136 LUDwas born in one of my own villages? At Chepetowka, actually. And yet when I
speak to him I have absolutely the impression of conversing with an equal.. .'^4
For the Radziwills and Potockis and their ilk were still exceptional by any stand-
ards. The greater part of the szlachta were merging fast into the population at
large. Parcellation was nibbling in to their estates. Landowning was in decline
as a profitable enterprise. The younger generation was taking off into business,
into the professions, into politics or public employment, into the Army. The
Second World War completed what was already far advanced. The eastern
provinces, where the great estates were concentrated, were annexed by the
USSR. In the People's Republic, the Land Reform of 1946 redistributed landed
property among all and sundry. Nowadays, everyone, and no one, is a noble-
man.
The old mieszczahstwo or 'burgher estate' was not so much destroyed as
overwhelmed. The reforms of the Four Year Sejm had been directed to an estate
of puny proportions, which had been declining for two centuries. After the
Partitions, Danzig until 1815 and Cracow until 1846 were the only cities to enjoy
a measure of their former privileges and thus to preserve the special legal status
on which the fortunes of the burgher estate had been founded. Municipal char-
ters were in force in the Congress Kingdom until 1869-70, when Russian prac-
tices were introduced and when large numbers of small towns lost their separate
municipal rights completely. In the course of the nineteenth century, urban life
was changed out of all recognition by the growth of new industrial towns and
suburbs, whose inhabitants lived and worked without reference to the ancient
order. Even so, several ancient-institutions survived. The Gildia or 'merchant
confraternity' was retained as a convenient means for organizing commercial
taxation. The Cecb or 'Guild' continued to function in the interests of those tra-
ditional trades and crafts which were not affected by the new habits of a mass
labour-force, and was not abolished until 1948. The transition from the burgher
estate, which had been defined by specific legal privileges to the ranks of the
'bourgeoisie' who were characterized by their social and economic function,
was, for most families, imperceptible. Whether or not one described oneself or
one's friends as mieszczanin (burgher), or burzuj or (bourgeois), depended
largely on whether one intended to be polite.
The Jewish community, which to all intents and purposes under the old
Republic had enjoyed the status of an autonomous estate, was subjected to the
separate legislations of the partitioning powers, and was changed out of all
recognition. By 1918, it had lost its exclusively religious identity and its legal
privileges, and had been fragmented by a wide variety of social, economic, cul-
tural, and political developments.
The emancipation of the serfs took place over some sixty years spanning the
first half of the nineteenth century.^5 It was achieved piecemeal, by different
authorities in different regions acting for different motives, and by different
methods each with its particular virtues and vices. One method, first introduced
in 1807 under French auspices in the Duchy of Warsaw and in Prussia, was