raelites of
all such taxes and restrictions as at present they are
made to bear in a greater number and to a greater extent
than other classes of His Majesty's subjects, and in
particular that of the Sabbath Light, which presses so
heavily on the poor.

"Such are the general details of the request that I most
respectfully solicit your Excellency to lay before His
Majesty the Emperor. I most humbly and earnestly pray,
that in the great opportunity which Divine Providence has
opened to His Majesty, he will raise the fallen, relieve
the oppressed, cheer the desolate, and by a high and
magnanimous measure of policy set an example which the
whole world, and especially my brethren, will never cease
to remember with gratitude and admiration.

"Your Excellency will observe that what I here entreat in
the name of my brethren, as well as in that of every
friend of humanity, amounts in fact to nothing more than
that which your Excellency's most enlightened and
benevolent Sovereign has already accorded to His Hebrew
subjects, by the declaration contained in the document
with which your Excellency obligingly furnished me.

"Under existing circumstances, deprived as they are of the
means adverted to in that declaration, of turning their
activity to useful objects, and of establishing their
prosperity upon a safe basis, poverty, distress, and the
annihilation of all hope must be the fate of His Imperial
Majesty's most faithful and loyal Hebrew subjects, and
indeed they appear already reduced to the lowest depth of
distress.

"I therefore most humbly approach His Majesty's
philanthropic Government with my fervent prayer, that it
will be pleased to carry out without delay the good and
humane intentions of His Most Gracious Majesty the
Emperor, manifested in his decrees.

"With respect to the real disposition of my brethren, I
feel it right to mention that from communications which I
held with the Russian authorities during my permitted
visit to the Israelites in His Majesty's dominions, I have
reason to think that my co-religionists have been
generally exempt from the commission of capital crimes,
and that even in regard to ordinary morality and the
greater proportion of minor offences, their conduct is of
a very exemplary kind. I sincerely hope that this
statement will accord with the reports in the possession
of His Majesty's Governm