d 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."

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 be