The "some thousands" here spoken of are of course the nobles, who had grasped all the political power and almost all the wealth of the nation, and, imitating the proud language of Louis XIV, could, without exaggeration, have said: "L'etat c'est nous." As for the king and the commonalty, the one had been deprived of almost all his prerogatives, and the other had become a rightless rabble of wretched peasants, impoverished burghers, and chaffering Jews.

Rousseau, in his Considerations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, says pithily that the three orders of which the Republic of Poland was composed were not, as had been so often and illogically stated, the equestrian order, the senate, and the king, but the nobles who were everything, the burghers who were nothing, and the peasants who were less than nothing.

The nobility of Poland differed from that of Other countries not only in its supreme political and social position, but also in its numerousness, character, and internal constitution.
[Footnote: The statistics concerning old Poland are provokingly contradictory.

One authority calculates that the nobility comprised 120,000 families, or one fourteenth of the population (which, before the first partition, is variously estimated at from fifteen to twenty millions); another counts only 100,000 families; and a third states that between 1788 and 1792 (i.e., after the first partition) there were 38,314 families of nobles.] All nobles were equal in rank, and as every French soldier was said to carry a marshal's staff in his knapsack, so every Polish noble was born a candidate for the throne.

This equality, however, was rather de jure than de facto; legal decrees could not fill the chasm which separated families distinguished by wealth and fame--such as the Sapiehas, Radziwills, Czartoryskis, Zamoyskis, Potockis, and Branickis--from obscure noblemen whose possessions amount to no more than "a few acres of land, a sword, and a pair of moustaches that extend from one ear to the other," or perhaps amounted only to the last two items.