attained, and even geographical position. The condition of society at which the lessening of the powers of local courts came about as the federal legal system grew, strongly affected the good or evil of the result. If the issues raised by the French Revolution had come to a head with the steady policy of peace pursued by Fleury in the early years of Louis XV., or if Louis XVI. had been assisted in his attempts at reform by advisers of the quality of Florida Blanca instead of the Swiss Necker, the problem might have been solved in a form more helpful to our European civility. If Catholic Emancipation had come to Ireland in 1790 instead of in 1829, the Elizabethan and Cromwellian horrors and the shameless breach by William III. of the Treaty of Limerick with the succeeding persecution might have been put to one side, and there would very likely have been no Irish question in the succeeding centuries.

Still, human agency does count. As the centuries progress the social revolutions cannot be avoided; but they may be quickened or delayed by the human element. The form, time and extent of events may depend a good deal on the character of the men who, for the time being, control the public action of the country and its neighbours. The event, both of the American and French revolutions, would appear to have been decided not by deliberate acts, still less by any principle at stake, but by an unbroken series of blunders on both sides acting on the economic causes which produced the storms; and the same may be said of many other events of this century, such as the whole history of Poland, from first to last.

ii. Feudalism in the East: Poland.-Poland is an example of arrested growth, of forms suitable for one age of the world being carried over into another age for which they were unfitted.

In the early ages when, as each little community was cut off from knowledge of its neighbour by undrained wood and fen and want of means of transport, constant war was the rule, the leadership, though it would tend to become hereditary, was elective, because men looking to the affairs of the locality only required fitness for the immediate emergency. For the same reason the seminal weakness of the modern republic, the elective ruler representing only a bare majority of the electors, was avoided by insistence (often, no doubt, forcible on the fractious

ones) on unanimity of the vote of the Assembly. As society became more stable, the nation replacing the smaller local unit, the elective principle, though, as always, it still existed, gave place in practice to hereditary rule, and the Assembly accorded its vote on affairs on the principle that the voice of the majority bound the lesser number. The tragedy of Poland was that, as a great military people encircled by the expression of absolute power or by nations who had only partially accepted the developments of western civility, she kept the forms suitable to perpetual war which others had thrown off, still clinging in the eighteenth century to the elective kingship and to the unanimity of the Assembly.

As the advanced post of Rome in Eastern Europe the Poles took Christianity from the West about the middle of the tenth century. They steadily extended their boundaries and their faith by advancing on the Germans on the West and on Vladimir of Russia and the Turk and Tartar on the East, taking Kieff and advancing to the river Dniester. The Cossacks, who later colonized the Ukraine, had been deserters or descendants of deserters from the Polish armies on the lower Dniester. By the middle of the fifteenth century the Poles had enlarged their borders further at the expense of the Teutonic knights in the North, acquiring inter alia Kulm, Marienberg, Elbing, Dantzig and Thorn. When in 1453 Constantinople fell, and the Turks began to overrun Europe, Western Christianity owed its safety to the Poles and the Hungarians. But while the Magyars became a homogeneous national people, and their armies a national militia, looking to law as the ultimate guarantee of social order, the Polish nobles, insisting upon individual rights as an aristocratic caste over their serfs and conquered peoples, depressed the social sense and destroyed national life.

Poland continued its imperial expansion at the expense of the Teutons. In 1525 Albert, Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, did homage to Sigismund II., King of Poland, as Duke of Prussia. The Hohenzollerns held East Prussia as a fief of the Polish Empire until 1656, when it was given to Frederick William I., the Elector of Brandenburg, as pay for his support of Poland against Sweden.

At the opening of the sixteenth century the Polish Empire was still a mighty wall of defiance to the East, extending from

the Black Sea to the Baltic. But it was surrounded by envious enemies; its military boundaries were weak; it had to reckon with hatreds and jealousies of the peoples who were under the subjection of its nobles; and it held within itself elements of speedy dissolution, defects which became prominent when the commercial forces of the eighteenth century broke down feudalism. In 1493 a national Diet had been set up, and several local parliaments established. But like all the Assemblies of that age the Diet represented only the interests of the great nobles and of a few rich burgesses from whom they drew money.

Though the kingdom was elective, the throne tended, as do all human institutions, to become hereditary in one family, son succeeding father. Fortunately for Poland in her earlier years her kings, the line of the Jagellos were, like those of Portugal, strong and practical men, who raised the country to a height of power and prosperity. This line came to an end in 1572, when Sigismund II., one of the greatest of Polish kings, died leaving no heir. Under him there had been religious toleration, which was essential, as the great Polish Empire of those days contained great numbers of Greek Orthodox, Lutherans and Jews. There had been a great immigration of Jews and of a considerable number of Germans who, settling in Poland, formed a bourgeoisie.

