310 Chapter XIII
reminder that race differences and slavery gave parts of America a resemblance to
Eastern Europe.
Persons counting as nobles were exceedingly numerous in Poland, making up
over eight per cent of the population. They were more numerous even than in
Hungary, where, as seen in the last chapter, the nobility was larger proportionately
than the noblesse of France or the gentry and aristocracy of England. Since one
person in twelve was noble, and the nobles outnumbered the burghers, and in all
societies the mass of the people remains somewhat anonymous, it has been possi-
ble for some writers to compare the lesser gentry to a yeomanry, and to see a kind
of agrarian democracy in the old Poland. The trouble in this view is that the
725,000 nobles were themselves very mixed.
The biggest and richest were the twenty- odd families of magnates, such as the
Potockis, the Czartoryskis, the Radziwills, and the Branickis. Their main strength
lay in the eastern and southeastern part of the country, in White Russia and the
western Ukraine, which remained under Polish control even after the First Parti-
tion. Here the landlords, Polish in origin or in culture, descendents of men who
had conquered the land from Russians, Tartars, or Turks, held vast latifundia
worked by the White Russian or Ukrainian peasantry. Felix Potocki, for example,
possessed estates of over 6,500 square miles, larger than Connecticut, or half as
large as the Dutch Republic. He kept a court of 400 persons, and had an annual
income of 3,000,000 Polish florins. This was a third as large as the income of the
Polish crown. A few such magnates together could raise as much money, and as
many armed men, as the King himself. They lived like princes, built palaces, gave
lavish entertainments, sponsored the arts, spoke French, went on grand tours, and
felt it natural for men in their position to maintain their own foreign policy, being
often seen at the courts of St. Petersburg, Berlin, or other great capitals.
Half the nobles, however, were landless or nearly so. Some, possessing a few
acres and a horse, made a shabby living by doing the farm labor themselves. Travel-
ers saw them going into the fields wearing their swords, which they hung on trees
as they went about their plowing or their digging. Others, having no property, in-
come, skills, or settled occupation, might be called a proletariat except for a sense
of class superiority that they maintained, by which they set a high value on birth,
physical courage, political liberty, and riding horseback (they were the “equestrian
order”), and a low value on work, routine, and the orderly payment of debts. Some
Polish noblemen were admirable products of European civilization; one thinks of
Adam Czartoryski in the next generation, or the poet and patriot Niemcewicz,
who lived for years in New Jersey after the failure of Kosciusko’s rebellion. The
bulk of the Polish nobility, however, were rude, slovenly, uneducated, and provin-
cial, equally unaware of what French philosophers or a Russian tsarina might be
thinking; out of touch with the world, their horizons bounded by the narrow limits
of their own way of life; unaccustomed to dealing on equal terms with people un-
like themselves; naïvely unpolitical, but inclined to political oratory, and more than
willing to join the following of some chieftain. Poor nobles lived as retainers to the
great. The great nobleman, the princely magnate, counted his importance by the
number of his dependents, the thousands of subjects or unfree peasants who la-
bored on his estates, and the swarms of freemen or nobles, who might also number