The Lessons of Poland 311
thousands, that flocked in to do him honor and eat dinner in his country house,
and might be rallied as a political force in times of public disturbance.
“Your aristoi,” Adams wrote to Jefferson in their old age, “are the most difficult
animals to manage of anything in the whole theory and practice of government.
They will not suffer themselves to be governed.”^6 Adams was speaking in general;
but his remark puts the political history of Poland for two hundred years before
1788 in a nutshell.
At the close of the Middle Ages Poland had had flourishing towns, and a
peasantry as free and as well- off as in most parts of Western Europe. The landed
nobility had extorted increasing privileges from the King, who found insufficient
strength in the burgher class to resist the neo- feudal demands; and the nobles
gradually deprived the King of his powers, and other classes of their rights. The
peasantry, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, fell into bondage. Burghers were
thrust aside; when the central diet was definitively constituted in 1505 no city
except Cracow received a clear right of representation, and such occasional par-
ticipation as a few towns enjoyed was finally ended by a law of 1768, with excep-
tions for Danzig and Thorn. Ceasing to exist as an estate of the realm, the bur-
ghers lost their rights of municipal self- government also, and were helpless before
the legislative predilections of an agrarian gentry, as when in 1565 the Diet for-
bade native merchants to engage in foreign trade, and in 1643 it limited their
profits to seven per cent, or three per cent in the case of Jews. The Polish towns
became very dilapidated.
The landowners, great and small, met in about fifty local assemblies, one for
each palatinate or province in the country; and these local assemblies, after 1500,
gathered to themselves the power to authorize and to collect taxes, and to main-
tain armed forces. The country became a loose federation of half a hundred little
noble republics. Each sent deputies to the lower house of a central or national diet,
where they were bound by imperative mandates of their constituents. The upper
house consisted of prelates and great officers of the crown. The nobles elected the
King, convening for this purpose in a grand special assemblage, a kind of enor-
mous town meeting which every gentleman in Poland had the right to attend, and
where as many as a hundred thousand might actually appear. It was the magnates
who financed and directed these turbulent encampments, which always imposed
on the King whom they elected certain articles of agreement, called the pacta con-
venta, by which the liberties of Poland were secured. The aristocracy thus pre-
vented the accumulation of powers in the crown from one generation to the next;
each generation remained “free,” uncommitted by the past, in an odd variation on
the doctrine of Jefferson or Thomas Paine.
The gentry and magnates were as reluctant to see power vested in their national
diet as in a king. They developed, therefore, a procedure for nullification, the fa-
mous Liberum Veto, which came into habitual use in 1652. By this procedure any
deputy in the central diet, acting as the representative of his home assembly (and
in practice carrying out the will of some magnate) could arise in the diet and by
pronouncing the formula, sic nolo, sic veto, not merely block the legislation in ques-
6 Work s (1851), X, 51.