Poland was, indeed, to all appearance, still a great country. The Russian province of Poland, Lithuania, Gallicia, Posen, part of Prussia proper, were Polish. Roughly speaking, her frontiers stretched from the Dneiper to near the Oder, from the Baltic to the Carpathians. But a great territory does not make a great nation. The approaching fall of Poland was foreshadowed by her fortunes, even in the seventeenth century. The extraordinary calamities of that country should not blind us to the means by which she brought some of her misfortunes upon her own head. Her constitution seemed skilfully contrived to unite the vices of aristocratic and democratic governments with the virtues of neither. Her people were turbulent without freedom, proud without steadiness of purpose. She lacked the equality and the popular support proper to a republic, as she lacked the fixed succession to the highest office and the consistent policy which are supposed to be the advantages of monarchy. A mob of tens of thousands of armed citizens pretended to form a deliberative diet. Their convention was always a signal for confusion; their dissolution was often the prelude to civil war. In the huge concourse a single _veto_ could stay proceedings, unless indeed the malcontent paid for his opposition with his life. An attempt to introduce representative assemblies was always resented, and the experiment restricted, by the jealousy of the citizens. Delegates, not representatives, came to the meetings. They were vigilantly observed, and strictly cross-examined on their return, by self-constituted judges, as to the performance of their mandate. Real debate and deliberation, free judgment and rational decision, were as impossible in one kind of assembly as in the other. Below these citizen-nobles, the people were slaves. The two halves of the state, Poland and Lithuania, were set against each other continually. The monarchy became purely elective in the sixteenth century. The king was the nominee of some foreign court, or of some domestic party, or family. Factions nourished from abroad were thus kept alive. Once elected, the king found his power curtailed on every side; and was generally as solicitous for the advancement, and future succession perhaps, of his family, as for the good of the state. He might be a stranger, or he might owe his position to the support of a foreign power. He seldom or never could be more than the nominee of some faction, the king of a party to the end of his days.