundamental differences between Eastern Europe on the
one hand, and Western Europe and North America on the other—always with the
4 For conditions in Poland before the Four Years’ Diet see R. H. Lord, The Second Partition of Po-
land (Cambridge, Mass., 1915); J. Fabre, Stanislas- Auguste Poniatowski et l ’Europe des lumières (Paris,
1952); R. N. Bain, The Last King of Poland and His Contemporaries (London, 1909); the special number
of Przeglad historyczny (Historical Review), XLII, 1951, devoted to Poland in this period, containing
articles with French summaries by C. Bobinska, A. Korta, J. Kott, W. KuIa, B. Lesnodorski, J. Mi-
chalski, and E. Rostworowski; B. Lesnodorski, “Les facteurs intellectuels de la formation de la société
polonaise moderne au Siècle des lumières,” in La Pologne au Xe Congrès international des sciences histo-
riques à Rome ( Warsaw, 1955); Polish Encyclopedia (Geneva, 1921), II, 104–21.
5 Quoted from Zalaszowski, Jus regni Poloniae (1742), I, 39, by P. Mitrofanov, Joseph II (Vienna,
1910), 592.