forming now no less than an eighth of the population.  Should this process continue, the Kingdom of Poland would be turned into a “Jewish country” and become “the laughing-stock of the whole of Europe.”  The Jewish religion is antagonistic to Catholicism:  we call them “Old Testament believers,” [2] while they brand us as “pagans.”  It being impossible to expel the Jews from Poland, they ought to be isolated like carriers of disease.  They should be concentrated in separate quarters in the cities to facilitate the supervision over them.  Only well-deserving merchants and craftsmen, who have plied their trade honestly for five or ten years, should be allowed to reside outside the ghetto.  The same category of Jews, in addition to those married to Christian women, should also be granted the right of acquiring landed property.  The ghetto on the one end of the line, and baptism on the other—­this medieval policy did not in the least abash the patriotic reformers of the type of Stashitz.

[Footnote 1:  Compare Vol.  I, p. 279 et seq.]

[Footnote 2:  Referring to the term Starozakonni, the Polish designation for Jews.]

Stashitz’s point of view was supported by certain publicists and opposed by others, but all were agreed on the necessity of a system of correction for the Jews.  The discussion became particularly heated in 1818, after the convocation and during the sessions of the first [1] Polish Diet in Warsaw.  Three different tendencies asserted themselves:  a moderate, an anti-Jewish, and a pro-Jewish tendency.  The first was represented by General Vincent Krasinski, a member of the Diet.  In his “Observations on the Jews of Poland,” he proceeds from the following twofold premise:  “The voice of the whole nation is raised against the Jews, and it demands their transformation.”  This titled publicist declares himself an opponent of the Jews as they are at present.  He shares the popular dread of their multiplication, the fear of a “Jewish Poland,” and is somewhat sceptical about their being corrigible.  Nevertheless he proposes liberal methods of correction, such as the encouragement of big Jewish capital, the promotion of agriculture and handicrafts among the Jewish masses, and the bestowal of the rights of citizenship upon those worthy of it.

[Footnote 1:  i.e., the first to be convoked after the reconstitution of Poland in 1815.]

Krasinski was attacked by an anonymous writer in an anti-Semitic pamphlet entitled “A Remedy against the Jews.”  Proceeding from the conviction that no reforms, however well conceived, could have any effect on the Jews, the writer puts the question in a simplified form:  “Shall we sacrifice the welfare of three million Poles to that of 300,000 Jews, or vice versa?” His answer is just as simple:  the Jews should be forced to leave Poland.  Emperor Alexander I., “the benefactor of Poland,” ought to be petitioned to rid the country of the Jews by transferring them to the uninhabited steppes in the South of Russia or even “on the borders of Great Tartary.”  The 300,000 Jews might be divided into 300 parties and settled there in the course of one year.  The means for expelling and settling the Jews should be furnished by the Jews themselves.