THE NOBLE DEMOCRACY 283
cherished by the szlachta from a precocious interest in progressive political
theory, rather than from the elemental desire to preserve their ancient privileges.
However, there is an obvious connection. By European standards, the Republic
provides an instance of grossly retarded development. To observers in the age
of Enlightenment, Polish attitudes were reminiscent of those of savage medieval
barons. Yet it must not be forgotten that modern Anglo-Saxon democracy has
grown from an essentially conservative position, which still sees the medieval
traditions of Magna Carta as relevant to the needs of today. The coincidence of
view between the Polish nobleman of the seventeenth or eighteenth century with
the liberal democrat of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is not purely for-
tuitous. It is caused by their common concern to combat the power of the state.
The one opposed the initial manifestations of the phenomenon, the other
opposes its modern excesses, but their enemy is the same. For this reason, if for
no other, in approaching the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Republic, the pre-
sent-day scholar might reasonably be expected to escape from the exclusively
negative judgements, whose origins can be surely traced to the exponents of the
Enlightenment and to the 'enlightened' apologists of the partitioning powers.