The vast plain of Poland, although in many places boggy and sandy, is on the whole fertile, especially in the flat river valleys, and in the east at the sources of the Dnieper; indeed, it is so much so that it has been called the granary of Europe.  But as the pleasure-loving gentlemen had nobler pursuits to attend to, and the miserable peasants, with whom it was a saying that only what they spent in drink was their own, were not very anxious to work more and better than they could help, agriculture was in a very neglected condition.  With manufacture and commerce it stood not a whit better.  What little there was, was in the hands of the Jews and foreigners, the nobles not being allowed to meddle with such base matters, and the degraded descendants of the industrious and enterprising ancient burghers having neither the means nor the spirit to undertake anything of the sort.  Hence the strong contrast of wealth and poverty, luxury and distress, that in every part of Poland, in town and country, struck so forcibly and painfully all foreign travellers.  Of the Polish provinces that in 1773 came under Prussian rule we read that—­

the country people hardly knew such a thing as bread, many had never in their life tasted such a delicacy; few villages had an oven.  A weaving-loom was rare; the spinning-wheel unknown.  The main article of furniture, in this bare scene of squalor, was the crucifix and vessel of holy-water under it....It was a desolate land without discipline, without law, without a master.  On 9,000 English square miles lived 500,000 souls:  not 55 to the square mile. [Footnote:  Carlyle.  Frederick the Great, vol. x., p. 40.]

And this poverty and squalor were not to be found only in one part of Poland, they seem to have been general.  Abbe de Mably when seeing, in 1771, the misery of the country (campagne) and the bad condition of the roads, imagined himself in Tartary.  William Coxe, the English historian and writer of travels, who visited Poland after the first partition, relates, in speaking of the district called Podlachia, that he visited between Bjelsk and Woyszki villages in which there was nothing but the bare walls, and he was told at the table of the ------ that knives, forks, and spoons were conveniences unknown to the peasants.  He says he never saw—­

a road so barren of interesting scenes as that from Cracow to Warsaw—­for the most part level, with little variation of surface; chiefly overspread with tracts of thick forest; where open, the distant horizon was always skirted with wood (chiefly pines and firs, intermixed with beech, birch, and small oaks).  The occasional breaks presented some pasture- ground, with here and there a few meagre crops of corn.  The natives were poorer, humbler, and more miserable than any people we had yet observed in the course of our travels:  whenever we stopped they flocked around us in crowds; and, asking for charity, used the most abject gestures....The