The Lessons of Poland 325
even in England, there were few towns where each property- owner could actually
cast a vote for councilman or mayor. In neither Russia, Prussia, nor the Hapsburg
empire were burghers as free to acquire rural land as under the new Polish laws. Nor
could they so readily rise into the gentry. It was easy for French democrats to laugh
at the Statute of Cities, or for conservatives of all Western nationalities to praise its
realistic correspondence to the facts of Polish life. It was nevertheless disturbing for
Eastern Europe. There is evidence, indeed, that East Europeans saw it as such, and
agreed with Niemcewicz that it might threaten neighboring powers by attracting
immigrants into Poland. The Austrian minister at Warsaw, on April 27, 1791, was of
this opinion, “Would it not be prudent,” he inquired of Vienna on reporting the
terms of the new Statute, “to take the necessary measures to prevent emigration of
our Galician burghers?”^32 The monarchs and the hier- archs of Eastern Europe were
by no means mistaken in detecting in the Polish constitution a disconcerting odor
of Jacobinism. Leopold II of Austria, characteristically enough, was the only one
who said anything in its favor, and he soon died.^33
Neither its touted moderation, nor the hearty approval of Edmund Burke, was
enough to save the Polish constitution from extinction. Moderation was not at
bottom the true issue. Nor was it the bloodshed and the “excesses” of the French
Revolution that caused the most resentment. Modern principles of the state, or
ideas with a democratic tinge, even when moderately stated, as by Dutch Patriots,
Belgian democrats, Genevese Représentants, English and Irish parliamentary re-
formers, or William Pitt himself, had for ten years met with nothing but repres-
sion or failure. The same happened in Poland. Disgruntled magnates, led by Felix
Potocki and the Branicki, formed the Confederation of Targowica. Raising up
their followers they declared war on the new regime. They accepted Russian inter-
vention to crush it. “I shall fight Jacobinism, and beat it in Poland,” the Empress
Catherine wrote to Grimm in 1792.^34 This she did, with aid from the King of
Prussia. The Polish constitution of 1791 survived only a year, and Poland itself was
cut up by the Second Partition. But we encroach here on the story of the interna-
tional counterrevolution, which I shall develop at length in a later place.
There was another country too big to be bullied, then the most populous state in
the world of Western Civilization, still at the height of its cultural leadership, in
the forefront of science, engineering, and the military arts, busy and wealthy, full of
peasants who were not serfs, of aristocrats who were not cowboys, and bulging
with bourgeois, the most brilliant and the most dangerous of all the peoples of
Europe, as it seemed to Tocqueville. It is time, after the involved narrative of pre-
ceding chapters, to turn to the French Revolution.
32 Dany, Idées politiques, 195–96.
33 On reaction of the East European courts see the French summary of the Polish work of S.
Smolka, “L’Europe et la constitution du 3 mai 1791,” in Bulletin international de l ’Académie des sciences
de Cracovie, 1891.
34 La Pologne au Xe Congrès international, 216. John Adams remarked, in a note added to his De-
fense at some time not before 1797, that a constitution may fail because of “circumstances having
nothing to do with its intrinsic excellence,” and that if the United States were in the geographical posi-
tion of Poland, given the controversies that existed in America, it was “at least an open question”
whether troubles as bad as those of Poland might not have developed under the constitution of the
United States. Work s (1851), IV, 374 n.