[Footnote:  The statistics concerning old Poland are provokingly contradictory.  One authority calculates that the nobility comprised 120,000 families, or one fourteenth of the population (which, before the first partition, is variously estimated at from fifteen to twenty millions); another counts only 100,000 families; and a third states that between 1788 and 1792 (i.e., after the first partition) there were 38,314 families of nobles.]

All nobles were equal in rank, and as every French soldier was said to carry a marshal’s staff in his knapsack, so every Polish noble was born a candidate for the throne.  This equality, however, was rather de jure than de facto; legal decrees could not fill the chasm which separated families distinguished by wealth and fame—­such as the Sapiehas, Radziwills, Czartoryskis, Zamoyskis, Potockis, and Branickis—­from obscure noblemen whose possessions amount to no more than “a few acres of land, a sword, and a pair of moustaches that extend from one ear to the other,” or perhaps amounted only to the last two items.  With some insignificant exceptions, the land not belonging to the state or the church was in the hands of the nobles, a few of whom had estates of the extent of principalities.  Many of the poorer amongst the nobility attached themselves to their better-situated brethren, becoming their dependents and willing tools.  The relation of the nobility to the peasantry is well characterised in a passage of Mickiewicz’s epic poem Pan Tadeusz, where a peasant, on humbly suggesting that the nobility suffered less from the measures of their foreign rulers than his own class, is told by one of his betters that this is a silly remark, seeing that peasants, like eels, are accustomed to being skinned, whereas the well-born are accustomed to live in liberty.

Nothing illustrates so well the condition of a people as the way in which justice is administered.  In Poland a nobleman was on his estate prosecutor as well as judge, and could be arrested only after conviction, or, in the case of high-treason, murder, and robbery, if taken in the act.  And whilst the nobleman enjoyed these high privileges, the peasant had, as the law terms it, no facultatem standi in judicio, and his testimony went for nothing in the courts of justice.  More than a hundred laws in the statutes of Poland are said to have been unfavourable to these poor wretches.  In short, the peasant was quite at the mercy of the privileged class, and his master could do with him pretty much as he liked, whipping and selling not excepted, nor did killing cost more than a fine of a few shillings.  The peasants on the state domains and of the clergy were, however, somewhat better off; and the burghers, too, enjoyed some shreds of their old privileges with more or less security.  If we look for a true and striking description of the comparative position of the principal classes of the population of Poland, we find it in these words of a writer of the eighteenth century:  “Polonia coelum nobilium, paradisus clericorum, infernus rusticorum.”