134 LUD
68.9 per cent in 1931, to 88.6 per cent in 1946, and 98.7 per cent in 1951. The
People's Republic of Poland, exceptionally, is overwhelmingly Polish.^3
The elimination of the Szlachta, the noble estate; was achieved by the progres-
sive annulment of their legal privileges. In Galicia, a limited number of Polish
families of senatorial rank were admitted to the nobility of the Austrian Empire.
The Lanckoronski, Gotuchowski, Tarnowski, Potocki, Czartoryski, and
Lubomirski families, and others like them, maintained their privileged status
throughout the nineteenth century. In Prussia, too, noblemen with land were
able to register their title, and to adapt to changed conditions without much
difficulty. Only in Russia did the authorities take active measures to repress an
estate which they regarded as incurably hostile to the Tsarist order. Successive
registrations, in 1800, in 1818 in Lithuania, and in 1856 in the Congress
Kingdom, provided the occasion to eliminate thousands of Polish families from
the noble list. Successive confiscations, impressments, and reprisals after each of
the Risings, had the same effect. By 1864, at least 80 per cent of the szlachta were
effectively declasse. Only the wealthiest and best-connected noblemen were per-
mitted to enter the ranks of the Russian dvoryanstvo. In the process, they often
acquired a new Russian life-style, which demanded strict political conformity
and service, and permitted at least till 1864 such practices as the sale of serfs. In
each of the three Partitions, it was the numerous petty nobility which suffered
most acutely. It has been estimated that in the last years of the Congress
Kingdom one-quarter of the zascianki enjoyed a lower standard of living than
the average serf. Deprived of all legal standing, some of the remnants of an
estate which had once dominated the life of the old Republic, clung to their way
of life in the countryside with dogged persistence; others drifted to the towns to
be recruited into the professions, into government service, into commerce, into
the intelligentsia; many sank without trace into the peasantry, and the working
class. In 1921, the March Constitution of the 'Second Republic' formally abol-
ished the noble estate altogether. Noble families of 'immemorial' ancestry, like
those who had obtained their titles of 'Graf or 'Baron' from the partitioning
powers, lost all claim to separate legal status. (See Diagram C.)
The abolition of the noble estate, and the suppression of their legal privileges,
did not necessarily disperse the landed property, the political influence or the
social status of the ex-noble families. It was the greatest fortunes which showed
the strongest instinct for survival. In the egalitarian aura of the Second Republic
it was amusing to address a Radziwill or a Zamoyski as 'Pan' (Mr) or
'Porucznik' (Lieutenant), or whatever; but there was little pretence that the
magnates had really been reduced to the level of common citizens. In 1919, Jozef
Potocki, speaking to Sir Harold Nicolson at the Peace Conference in Paris, could
still describe his Prime Minister, Ignacy Paderewski, in the most patronizing of
terms: 'Yes, a remarkable man, a very remarkable man. Do you realise that he