would have been saved by those who now looked on without giving a
sign of life. The "some thousands" here spoken of are of course
the nobles, who had grasped all the political power and almost
all the wealth of the nation, and, imitating the proud language
of Louis XIV, could, without exaggeration, have said: "L'etat
c'est nous." As for the king and the commonalty, the one had been
deprived of almost all his prerogatives, and the other had become
a rightless rabble of wretched peasants, impoverished burghers,
and chaffering Jews. Rousseau, in his Considerations sur le
gouvernement de Pologne, says pithily that the three orders of
which the Republic of Poland was composed were not, as had been
so often and illogically stated, the equestrian order, the
senate, and the king, but the nobles who were everything, the
burghers who were nothing, and the peasants who were less than
nothing. The nobility of Poland differed from that of Other
countries not only in its supreme political and social position,
but also in its numerousness, character, and internal
constitution.

[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,