THE NOBLE DEMOCRACY 247largely prevail in existing history textbooks to this day. The Republic of
Poland-Lithuania was not a resounding success. For that reason its ideals and
institutions have rarely received the attention they deserve.^1
Appropriately enough, the fundamental constitutional laws which supposedly
governed the political life of Poland-Lithuania were nicely contradictory.
Indeed the exact nature of the Union was disputed for much of its existence.
According to the Union of Lublin, whose provisions were held to be sacrosanct
by Polish jurists, the separate sovereignties of the Kingdom of Poland and of the
Grand Duchy of Lithuania had been voluntarily dissolved in 1569, and merged
for ever into a new sovereign entity, the united Rzeczpospolita. All laws con-
trary to the Act of Union were repealed. According to the Third Lithuanian
Statute of 1588, however, the separate sovereignty of the Grand Duchy
remained inviolate, and all laws contrary to the Statute, including several
clauses of the Union of Lublin, were judged to be invalid.^2 By any stretch of the
imagination, the situation was absurd. In Poland, the Third Lithuanian Statute
was thought to be unconstitutional. In Lithuania, the 'humiliating' Union of
Lublin was seen by the authors of the Statute as an act of duress. Yet no attempt
was made to resolve the confusion. Both the Act of Union, and the Third Statute
remained in force until the end of the eighteenth century. What the average cit-
izen thought or knew about the problem is difficult to say; but it is clear, whilst
most Polish noblemen from the Kingdom held the Union to be binding, a minor-
ity of their Lithuanian brethren continued to insist on the Grand Duchy's sepa-
rate status. In this light, it could be argued that the constitutional union of
Poland and Lithuania was not properly consummated until 1791, when the
Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodow (The 'Republic of the Two Nations') was
solemnly declared as part of the Constitution of 3 May. Yet this latter union
hardly left the paper on which it was written. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania
was formally abolished by Russian decree after the Second Partition of 1793,
just two years before the Polish rump of the Republic was abolished by the
Third Partition of 1795. Ineluctably, therefore, in examining political traditions,
the historian is obliged to rely less on the theory of the law, and more on the cus-
toms and practice of established institutions. (See Diagram K.)
The basic unit of constitutional life in Poland-Lithuania was the sejmik
or dietine. (Both Sejm and sejmik, meaning 'assembly' and 'little assembly'
derive from the old Czech word sejmovat, 'to bring together' or 'to summon'.)
It crystallized in the fifteenth century out of earlier forms of meetings organized
by the nobility, mainly for military purposes, and became the regular consulta-
tive institution in all the provinces of the Kingdom, and later of the Republic. Its
decisive moment occurred in 1454, at Nieszawa, at the beginning of the second
Teutonic War, when the King conceded the principle that he would neither sum-
mon the army nor raise taxes without prior consultation with the nobility. From