the spirit of
the regulations issued for them."

This flunkeyish notion of the necessity of _deserving_ civil rights
coincided with the views of the official Polish Committee in Warsaw.
Soon afterwards a memorandum, prepared by the Committee, was
submitted through its Chairman, Count Chartoryski, to the Polish
viceroy Zayonchek. [1] Formerly a comrade of Koszciuszko, Zayonchek
later turned from a revolutionary into a reactionary, who was
anxious to curry favor with the supreme commander of the province,
Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich. [2] No wonder, therefore, that the
plan of the Committee, conservative though it was, seemed too
liberal for his liking. In his report to Emperor Alexander I., dated
March 8, 1816, he wrote as follows:

[Footnote 1: He was appointed viceroy in 1815, after the formation of
the Kingdom of Poland, and continued in this office until his death in
1826.]

[Footnote 2: He was the military commander of the province. See above,
p. 13, n. 2.]

The growth of the Jewish population in your Kingdom of Poland is
becoming a menace. In 1790 they formed here a thirteenth part of the
whole population; to-day they form no less than an eighth. Sober and
resourceful, they are satisfied with little; they earn their
livelihood by cheating, and, owing to early marriages, multiply
beyond measure. Shunning hard labor, they produce nothing
themselves, and live only at the expense of the working classes
which they help to ruin. Their peculiar institutions keep them apart
within the state, marking them as a foreign nationality, and, as a
result, they are unable in their present condition to furnish the
state either with good citizens or with capable soldiers. Unless
means are adopted to utilize for the common weal the useful
qualities of the Jews, they will soon exhaust all the sources of the
national wealth and will threaten to surpass and suppress the
Christian population.

In the same year, 1816, a scheme looking to the solution of the Jewish
question was proposed by the Russian statesman Nicholas Novosiltzev, the
imperial commissioner attached to the Provincial Government in
Warsaw.[1] Novosiltzev, who was not sympathetic to the Poles, showed
himself in his project to be a friend of the Jews. Instead of the
principle laid down by the official Committee: "correction first, and
civil rights last," he suggests another more liberal procedure: the
immediate b