ught for a long while to pave the way for the election of the Prince of
Conti to the throne of Poland; the influence of Russia and of Prussia
carried the day. Prince Poniatowski, late favorite of the Empress
Catherine, was elected by the Polish Diet; in discouragement and sadness,
four thousand nobles only had responded to the letters of convocation.
The new king, Stanislaus Augustus, handsome, intelligent, amiable,
cultivated, but feeble in character and fatally pledged to Russia, sought
to rally round him the different parties, and to establish at last, in
the midst of general confusion, a regular and a strong government. He
was supported in this patriotic task by the influence, ever potent in
Poland, of the Czartoriskis. The far-seeing vigilance of Frederick II.
did not give them time to act. "Poland must be left in her lethargy," he
had said to the Russian ambassador Saldern. "It is of importance," he
wrote to Catherine, "that Her Majesty the empress, who knows perfectly
well her own interests and those of her friends and allies, should give
orders of the most precise kind to her ambassador at Warsaw, to oppose
any novelty in the form of government, and, generally speaking, the
establishment of a permanent council, the preservation of the commissions
of war and of the treasury, the power of the king and the unlimited
concession on the prince's part of ability to distribute offices
according to his sole will." The useful reforms being thus abandoned and
the king's feeble power radically shaken, religious discord came to fill
up the cup of disorder, and to pave the way for the dismemberment, as
well as definitive ruin, of unhappy Poland.

Subjected for a long time past to an increasing oppression, which was
encouraged by a fanatical and unenlightened clergy, the Polish dissidents
had conceived great hopes on the accession of Stanislaus Augustus; they
claimed not only liberty of conscience and of worship, but also all the
civil and political rights of which they were deprived. "It is no
question of establishing the free exercise of different religions in
Poland," wrote Frederick to Catherine; "it is necessary to reduce the
question to its true issue, the demand of the dissident noblesse, and
obtain for them the equality they demand, together with participation in
all acts of sovereignty." This was precisely what the clergy and the
Catholic noblesse were resolved never to grant. In spite of support from
the empr