Full quote If in the subsequent period the Poles are judged to have contributed to the catastrophe themselves it was more by their desperate efforts to ecape from ANarchy than from their supposed desire to wallow in it It should have been clear to all that the despots of St Petersburg and Berlin who denied most civil liberties to their own subjects could never be the genuine champions of any Golden Freedom in Poland The same sort of hypocrisy was current in matters of religion It is true that the Roman Catholic establishment of the Republic despite the long tradition of toleration and freedom of worship had denied the religious minorities Orthodox and Protestant full political rights since 1917 In this Polish practices resembled that of Great Britain or Holland and until bishops were goaded into retaliation in the 1770s had been far more tolerant that that of Russia whose visiting armies had invariably inflicted forcible conversion on the Republic s Uniates This is something completely different from what you claimed by writing Davies says they intervened because Poland had denied the religious minorities Orthodox and Protestant full political rights since 1718 Norman Davies God s Playground A History of Poland Vol 1 The Origins to 1795 1982 p 514