its territory in big, bold strokes as the domain of a nation. Napoleon saw in rivers, mountain ranges, and oceans the natural boundaries of states; Poland had none of these. She was right in the middle of the European world, pressed on all sides, without natural defenses. Turks, Tatars, Slavs, Northmen, Austrians, Germansall were her natural enemies, and to all she was accessible; for all she was at one time or another a buffer.

A people of stronger genius for government might have extended their influence and become a great power; but the Poles were without that genius. They were basically democratic, as all Slavs are, but they were woefully without constructive faculty. Calling their country a republic, the ruling class, composed of the landowning nobles or the decadent members of the caste who had lost their land, while still possessing the proud tradition of having once held it, was willing to fight among themselves for freedom, but always to unite in preventing the masses from getting it. This caste became numerous, and as its economic power dimin ished, its jealousy of its political authority increased. A noble might wear a sword, and vote for king in the convocation of electors, though he owned not a foot of land. He might sell his vote for king, or he might run a peasant through with his sword on penalty of a modest fine. He was much given to both practices.

It has been observed that the authorities attribute the institutional weakness of the Polish state to the pacta conventa and the liberum veto. The pacta conventa, or contract between nobles and king, deprived the king of almost all real power, save when, in war, he headed the army. The nobles took no chances of turning up a king who might make common cause with the peasants, as had often happened in western Europe, and clip the wings of the privileged class. In other states the curtailment of the regal power was always accompanied by an increase of the parliamentary authority. In Poland the power taken from the king was given to nobody. Instead, the nobles actually sur

rendered their own powers by yielding to the liberum veto in the diet.

The pacta conventa at its full development must strike a twentieth-century reader as rather a charter of liberties than an apple of discord. The king was elective; only the parliament could make war, impose taxes, or commission ambassadors; parliament must be convened at least biennially; the king's cabinet was to be elected by the diet once a year. The sovereign might not even wed except to the candidate named by the diet!

Manifestly, the powers so liberally shorn from the king would seem well reposed in the parliament; but Poland's parliament never rose to a realization of its own dignity. It would be in session only a very short time; commonly, the shorter the better, because it could seldom agree on anything save the privilege of florid oratory. This incompetent diet was reduced at length to absolute impotence by the liberum veto.

The liberum veto was the privilege of a single member of the diet to nullify any piece of legislation, or a whole session's legislative work, by simply rising in his place and solemnly proclaiming, "I forbid!" When first asserted it was bitterly opposed, but the principle was at length accepted. If it seems utterly inexplicable that a legislature would thus surrender all its power, a medieval Pole might with reason retort that in the American Senate unlimited debate is even now permitted; that, according to high parliamentary authority, the great bulk of legislation is done virtually by unanimous consent; and, most suggestive of all, that a single member, by a point of order, may strike from a supply bill any proposed limitation on the use of the funds.

Despite the pacta conventa and the liberum veto, Poland might have built up a constitutional system suited to a limited monarchy if it had had responsible cabinet government. But the cabinet, while chosen by the diet, was not responsible. If the privy treasurer had stolen the revenues, an investigation by the diet could be ended instanter by the liberum veto,

and there were always corrupt personages to exercise it.

But it was not for want of "Rules of Order" printed entirely in the aspirated consonants that Poland fell. The Poles called their country a republic, and their institutions might have justified their claim if only they had understood that a republican government must be truly representative. It must represent all the people; Poland's represented a select upper class only. It was the world's most undemocratic attempt at a republic. The frailties of its institutions were a reflection of the misconception which its ruling classes entertained of the relation of government to the people.

Throughout the period of its importance as a nation Poland elected its king. Like almost all peoples habited to the monarchic idea, the Poles imagined that a king must be of the kingly caste, born to the purple. Whether he was competent to rule, whether a Pole or not, whether he understood or sympathized with the people, was not so important. Because of a dread of building up too great a power in the reigning family, there appeared repeatedly a positive prejudice against allowing the succession to remain in the direct line. So Poland was found constantly shopping about the courts of Europe for an amiable prince willing to wear its crown on terms which involved the sacrifice of his self-respect. The king was the merest figurehead; the nobility ruled. And never was there a class in any state more devoted to liberty -strictly for its own use-than this Polish aristocracy. Never a caste more determined to have no real power above or no real freedom below.

