ABSTRACT
The Grodno Sejm was to remain in session for another two months. Like the Warsaw Sejm of 1773–75, it had to frame an acceptable constitutional settlement. Any concessions that the Poles managed to secure could be nothing more than the paper trappings of what was but the simulacrum of a state. The diplomatic butchery had cost the Commonwealth almost half its territory and population. The Rzeczpospolita was reduced to a fragile column of 83,000 square miles, jammed between Galicia, East Prussia and the Baltic. Where the population had numbered some 8,000,000, now it was at best half of that figure. Warsaw was little more than thirty miles from the new Prussian border.
