p his bloody
work of retribution. As for the Kingdom of Poland, neither the
revolution nor its suppression entailed any serious consequences for
them. True, the fraternization of the Warsaw Jews with the Poles during
the revolutionary years weakened for a little while the hereditary
Jew-hatred of the Polish people, and helped to intensify the fever of
Polonization which had seized the Jewish upper classes. But indirectly
the effects of the Polish rebellion were detrimental to the Jews of the
rest of the Empire. The insurrection was not only followed by a general
wave of political reaction, but it also gave strong impetus to the
policy of Russification which was now applied with particular vigor to
the Western provinces, and was damaging to the Jews both from the civil
and the cultural point of view.

CHAPTER XIX

THE REACTION UNDER ALEXANDER II.

1. CHANGE OF ATTITUDE TOWARD THE JEWISH PROBLEM

The decided drift toward political reaction in the second part of
Alexander's reign affected also the specific Jewish problem, which the
homoeopathic reforms, designed to "ameliorate" a fraction of the Jewish
people, had tried to solve in vain. The general reaction showed itself
in the fact that, after having carried out the first great reforms, such
as the liberation of the peasantry, the introduction of rural
self-government and the reorganization of the administration of the law,
the Government considered the task of Russian regeneration to be
completed, and stubbornly refused, to use the expression current at the
time, "to crown the edifice" by the one great political reform, the
grant of a constitution and political liberty. This refusal widened the
breach between the Government and the progressive element of the Russian
people, whose hopes were riveted on the ultimate goal of political
reorganization. The striving for liberty, driven under ground by police
and censorship, assumed among the Russian youth the character of a
revolutionary movement. And when the murderous hand of the "Third
Section" [1] descended heavily upon the champions of liberty, the
youthful revolutionaries retorted with political terrorism which
darkened the last days of Alexander II. and led to his assassination.

[Footnote 1: See above, p. 21, n. 1.]

The complete emancipation of the Jews was out of place in this
atmosphere of growing official reaction. The same bureaucracy which
halted the march of the "great reforms" for the country at