The Lessons of Poland 321
Poland, and it reveals, on the one hand, how remote from its authors’ minds was
the idea of abolishing legal status, and, on the other, how the Polish nobility was
less jealously exclusive, less preoccupied with pedigree, more conscious of being
simply a general upper class, even in a vague sense more “democratic,” than most of
the aristocracies in the West. By the statute, any burgher who bought an “entire
village,” on which he paid at least 200 guilders in taxes, could become a noble.
Burghers serving two years as town delegates in the diet, and those reaching the
rank of captain in the army, were also to be nobles. In addition, each diet was to
ennoble thirty burghers who had obtained distinction in the army, the government
service, as factory owners, or as merchants selling native products. In short, bur-
ghers of notable achievement, or those especially useful to the country, were to be
absorbed, or drained off, year by year, into the noble class.
A Game of Ideological Football
News of the Polish Revolution was at first received with satisfaction throughout
the Western World. Persons of the most contrary opinions found something in it
to approve, but precisely in the universality of these praises there lay a danger, for
by 1791 the world of Atlantic Civilization, if the term be permitted, had become
aware of deep ideological cleavages, and it aroused the suspicion of each party to
hear Poland so loudly eulogized by the other. As always, observers used Poland to
draw a lesson or read a lecture. Poland was caught in the cross- fire of argument
over the French Revolution. It was kicked about in a game of ideological football.
“A great and important Revolution in favor of the rights of man... happily
begun without violence or tumult... a most wonderful revolution... .” So said the
Gazette of the United States, published at Philadelphia. It put to shame, according to
these Americans, the constitution given to Canada at the same time by the British.
Toasts “to the King of Poland” were drunk at Philadelphia and at Richmond. Poets
warmed to the subject:
Waked by the vernal breeze, see Poland, France
With youth renew’d and vig’rous health advance.Thomas Paine considered applying for Polish citizenship, and Joel Barlow, also in
Europe and caught up in the international revolutionary spirit, wrote a long and
enthusiastic letter to the Polish King.^19
In Holland, the Leiden Gazette thought that “if there are any miracles in this
century, one has happened in Poland.” The London Critical Review, surveying the
new Polish, French, and United States federal constitutions together, found that
the Polish had “caught its spirit” from the American. Peter Ochs, at Basel, saw in
the Polish revolution, as in the French and American, a sign of world renewal.^20
19 M. Haiman, The Fall of Poland in Contemporary American Opinion (Chicago, 1935), 38–62.
20 Gazette de Leyde, numbers 37, 39 and 40 of 1791; Critical Review, Sept.–Dec. 1791, 443; on
Ochs, above, 269.