The Polish serfs were indeed never regular slaves; but merely glebae adscripti, i.e. they could not be sold separately as mere things, but only with the soil they cultivated, which they had no right to leave. They were not reduced even to this state before the fifteenth or sixteenth century; for one of the statutes of Casimir the Great allows them the privilege of selling their property and leaving whenever they were ill treated. Of the present state of the Polish peasantry, the author of "Poland under the dominion of Russia," (Bost. 1834,) says: "The Polish peasant might perhaps be about as free as my dog was in Warsaw; for I certainly should not have prevented the animal from learning, had he been so inclined, some tricks by which he could earn the reward of an extra bone. The freedom of the wretched Polish serfs is much the same as the freedom of their cattle; for they are brought up with as little of human cultivation," etc. p. 165. And again: "The Polish serf is in every part of the country extremely poor, and of all the living creatures I have met with in this world, or seen described in books of natural history, he is the most wretched." p. 176.
Lemberg indeed can hardly be called a Polish university. All its professors are Germans, and the lectures are delivered in Latin or German. It has only three faculties, viz. the philosophical, theological, and juridical. For medicine it has only a preparatory school, the course being finished at Vienna. Among the 65 medical students of 1832, there were 41 Jews. The university had in that year, in all, 1291 students. For the theological and juridical courses, which, according to law, comprise each four years, a previous preparation of two years spent in philosophical studies is required by the government. Thus the regular course of an Austrian student lasts six years. The same measures were taken to Germanize Cracow during the Austrian administration; but when in 1815 Cracow became a free city, it parted with all its German professors, and became again a genuine Polish university.
From the account given of the state of the Polish common people in note 42 above, we must conclude that this number is very small. Mr. Ljach Szyrma, the author of Letters on Poland, (Edinb. 1823,) says: "The lower classes, unfortunately, do not enjoy the advantage of being proportionally benefited by the learning requisite to their social condition. The parish schools are not sufficient to improve them in this respect; and the village schools, upon which their hopes chiefly rest, are not numerous."