Members of this class might do honest. work in agriculture; never in industry, trade, finance. The peasants were too poor and ignorant to dream of themselves as real partners in the nation. Their backs burned and bled under the burden of the turbulent nobility and its sport of everlastingly quarreling with itself. Some of the kings, indeed, in despair of ever getting on with the nobles, bethought

themselves of that stratagem of the old British monarchs, who enlisted the peasants on their side, and united king and people against the barons; but in Poland the nobility always managed to frustrate such efforts. So treasonable a project on the king's part was sure sign that if he were not driven to abandon it, he would at least be succeeded by a king weak and acquiescent enough to undo whatever he had accomplished.

When a king died and a successor was to be chosen, there was a great scramble among the princely families of neighboring states for the advantage of providing a sprig of royalty to wear the crown. Austria, France, Russia, Saxony, Germany, Sweden, Hungary, and Bohemia were constantly intriguing for the Polish scepter. Austria was peculiarly successful in marrying its princesses to Polish kings. This continual plotting for the throne inevitably inspired the idea of partitioning Poland.

In the long interregnums between the demise of a king and the election of a successor, other nations, espousing the cause of this or that aspirant, often sent armed forces to support the factions with which they were intriguing. The country was thus kept in a demoralization that made the constant foreign wars almost a relief because for the time they compelled a certain cohesion and coöperation.

We may stratify the Polish people roughly into four social layers: at the top, the impotent king and his gorgeous, profligate court; next, the small group of rich and really powerful nobles who owned the land, maintained as many armed retainers as they could, and ruled in their several castellans and palatinates; next, the minor nobility, or sczlachta, who owned little or no land, but were none the less proud of their rank and privileges as nobles; and underneath all this the peasantry free and the bond, but the freeman tending constantly toward the level of the lower class.

These classes constituted the Polish people. They did not include any industrial or merchant classes; these were in

troduced from the outside, and were mainly Germans and Hebrews. These were never considered a part of the Polish community; they were in it, not of it. The Germans were long ruled in a curious extraterritorial fashion under the lex Magdeburgicum. Aliens in race, denied political participation, socially despised, these outlanders became largely the burghers of the towns, the merchants.

Finally, there were the religious divisions among the people: Jews and Gentiles, Tatars and Teutons, Turks and Slavs, Protestants and Catholics and Greek orthodox. Lithuania was largely disposed toward the Greek Church. Roman Catholic and Lutheran reform forces struggled for domination, the Catholic power asserting itself. The kings were latterly sworn to enforce religious toleration, but the oath meant chiefly that the nobles were denying the king power to exercise an intolerance that they themselves displayed with the greatest ardor.

The differences of language were accentuated as a national weakness by the fact that the ruling class of Poles were never very loyal to their native tongue. They cultivated Latin as the language of literature and government long after it had been generally abandoned in more Western countries, and they dropped from it into French and Italian as the tongues of culture and elegance. Thus while other north-of-Europe peoples were perfecting their native languages, the Poles were dissipating that most potent of all national ties, a common and beloved tongue. Here one of the greatest opportunities of Slavonic leadership was lost.

The various strata and parts of the Polish people never became acquainted with

one another. The superior classes did not take any interest in the peasantry, but regarded themselves as the nation, and the peasantry as if they might have been an inferior order of beings. Nobility and peasantry alike looked upon the Germans and the Jews, who were willing to submit to the degradation of trade and industry, as mere outlanders.

When the era of discovery and of widening vision came, Poland was lost from the main-traveled highways of the world. There had been a time when a great commerce between far East and West passed in considerable part through Poland, but the Tatar irruptions closed the northern caravan routes, and the fall of Constantinople clogged the more southerly. This had a large part in cutting off the commercial classes of Poland from intimacy with the progressive communities to the west. The exclusive classes in Poland did, indeed, continue relations with the West, but they were the relations of a sycophantic social class rather than of the virile, enterprising body of the nation. The discovery of America and of the ocean routes to the east left Poland off the revised map of the world, and the country, too late, was thrown back on its own scant resources of capacity for modernistic development.

If Poland in the era of chivalry could have been blessed with more isolation, more chance to develop a phase of that fine, individualizing provincialism that England produced, and if later Poland could have established its touch with the awakening world, there might have been a different and a happier story of the nation. But Poland was cosmopolitan too early and provincial too late.