same prominent estate owner told me that one day he asked some of
his peasants if they really had partaken in a Pogrom which had taken
place in the neighboring parish--he could not believe it, as they looked
so good-natured. To his astonishment they answered yes, and when he
asked them about the reason they replied: "You know it very well." They
then explained that they had killed these Jews because the Jews had
killed their Saviour. He: "But that was so long ago and it was not they
who did it and it did not happen in this country." To which they, again
astonished, exclaimed: "Was it long ago? We thought it was last week."
It appeared that they had understood from the priest's explanation that
the crucifixion had taken place then and there.

Under such conditions one is not surprised by any outrage. But to see
the hatred of the Jews spread in Russian Poland, where people understand
how to read and write, that must surely fill one with wonder. The great
number of Jews in the old Polish Kingdom originated in the days of
Casimir the Great (1309-1370), who out of love for his concubine,
Esther, opened his country to the Jews and made conditions favorable for
them. Since then the number has increased, as the Czars locked up all
their Jewish subjects there. So they have been living separated and with
a special dress like the Jews of Denmark at the time of Holberg. They
have, however, felt and suffered as Polish patriots. As early as 1794 a
regiment of Jewish volunteers fought under Kosciusko; their Colonel fell
in 1809. In 1830 the shallow Polish national Government refused the
Jews' petition to be allowed to enter the army. As they then ventured to
apply for admission to the Polish public schools Nicholas I. punished
them, allowing 36,000 families to be carried away to the steppes of
South Russia, where the regulation for the enlistment of children
overtook them. All their small boys from the age of 6 years were sent to
Archangel in Cossack custody to be trained as sailors. They died in
multitudes on the way.

The evils which befell all the inhabitants of Poland regardless of their
creed for some time suppressed the hatred of the Jews which is always
lurking in the masses. The great men of Poland checked its development.
Adam Mickiewicz, Poland's greatest author, went so far that in his chief
work, Poland's national epic, "Pan Tadeusz" (1834) he makes a Jewish
innkeeper one of the most sympathetic leading characters. He is