On Sigismund's death, the Emperor Maximilian and Henry of Valois (III.), brother and heir of Charles IX. of France, became candidates for the succession. By wholesale bribery Henry was elected; but after five months, on the death of Charles IX., he went back to France. He had given away so much for his empty title that the last bit of authority had left the crown. From this time the kingship became a mere croupier's table for gambling between the nobles who supported the alien candidates. At each election the declining power of the kingship was still further squeezed by the Polish nobles for support of new grants of privileges, they being heavily bribed in turn by the candidates.

The Polish feudalism, as I have said, had not advanced as far as majority rule. In the Parliaments and in the Diet the decisions must be unanimous. It was the clashing of the spears on the shields. It was only necessary to bribe or to terrorize one or a few members in order to crush any proposal of reform,

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unless the matter discussed was one which promised further privileges to the nobles. This from beginning to end is the crucial difficulty of the Polish nation. Many times the reform might have been made from within, but it was prevented from without. The feudal lords in the Diet and in their provincial assemblies were at odds always with a strong elective king, trying to control him to their use, ready at any moment supplied with funds from outside to carry laws increasing their own power or laying fresh burdens on the peasants.

After Henry of Valois had been elected what were called the Henrician articles were drawn up. Roughly summarized they were: (1) the Diet was to meet at regular intervals; (2) a permanent council was to advise the king; (3) there was to be a limited liberty of conscience; (4) the consent of the Diet was to be necessary for war and taxation (a provision which proved ruinous in the time of John Sobieski) and for the marriage and divorce of the king; (5) no foreigner was to hold public office; (6) the king must not interfere in the election of his successor.

Other causes which told for the fall of Poland were their treatment of the conquered peoples, and their difficulties on account of religion. Wherever they conquered they reduced the people to a condition of serfdom, the Polish noble monopolizing property and all social and political rights. As a consequence, when in their wars with neighbouring states the fighting fell on outlying territory such as Ruthenia or Livonia, the Poles could expect no willing support from their subjects. In the earlier stage of their expansion they lived in a state of constant war which weakened the position of the farming class and checked the independence of the burghers. The needs of money for war and the control of taxation by the nobles put an immense power into their hands at the expense of the crown.

Religious difficulties helped to the loss of their Ruthenian and Lithuanian territories to the rising power of Russia. Up to the time of the Reformation the reformed doctrines were spreading among the Roman Catholic Poles; but in 1565 Sigismund recognized the decrees of the Council of Trent. The efforts to separate their subjects of the Eastern Church from the Russians led to the creation of the Uniat Church of Brest Litovsk allowing Greek ritual under the Church of Rome.

But the main, almost the sole cause of the ruin of Poland lay

in the Liberum Veto in the Diet which enabled any one member to negative any legislation, any alterations, any reform by his single vote.

The Polish noble permitted his nobility to assume an interest in agriculture. It is written that in the later days of his supreme poverty he could be seen in his rags ploughing his oxen, with the sword, the token of his superiority of race, tied to his side. But he would not demean himself to trade. That he left to the Jews. We have to wait for that degrading occupation until we come to speak of the feudalism of Western Europe.

In spite of all the odds against them great kings were not wanting to the Poles. In 1574 Stephen Batory, Prince of Transylvania, was elected. He made peace with the Turk and won Livonia from Ivan the Terrible. He organized the Cossacks as part of the Polish army, much as the Highlanders were incorporated with the British Army. He tried to make the crown hereditary and to introduce majority rule in the Diet, but he was met throughout by a solid opposition of the nobles who had no use for a patriotic king. He died suddenly in 1586. Then followed a civil war and the overturn of many years, after which Sigismund Vasa, heir to the throne of Sweden, and after him Vladislas became kings, the same struggle for reform and the same determined opposition continuing, with the same results. Poland was involved in unnecessary wars with Russia and Sweden with varying fortunes. Any success obtained was won in the face of the control by the nobles, their exemption from taxation, their refusal of supplies at the critical moment, making consistent forward action, either internal or external, impossible. When Vladislas died in 1648 the weakness of the country invited invasion. The Cossacks came and inflicted severe defeats on the Poles. John Casimir, the half-brother of Vladislas, was elected king. In 1655 the Swedes and Russians came and met with success until Charles X. and the Czar quarrelled. In 1660 Austria lent Poland troops for defence. It was in this war that the Prussians won their independence of Poland as the price of their assistance. Charles gave back all his conquests except Livonia, and the Poles, by treaty with the Czar, recovered most of Lithuania, but ceded to him all east of the river Dnieper.

The Poles had now to fight the Cossacks backed by the Turks.