In our own day when the problems of a "Free Poland" unite the sympathies of the victorious democracies, it is difficult to realize the meaning that "Polish Freedom" must have conveyed to the peasant and Cossack population of the Ukraine two centuries ago. The persistent loyalty with which the Polish people have clung to their faith and their nationality has won the admiration of the whole civilized world. Yet the most superficial study of Polish national history reveals the reason for many of their past misfortunes.
The only recognized citizens of the old "republic" of Poland were the panye, or nobles, — a class so jealous of its arrogant equality that the negative vote of a single gentleman could set at naught the deliberations of the entire nobiliary body gathered in council. Their parliaments were usually held in the open fields near Cracow or Warsaw, often on horseback. These were attended by all of aristocratic lineage who chose to be present, either to vote or to impose their opinions
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by their shouts or the clash of their weapons. The great Polish nobles often attended these assemblies accompanied by private armies of horse, foot and artillery, recruited from among their serfs and retainers. Naturally, few of these armed assizes passed off without conflict and the spilling of much azure blood.
No Polish pan might engage in trade. To buy and sell was considered degrading and, therefore, forbidden their class. Yet these strange "republican" aristocrats might become the humble servants of a fellow pa?i without losing their rights in the national assembly. Only the nobles were permitted to own land, and too often the exploitation of their peasants was left in the hands of Jew or German "factors" or overseers. The only occupation of the masters of the soil lay in the more congenial emplojTnents of law-making — and lawbreaking. In the tumultuous assemblies of the nobiliary Diet only one principle seems to have met with general agreement — the God-given right of the pan to exploit his serfs as natural "property." Among the free peasants and Cossacks of the Ukraine it was commonly reported that the Polish priests taught their peasant parishioners to answer a question of the catechism beginning "Why has God created you?" by the humble response: "To give our service to our noble lords."
The civilization of Poland was Catholic and Roman: the civilization of the border provinces looked towards the East and remembered Byzance. These differences have persisted to the present time, but in the early seventeenth century, when Catholic Poland was a powerful state and Russia still in the making, religious oppression sowed the seed of differences which have not yet died away. The people of the Orthodox Ukraine — peasants and Cossacks alike — could only look to a distant Tsar for redress when the armed emissaries of the oppressing Polish Church rode among them demanding tithes and taxes. Or else — as the wise King Sigismond of Poland is reported to have himself advised them — they might "trust to their own Cossack swords."
The complete reunion of Poland and Lithuania decreed at Lublin in 1569 had resulted in a promise to the Greek Orthodox population of the border lands that the freedom of their religion would be respected. But the militant Catholic order of the Society of Jesus was firmly entrenched at Warsaw. To the influence of these learned and courtly prelates the Polish aristocracy owed their astonishing progress in the arts of civilization and their, perhaps too faithful, conformity to the more superficial standards of western Europe. The not unnatural ambition of the Jesuits — and of the Polish nobles whose political policy as well as their conscience was dominated by these spiritual directors,— lay in bringing about the submission of the Orthodox provinces of the Polish frontier to the
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rule of the Catholic church. By one of those able compromises which formed the basis of Jesuit diplomacy, they conceived the idea of endowing these border races with a separate "Uniate" church. This allowed the Orthodox believers to retain some features of the old ritual, to which they clung so persistently, while j^elding obedience to the Pope at Rome. But this first crafty step towards a more irrevocable union was viewed with not unnatural suspicion from the beginning. In 1595 all but thirty-seven of the bishops whose sees lay in the Orthodox provinces had succumbed to the powerful influence of the Jesuits. Not so, however, their parishioners, the sturdy Ukrainian peasantry and the Cossack polki. To these latter Orthodoxy meant personal liberty and the dignity of freemen, while Catholicism preached obedience and blind submission.