The Free Royal Cities Act (full Polish title: Miasta Nasze Królewskie wolne w państwach Rzeczypospolitej; English: "Our Free Royal Cities in the States of the Commonwealth", or the Law on the Cities, Prawo o miastach) was an act adopted by the Four-Year Sejm (1788-92) of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth on April 18, 1791, in the run-up to the adoption of the Constitution of May 3, 1791.
The Free Royal Cities Act was subsequently stipulated, in that Constitution's Article III, to be an integral part of the Constitution.
The Act granted to the Commonwealth's townspeople personal security, the right to acquire landed property, and eligibility for military officers' commissions, public offices, and membership in the szlachta (nobility).
The Act constituted a major element in the Constitution's advancement of democracy in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (which was converted by the Constitution into a unitary state, henceforth called the "Polish Republic" — "Rzeczpospolita Polska").
Famous quotes containing the words free, royal, cities and/or act:
“But we still remember ... above all, the cool, free aspect of the wild apple trees, generously proffering their fruit to us, though still green and crude,—the hard, round, glossy fruit, which, if not ripe, still was not poison, but New English too, brought hither, its ancestors, by ours once. These gentler trees imparted a half-civilized and twilight aspect to the otherwise barbarian land.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Because humans are not alone in exhibiting such behavior—bees stockpile royal jelly, birds feather their nests, mice shred paper—it’s possible that a pregnant woman who scrubs her house from floor to ceiling [just before her baby is born] is responding to a biological imperative . . . . Of course there are those who believe that . . . the burst of energy that propels a pregnant woman to clean her house is a perfectly natural response to their mother’s impending visit.”
—Mary Arrigo (20th century)
“Such poverty as we have today in all our great cities degrades the poor, and infects with its degradation the whole neighborhood in which they live. And whatever can degrade a neighborhood can degrade a country and a continent and finally the whole civilized world, which is only a large neighborhood.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“To see him act is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)