ABSTRACT
The Old Order abounded in new developments and new ideas. In the political assemblies, or diets, of Bohemia and Poland, where the towns had been represented about the year 1500, they were now virtually excluded, in part because of old religious and ethnic quarrels, but mainly because of the triumph of an agrarian and anti-mercantile mentality in the landed gentry and nobles. The role of kings everywhere had long been to subjugate a formerly feudal nobility, to turn them into subjects against whom law and public order could be enforced. Their order was dissolved for the whole Catholic world in 1773, by the pope himself, at the instigation of the Catholic governments. With the dissolution of the Jesuit order, reforms introduced into Jesuit schools, from France to Poland, with a view to a civic, "patriotic", or socially minded education; the founding of the Collegium Nobilium at Warsaw, in the 1770s, marked a new step in the political education of Poland.
