1 I regret that on one occasion, summarizing views very different from my own, Professor Backus referred (in his note 12) to their “careful formulation” in my History of Poland.

2 One of them, Gotthold Rhode, is criticized by Professor Backus (note 17) for not having rejected altogether and in advance the conception of Poland as the rampart of Christendom, when starting his thorough study of her eastern frontiers.

3 Professor Backus, mentioning (note 29) the second partition, referred the reader not to Lord's comprehensive work (The Second Partition of Poland: A Study in Diplomatic History, Cambridge, Mass., 1915) but to a description of the Polish-Russian war of 1792 in a rather unimportant Polish monograph.

4 It is a matter of particular regret that a scholar of Professor Francis Dvornik's distinction, who has made most valuable and highly objective contributions to a better understanding of early Polish history, in his latest, otherwise very remarkable book The Slavs in European History and Civilization (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1962) blames the whole constitutional development of Poland, supports the views of Russian historiography on Poland's eastern policy, and joining the usual condemnation of the szlachta, singles out the selfishness of that leading part of the nation as the cause of the partitions.

5 They are available in an excellent edition, which is quoted by Professor Backus (note 19), but only in order to warn the reader that such “laws” do not justify the conclusion “that Poland and Lithuania were fast becoming one and that they agreed on an underlying religious ethic.“

6 In order to support his charge that the Polish nobles wanted to dominate Lithuania, Professor Backus (note 5) quotes an obscure Russian pamphlet published in 1863, the year of the Polish uprising.

7 See Halecki, O., Ostatnie lata świdrygiełły i sprawa wołyńska za Kazimierza Jagiellończyka (Krakow, 1915)Google Scholar.

8 That long petition, which I discovered fifty years ago in the Czartoryski Archives, is summarized in my article “Sejm obozowy szlachty litewskiej pod Witebskiem w r. 1562 i jego petyeja o unie; z Polską’ Przegląd historyczny, XVIII (1914), 320-52. Not denying at all that the Union of Lublin created a common Polish-Lithuanian diet, recent Russian historiography (G. Vernadsky, quoted by Professor Backus in note 7, quotes himself I. I. Lappo) has only added some information on separate Lithuanian conventions which in the first decades after 1569 were occasionally held in preparation for the general diets.

9 What Professor Backus writes about “Russians,” the “Russian” language, etc., in the other parts of the Polish-Lithuanian state, refers to the other two East Slavic nations, today called the Ukraine and Belorussia.

10 See their statements quoted by K. Chodynicki, Kośiół prawosławny i Rzeczpospolita Polska do r. 1632 (Warsaw, 1934), pp. 106-7.

11 As to the earlier detections of “West Russian nobles” from Lithuania to Moscow, studied by Professor Backus in the book quoted in his note 14, see my comments in the American Historical Review, LXIII (1958), 1037-38.

12 We now know that there was an alternative plan of a marriage of Jagello not with the queen of Poland but with a daughter of the grand prince of Moscow, Dmitrii Donskoi. This would have meant an early absorption by Moscow not only of all eastern Slavs but of the Lithuanians as well, and possibly a partition of Poland already at the end of the fourteenth century, when it was first planned by her western neighbors.

13 This is well explained, against the whole background of the position of the Orthodox Church in the commonwealth, in Chodynicki's excellent book, cited above (note 10).

14 See the chapter on the Reformation in the highly objective Kirchengeschichte Polens (Berlin, 1930) by the Protestant theologian Karl Völker, particularly his exhaustive bibliographies, including, e.g., the numerous, less objective but very informative works of the Lutheran pastor T. Wotschke on the Reformation in Poland and Lithuania.

15 This is the opinion of the leading Polish specialist in the field, Professor Stanisław Kot, who is a Catholic but whose attitude toward the Reformation is absolutely positive. See his essay La Réforme dans le Grand Duché de Lithuanie: Facteur d'occidentalisation culturelle (Brussels, 1953).

16 This results from a document I discovered in 1962, which will be printed and discussed in the 1963 volume of the (Ukrainian) Analecta Ordinis S. Basilii M., published in Rome.

17 The “economic difficulties” which Professor Backus studied before turning to the Ukrainian problem are not discussed in this commentary, because he feels himself unable to say “to what extent they tended to draw Poland-Lithuania apart or hold it together.“

18 See Wójcik, Z., Traktat Andruszowski 1667 r. i jego geneza (Warsaw, 1959)Google Scholar, where the whole background is very objectively discussed in the light of unpublished sources.

19 French interference, which tried in vain to strengthen the monarchy in Poland, cannot be compared to Russian and Prussian interference, which worked in the opposite direction. The French policy in the years 1725-33, studied in the valuable monograph of E. Rostworowski (quoted by Professor Backus in his note 29), could have saved Poland, had it been more consistent and energetic at the time of the election of 1733.

20 The series źródła dziejowe was dedicated from 1883 (Vol. XII) to the systematic study of Poland's individual provinces at the turn of the sixteenth century, mainly from the economic and social point of view. The best volumes (XVIII to XXII), dealing with the Ruthenian lands, have been edited by Aleksander Jabłonowski, who studied also the cultural and ethnic background in a highly objective spirit. And soon after the reopening of the Polish University of Wilno in 1919, that center started publication of the Ateneum Wileńskie (a regional review dedicated to the history of the grand duchy of Lithuania and its various provinces) which continued until another partition of Poland, in 1939.

21 In his last footnote Professor Backus also recommends for study “the moral state of Poland.” This could indeed contribute to a better understanding of the partitions, but on two conditions. Not only the Poles but also their enemies should be submitted to that test of morality. And statements of Kostomarov on the “gluttony and drunkenness” of the Poles should not serve as an inspiring starting point for such a study. They do not deserve any comment.