formed under the regime of oppression and caprice. Pointing to the
example of the West where the bestowal of equal rights had contributed
to the success of Jewish assimilation, the St. Petersburg petitioners
were not even courageous enough to demand equal rights as the price of
assimilation, and professed, perhaps from diplomatic considerations, to
content themselves with miserable crumbs of rights and privileges for
"the best among us." They failed to realize the meanness of their
suggestion to divide a nation into best and worst, into those worthy of
a human existence and those unworthy of it.

3. THE EXTENSION OF THE RIGHT OF RESIDENCE

After some wavering, the Government decided to adopt the method of
"picking" the best. The intention of the authorities was to apply the
gradual relaxation of Jewish rightlessness not to groups of
restrictions, but to groups of persons. The Government entered upon the
scheme of abolishing or alleviating certain restrictions not for the
whole Jewish population but merely for a few "useful" sections within
it. Three such sections were marked off from the rest: merchants of the
first guild, university graduates, and incorporated artisans.

The resuscitated "Committee for the Amelioration of the Jews" [1]
displayed an intense activity during that period (1856-1863). For fully
two years (1857-1859) the question of granting the right of permanent
residence in the interior governments to merchants of the first guild
occupied the attention of that Committee and of the Council of State.
The Committee had originally proposed to restrict this privilege by
imposing a series of exceedingly onerous conditions. Thus, the merchants
intending to settle in the Russian interior were to be required to have
belonged to the first guild within the Pale for ten years previously,
and they were to be allowed to leave the Pale only after securing in
each case a permit from the Ministers of the Interior and of Finance.
But the Council of State found that, circumscribed in this manner, the
privilege would benefit only a negligible fraction of the Jewish
merchant class--there were altogether one hundred and eight Jewish
first-guild merchants within the Pale--and, therefore, considered it
necessary to reduce the requirements for settling in the interior.

[Footnote 1: Compare above, p. 49.]

A long succession of meetings of this august body was taken up with the
perplexing problem how to attract big Jewish c