ndants into plaintiffs
ran counter to the fundamental task of the Committee, which, according
to the original instructions received by it, was expected to draft its
plans in a spirit of reaction. At any rate, these words were uttered too
late. A new era was approaching which in solving the Jewish question
resorted to methods such as would have horrified even the conservative
statesmen of the seventies: the era of pogroms and cruel disabilities.

4. THE DRIFT TOWARD OPPRESSION

During the last decade of Alexander's reign, the machinery of Jewish
legislation was working at a slow rate, pending the full "revision" of
Jewish rights. Yet the steps of the approaching reaction could well be
discerned. Thus in 1870, during the discussion of the draft of the new
Municipal Statute by a special committee of the Ministry of the
Interior, which included as "experts" the burgomasters of the most
important Russian cities, the question arose whether the former
limitation of the number of Jewish aldermen in the municipal councils to
one-third of the whole number of aldermen [1] should be upheld or not.
The cities involved were those of the Pale where the Jews formed the
majority of the population, and the committee was searching for ways and
means to weaken "the excessive influence" of this majority upon the city
administration and to subordinate it to the Christian minority.

[Footnote 1: See above, p. 41.]

One solitary member, Novoselski, the burgomaster of Odessa, advocated
the repeal of the old restriction, with the one proviso that the Jewish
aldermen should be required to possess certain educational
qualifications, inasmuch as educated Jews were "not quite as harmful" as
uneducated ones.

A minority of the members of the Committee favored the limitation of the
number of Jewish aldermen to one-half, but the majority staunchly
defended the old norm, which was one-third. The representatives of the
majority, in particular Count Cherkaski, the burgomaster of Moscow,
argued that the Jews constituted not only a religious but also a
national entity, that they were still widely removed from assimilation
or Russification, that education, far from transforming the Jews into
Russians, made them only more successful in the struggle for existence,
that it was inadvisable for this reason "to subject the whole Russian
element (of the population) to the risk of falling under the domination
of Judaism."

The curious principle of municipal