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The present wretched state of the towns, compared with their former flourishing condition; the poverty of the peasants, whose oppressions have increased in proportion to the power of the nobles, having lost a protector when the king lost his weight in the constitution; the total confusion in all public affairs; the decline of importance and loss of territory; all show that absolute monarchy is preferable to such a republic. Would twelve millions of inhabitants, under an English constitution, or under the constitution of any one of the United States, have been partitioned and dismembered? No; not by a league of all the absolute sovereigns of Europe against them at once. Such are the effects of "collecting all authority into one centre," of neglecting an equilibrium of powers, and of not having three branches in the legislature.

The practice of cantoning a body of soldiers near the plain where the kings are elected, has been adopted by several foreign powers for near a century; and, although it may be galling to the nobility, it prevents the effusion of blood that formerly deluged the assembly. This was done at the election of Stanislaus Augustus, by the Empress of Russia and the King of Prussia; five thousand Russian troops were stationed at a small distance from the plain of Vola.

Stanislaus was in the thirty-second year of his age when, in 1764, he ascended the throne. From his virtues and abilities, the fairest hopes were conceived of his raising Poland from its deplorable situation; but his exertions for the public good were fettered by the constitution, by the factions of a turbulent people, and the intrigues of neighboring powers. His endeavors to introduce order at home and independence abroad, which would have increased the power of his country and her consideration with foreign nations, alarmed the neighboring powers. The spirit of religious intolerance produced a civil war, and the senate petitioned the ambassador from Petersburg not to withdraw the Russian troops. The royal troops, aided by the Russians, whose discipline was superior, were in favor of religious liberty. The confederates, secretly encouraged by Austria, assisted by the Turks, and supplied with money and officers by the French, were able to protract hostilities from 1768 to 1772 ; during which period the attempt was made to assassinate the king.

nation Polonaise est composée de trois ordres; les nobles, qui sont tout; les bourgeois, qui ne sont rien; et les paysans, qui sont moins que rien." Rousseau, Cons. sur le Gouvernement de la Pologne.

Count Pulaski, who was killed in the service of the United States, is said to have planned an enterprise so much to his dishonor. No good cause ever was, or ever will be, served by assassination; and this is happily, in the present age, the universal sense of mankind. If a papal nuncio was found in Poland, capable of blessing the weapons of conspirators against this tolerant king, he was a monster, whose bloody bigotry the liberal spirit of the pope himself must, at this enlightened period, abominate. The king did himself immortal honor by his intercession with the diet to remit the tortures and horrid cruelties decreed by the laws of most kingdoms in Europe against treason, and by his moderation towards all the conspirators.

We are now arrived at the consummation of all panegyrics upon a sovereignty in a single assembly - the partition.

Prussia was formerly in a state of vassalage to this republic; Russia once saw its capital and throne possessed by the Poles; and Austria was indebted to John Sobieski, a sovereign of this country, but a century ago, for compelling the Turks to raise the siege of Vienna. A republic so lately the protector of its neighbors would not, in an age of general improvement, without the most palpable imperfections in the orders and balances of its government, have declined, and become a prey to any invader - much less would it have forced the world to acknowledge that the translation of nearly five millions of people from a republican government to that of absolute empires and monarchies, whether it were done by right or by wrong, is a blessing to them. The partition was projected by the King of Prussia, who communicated it to the emperor and empress. The plague was one circumstance, and the Russian war against the Turks another, that favored the design; and the partition treaty was signed at Petersburg, in February, 1772, by the Russian, Austrian, and Prussian plenipotentiaries. The troops of the three courts were already in possession of the greatest part of Poland, and the confederates were soon dispersed. The partitioning powers proceeded with such secrecy, that only vague conjectures were made at Warsaw, and Lord Cathcart, the English minister at Petersburg, obtained no authentic information of the treaty until two months after its signature. The formal notification was made to the king and senate at Warsaw by the imperial and Prussian ambassadors, in September, 1772, of the pretensions of their courts to the Polish territory. Their remonstrances, as well as those of the courts of London, Paris, Stockholm, and Copenhagen, had no effect; and the most humiliating record that ever appeared in the annals of a republic, is seen in the king's summons: - " Since there are no hopes from any quarter, and any further delays will only tend to draw down the most dreadful calamities upon the remainder of the dominions which are left to the republic, the diet is convened for the nineteenth of April, 1773, according to the will of the three courts; nevertheless, in order to avoid all cause of reproach, the king, with the advice of the senate, again appeals to the guaranties of the treaty of Oliva." It is not to be doubted that if there had been a people in existence in Poland, as there is in Holland, to have given this amiable prince only the authority of a stadtholder, he would have said, " I will die in the last ditch."

