Kazimierz Baran 314 IIL Putting it all together we may say that out of all that research on the Old Republic which was the work of legal as well as sensu stricto historians there emerged a certain image of a particularly unique organism. Its specificacy is even better perceived by a foreigner than a Pole to whom many of the discussed institutions are too familiar and therefore do not suprise him. Hence in this respect the comparative observations of Norman Davies seemparticularly precious. Let us have a short view of some of them. Wrote he: “In fact, the closest parallels to Poland’s ‘Noble Democracy’ can probably be found outside Europe, altogether, in America. At first sight at least, the outlook of the Polish nobility would seem to agree with that of the gentry of the English colonies of the deep South, whose vast plantations and brilliant social life were perpetuated, as in Poland-Lithuania, by their isolation from central government and by the servitude of the rural masses. Slave-owning democrats such as Thomas Jefferson or George Washington, and other founding fathers of the USA, have much in common with the reformingwing of magnatial politicians among their contemporaries in Poland-Lithuania. Further north, in NewEngland, a different brand of individualism was encouraged by religious beliefs, and by the colonists’ rejection of the spiritual coercion practiced by ecclesiastical authorities in most European countries. The thoughts of Henri Thoreau beside the Walden Pond, or in his ‘Essay on the Duty of Civil Disobediance’ would have found a greater measure of understanding in the Polish Sejm than in any Court of Parliament in Europe. His famous motto to the effect that ‘that government is best that governs least’ would have brought a roar of acclaimat any provincial dietine, and encapsulates the opposition of the Polish nobility to the growth of royal power throughout the Republic’s existence. Primitive American anarchism, born on the Frontier of a newContinent, may well have had a kindred spirit, if not a direct ancestor, in the ideals of that extinct Republie which once roamed the planes of eastern Europe”.'"^ In still another fragment this author points to how allegedly anachronistic constitutional ideas which were current among the nobility of the extinct Commonwealth could in fact have a tint of values that our present democracy fights for. Wrote he: “Oddly enough the ideals of the Polish nobility possess an air of striking modernity. In an age when most Europeans were lauding the benefits of Monarchism, Absolutism, or of state power, the noble citizens of Poland-Lithuania were praising their ‘golden freedom’, the right of resistence, the social contract, the liberty of the individual, the principle of government by consent,the value of self-reliance. These concepts feature widely in the ideologies of modern liberal democracies. It is inconceivable, of course, that they were cherished by the szlachta froma precocious interest in progressive politNorman Davies, op. cit. p. 370.
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