in the form of government, and, generally speaking, the establishment of a permanent council, the preservation of the commissions of war and of the treasury, the power of the king and the unlimited concession on the prince’s part of ability to distribute offices according to his sole will.”  The useful reforms being thus abandoned and the king’s feeble power radically shaken, religious discord came to fill up the cup of disorder, and to pave the way for the dismemberment, as well as definitive ruin, of unhappy Poland.

Subjected for a long time past to an increasing oppression, which was encouraged by a fanatical and unenlightened clergy, the Polish dissidents had conceived great hopes on the accession of Stanislaus Augustus; they claimed not only liberty of conscience and of worship, but also all the civil and political rights of which they were deprived.  “It is no question of establishing the free exercise of different religions in Poland,” wrote Frederick to Catherine; “it is necessary to reduce the question to its true issue, the demand of the dissident noblesse, and obtain for them the equality they demand, together with participation in all acts of sovereignty.”  This was precisely what the clergy and the Catholic noblesse were resolved never to grant.  In spite of support from the empress and the King of Prussia, the demand of the dissidents was formally rejected by the Diet of 1766.  At the Diet of 1767, Count Repnin, Catherine’s ambassador and the real head of the government in Poland, had four of the most recalcitrant senators carried off and sent into exile in Russia.  The Diet, terrified, disorganized, immediately pronounced in favor of the dissidents.  By the modifications recently introduced into the constitution of their country, the Polish nobles had lost their liberum veto; unanimity of suffrages was no longer necessary in the Diet; the foreign powers were able to insolently impose their will upon it; the privileges of the noblesse, as well as their traditional faith, were attacked at the very foundations; religious fanaticism and national independence boiled up at the same time in every heart; the discontent, secretly fanned by the agents of Frederick, burst out, sooner than the skilful weavers of the plot could have desired, with sufficient intensity and violence to set fire to the four corners of Poland.  By a bold surprise the confederates gained possession of Cracow and of the fortress of Barr, in Podolia; there it was that they swore to die for the sacred cause of Catholic Poland.  For more than a century, in the face of many misatkes and many misfortunes, the Poles have faithfully kept that oath.