Pola

It was against this primitive state of things that the Czartoryskis struggled and struggled in vain. First they attempted to abolish the liberum veto with the assistance of the Saxon court where they were supreme, but fear of foreign complications and the opposition of the Potockis prevented anything being done. Then they broke with their old friend Briihl and turned to Russia. Their chief intermediary was their nephew Stanislaus Poniatowrki, whom they sent, as Saxon minister, to the Russian court in the suite of the English minister Hanbury Williams, in 1755. The handsome and insinuating Poniatowski speedily won the sus ceptible heart of the grand-duchess Catherine, but he won nothing else and returned to Poland in 1759 somewhat discredited. Nevertheless, the Czartoryskis looked to Russia again for support on the death of King Augustus III. They rejected with scorn and derision the pacific overtures of their political opponents, prince Michael Czartoryski openly declaring that he preferred the tyranny of the Muscovite to the tyranny of his equals. He had in fact already summoned a Russian army corps to assist him to reform his country, which sufficiently explains his own haughti ness and the unwonted compliance of the rival magnates.

The simplicity of the Czartoryskis was even more mischievous than their haughtiness. Their naïve expectations were very speed ily disappointed. Catherine II. and Frederick II. had already determined (Treaty of St. Petersburg, 1764) that the existing state of things in Poland must be maintained, and as early as 1763 Catherine had recommended the election of Stanislaus Poniatowski as "the individual most convenient for our common interests." The personal question did not interest Frederick : so long as Poland was kept in an anarchical condition he cared not who was called king. Moreover, the opponents of the Czartoryskis made no serious attempt to oppose the entry of the Russian troops.

Stanislaus II. Poniatowski,

1764-95.—Shortly afterwards Stanislaus Poniatowski was elected king and crowned. But at the beginning of 1766 Prince Nicholas Repnin was sent as Russian minister to Warsaw with instructions which can only be described as a carefully elaborated plan for destroying the republic. The first weapon employed was the dissident question. At that time the population of Poland was, in round numbers, 11,500,000, of whom about i,000,000 were dissidents or dissenters. Half of these were the Protestants of the towns of Polish Prussia and Great Poland, the other half was composed of the Orthodox population of Lithuania. The dissidents had no political rights, and their religious liberties had also been unjustly restricted ; but two thirds of them being agricultural labourers, and most of the rest artisans or petty tradesmen, they had no desire to enter public life, and were so ignorant and illiterate that their new protectors, on a closer acquaintance, became heartily ashamed of them. Yet

it was for these persons that Repnin, in the name of the empress, now demanded absolute equality, political and religious, with the gentlemen of Poland. He was well aware that an aristocratic and Catholic assembly like the seym would never concede so pre posterous a demand.

Early in 1767 the malcontents, fortified by the adhesion of the leading political refugees, formed a confederation at Radom, whose first act was to send a deputation to St. Petersburg, peti tioning Catherine to guarantee the liberties of the republic. With a carte blanche in his pocket, Repnin proceeded to treat the diet as if it were already the slave of the Russian empress. But despite threats, wholesale corruption and the presence of Russian troops outside and even inside the chamber of deputies, the patriots, headed by four bishops, offered a determined resistance to Repnin's demands. Only when brute force in its extremest form had been ruthlessly employed, only when two of the bishops and some other deputies had been arrested in full session by Russian grenadiers and sent as prisoners to Kaluga, did the opposition collapse. The liberum veto and all the other ancient abuses were now declared unalterable parts of the Polish consti tution, which was placed under the guarantee of Russia. All the edicts against the dissidents were, at the same time, repealed.

Confederation of Bar.

This shameful surrender led to a Catholic patriotic uprising, known as the Confederation of Bar, which was formed in 1768 at Bar in the Ukraine, by a handful of small squires. It never had a chance of permanent success, though, feebly fed by French subsidies and French volunteers, it lingered on for four years, until finally suppressed in 1772. But, insignificant itself, it was the cause of great events. Some of the Bar confederates, scattered by the Russian regulars, fled over the Turkish border, pursued by their victors. The Turks, already alarmed at the progress of the Russians in Poland, and stimulated by Vergennes, at that time French ambassador at Constantinople, at once declared war against Russia. Seriously disturbed at the prospect of Russian aggrandizement, the courts of Berlin and Vienna conceived the idea that the best mode of preserving the equilibrium of Europe was for all three powers to readjust their territories at the expense of Poland. Negotiations led to no definite result at first, till Austria took the first step by occupying, in 1769, the country of Zips, which had been hypothecated by Hungary to Poland in 1411 and never redeemed. This act decided the other confederates. In June 1770 Frederick surrounded those of the Polish provinces he coveted with a military cordon, ostensibly to keep out the cattle plague. Cath erine's consent had been previously obtained.