POLAND
This was a year after the United States gave women the right to vote.
Typical of the times, the king was accountable to no one for anything. 200 years later, most of the world have accepted the principle that no one is above the law and that every leader is accountable to the people.
This was the second liberal constitution in the world following on the heels of United States Constitution upon which some of this constitution is based. See {585394}. This particular clause is noteworthy for its internal contradiction regarding freedom of religion. After making it illegal to convert any Catholic to any other religion, the constitution goes on to establish freedom of religion. So one was guaranteed the right to practice one’s own religion but if the religion advocated evangelizing and converting others, that part of religious freedom was banned when targeting Roman Catholics.
To many of us the notion of liberty and aristocracy and nobility are contradictory. However, at the time, the nobility, unlike most Poles, were literate and educated and had followed the U. S. Constitution adoption. And this Constitution was created with the Nobility being one of the driving forces. See {585394}.
Throughout history Lithuania has been a football fought over by Poland and Russia both of which claimed a unity of peoples but in actuality discriminated against Lithuania in resource allocation and social and intellectual relations. Throughout, many Lithuanians insisted that they have a separate language and culture and fought for independence which finally arrived after the Cold War. See {640106} for another quotation in this so called union. The fusion of the two territories made great sense to the King, but little to the Poles and Lithuanians who each saw themselves as a very different people and wanted little to so with the other.
Very few countries make such overt recognition of the arts and their cultural heritage a part of their constitutions. Even nations which are fanatic about their cultures such as France do not have such overt constitutional provisions.
The notion that a the first line of a national anthem should be focused on the survival of the nation is explained by the history of countries that have and have not existed having been overrun and occupied and absorbed into other nations. That fear exists centuries later. See Ukraine for another example {642421}.
Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe, situated between the Baltic Sea in the north and two mountain ranges (the Sudetes and Carpathian Mountains) in the south. Bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine and Belarus to the east; and the Baltic Sea, Kaliningrad Oblast (a Russian exclave) and Lithuania to the north. The total area of Poland is 312,679 square kilometres (120,726 sq mi), making it the 69th largest country in the world and the 9th largest in Europe. With a population of over 38.5 million people, Poland is the 34th most populous country in the world, the 8th most populous country in Europe and the sixth most populous member of the European Union, as well as the most populous post-communist member of the European Union. Poland is a unitary state divided into 16 administrative subdivisions and its capital and largest city is Warsaw. Other metropolises include Kraków, Wrocław, Poznań, Gdańsk and Szczecin. The country's largest agglomeration is the Silesian Metropolis.