Of the dismembered provinces, the Russian portion, which is the largest territory, contains only one million and a half of souls; the Austrian, which is the most populous, contains two millions and a half; the Prussian, which is the most commercial, commanding the navigation of the Vistula, contains only eight hundred and sixty thousand. This has given a fatal blow to the commerce of Poland, by transferring it from Dantzic to Memel and Königsberg.

The finishing stroke of all remains.

The three ambassadors, on the thirteenth of September, 1773, delivered "A part of those cardinal laws, to the ratification of which our courts will not suffer any contradiction.

"I. The crown of Poland shall be forever elective, and all order of succession proscribed. Any person who shall endeavor to break this law shall be declared an enemy to his country, and liable to be punished accordingly.

"II. Foreign candidates to the throne, being the frequent cause of troubles and divisions, shall be excluded; and it shall be enacted, that, for the future, no person can be chosen king of Poland and great-duke of Lithuania, excepting a native Pole of noble origin, and possessing land within the kingdom. The son, or grandson, of a king of Poland, cannot be elected imme

diately upon the death of his father or grandfather; and is not eligible excepting after an interval of two reigns.

"III. The government of Poland shall be forever free, independent, and of a republican form.

"IV. The true principle of said government consisting in the strict execution of its laws and the equilibrium of the three estates, namely, -the king, the senate, and the equestrian order, a permanent council shall be established, in which the executive power shall be vested. In this council the equestrian order, hitherto excluded from the administration of affairs in the interval of the diets, shall be admitted, as shall be more clearly laid down in the future arrangements."

Thus the supreme legislative authority resides in the three estates of the realm, - the king, the senate, and equestrian order, assembled in a national diet; but each estate has no negative upon the other, and, therefore, there is no balance, and very little check. The great families and principal palatines will still govern without any effectual control.

The executive power is now vested in the supreme permanent council; but neither here have they any checks, all being decided by the majority; and the same principal families will always prevail.

These august legislators have acknowledged the principle of a free republican government, that it consists in a strict execution of the laws and an equilibrium of estates or orders. But how are the laws to govern? and how is the equilibrium to be preserved? Like air, oil, and water, shaken together in one bottle and left in repose; the first will rise to the top, the last sink to the bottom, and the second swim between.

Our countrymen will never run delirious after a word or a name. The name republic is given to things, in their nature as different and contradictory as light and darkness, truth and falsehood, virtue and vice, happiness and misery. There are free republics, and republics as tyrannical as an oriental despotism. A free republic1 is the best of governments, and the greatest-blessing which mortals can aspire to. Republics which are not free, by the help of a multitude of rigorous checks, in very small states, and for short spaces of time, have preserved some

1 This was the name given to the government of Massachusetts by a formal vote of the convention. See p. 215.

reverence for the laws, and have been tolerable; but there have been oligarchies carried to such extremes of tyranny, that so far as the happiness of the nation at large is concerned, the despotism of Turkey would perhaps be preferable. An empire of laws is a characteristic of a free republic only, and should never be applied to republics in general. If there should ever be a people in Poland, there will soon be a real king; and if ever there should be a king in reality, as well as in name, there will soon be a people. For, instead of the trite saying, "no bishop, no king," it would be much more exact and important truth to say, no people, no king, and no king, no people; meaning, by the word king, a first magistrate possessed exclusively of the executive power. It may be laid down as a universal maxim, that every government that has not three independent branches in its legislature will soon become an absolute monarchy; or an arrogant nobility, increasing every day in a rage for splendor and magnificence, will annihilate the people, and, attended with their horses, hounds, and vassals, will run down the king as they would hunt a deer, wishing for nothing so much as to be in at the death.

The philosophical King Stanislaus felt most severely this want of a people. In his observations on the government of Poland,1 he laments, in very pathetic terms, the miseries to which they were reduced.

"The violence," says he, "which the patricians at Rome exercised over the people of that city, before they had recourse to open force, and, by the authority of their tribunes, balanced the power of the nobility, is a striking picture of the cruelty with which we treat our plebeians. Yet this portion of our state is even more debased among us than it was among the Romans, where it enjoyed a species of liberty, even in the times when it was most enslaved to the first order of the republic.

"We may say, with truth, that the people are, in Poland, in a state of extreme humiliation. We must, nevertheless, consider them as the principal support of the nation; and I am persuaded, that the little value we set on them might have very dangerous consequences.

1 Oeuvres du Philosophe Bienfaisant, tome iii. p. 2.

The extracts are not made continuously, but only of such paragraphs as are most to the point.

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