THE RISE OF THE COMMON PEOPLE 143Among the new classes of the nineteenth century, the new middle stratum
(meaning that part of society which lay between the old propertied class on the
one hand and the peasants and workers on the other) was most unlike anything
which had existed before. It coalesced round the core of the burgher estate,
whose revival was envisaged by the Constitution of 1791 and realized in the life
of the Duchy of Warsaw; and it drew heavily on the declasse nobility and on the
Jews. It included a numerous bureaucratic class, unknown in the old Republic:
commercial, industrial, and financial entrepreneurs, the burzuazja (bourgeoisie)
proper; a less prosperous grouping of professional and service families; and, as
in all parts of Eastern Europe, an influential inteligencja (intelligentsia). Most
characteristically, it contained a high proportion of Germans, Jews, Russians,
and even Czechs' and Hungarians: some assimilated, some not: some who were
native born, and some who arrived from distant regions of the three partition-
ing Empires. Its activities were most in evidence in the towns of Russian Poland,
less so in Prussia or in Galicia.
The prototypes of the burzuazja first appeared in the late eighteenth cen-
tury. Two prominent figures, Antoni 'Prof Potocki (1761-1801), one-time
Palatine of Kiev, who combined a landed fortune with commercial business
and who built a fleet of trading ships on the Black Sea, and Fergusson Piotr
Tepper (died 1794), one-time shopkeeper on Warsaw's Old Town Square, who
lent over 11 million zl. to King Stanislaw-August, were both bankrupted by the
crisis of 1793. At that time, their individual fortunes were each estimated at 70
million zl., or approximately three times the entire annual expenditure of the
Kingdom. Their successors included several banking and industrial dynasties.
Jakub Epstein (1771-1843), one-time officer on Kosciuszko's staff, made his
fortune through French military contracts in the Duchy of Warsaw. His third
son, Hermann E. Epstein (1806—67), farmed the Customs and Excise of the
Congress Kingdom, was elected Chairman of the Warsaw—Vienna Railway
Co., and ennobled by the Tsar. His grandson, Mieczyslaw Epstein
(1833-1914), founded Warsaw's Discount Bank, owned the 'Zawiercie' firm,
and served for thirty years as President of the Warsaw Stock Exchange.
Leopold Kronenburg, a participant of the January Rising, was the proprietor
of banking houses in both Warsaw and St. Petersburg, and was active in pro-
moting railways and metallurgical industries. Hipolit Wawelburg (1843-1901),
an international financier on the same scale, founded the influential Technical
School in Warsaw in 1891. Jan Bloch (1836-1902), perhaps the king of Polish
railwaymen, was remembered for his prophetic book, Przyszia Wojna (The
Future War, 1898) which correctly predicted the economic consequences for
Poland of war between Germany and Russia. In the world of industry, four
English brothers, Thomas, Andrew, Alfred, and Douglas Evans, pioneered the
machine industry. Stanislaw Lilpop (1817-66), an engineer expanded their
business into rolling-stock and machine tools. In Lodz, the Fraenkel,
Poznaiiski, and Geyer families of miil-owners presided over the growth of tex-
tile empires.^10