As the Jews, of course, could not vote on such a man, they urgently asked the committee to propose another candidate not inimical to them. This reasonable request was refused with coarseness and Kucharschewski's candidacy maintained. Because of that the Jews were obliged to look about for another candidate of Polish family who was fit for the position and was not hostile to them. In spite of numerous applications, they did not succeed in finding such a man; at the last moment, when all attempts had failed, Jagello, the Social Democrat, declared himself willing to accept the candidacy of the Jews.
The only thing in his favor was the fact that he was of pure Polish blood. As their leading men all belong to the higher middle class, they did not share his views. But the state of affairs forced them to support him. Lord Beaconsfield used to maintain that the natural disposition of the Jewish race was conservative, but foolish politics, instead of encouraging the conservative instincts of the race, forced it to cast its lot with the most extreme elements of the opposition. It has proved true here.
Jagello was elected.
The leading men in Russian Poland, who, as a matter of fact, through the whole new century, had fought against the Jews, although secretly, for fear they should forfeit the sympathy of the intellectual aristocracy of Europe, used this electoral victory of the Jews, which had been forced upon them, to throw off the mask and openly act as their passionate enemies. The so-called co-operative movement developed during the last twelve years, and in itself nothing but a fight against the Jewish commerce, under a different name, now changed into a systematic and cruelly effected boycotting of the Jewish population. In private as in public life, the openly pronounced password was: not to buy from Jews, not to associate with Jews.
At the head of this movement marched the intelligence of Poland, among others some of its most famous authors, avowed free thinkers as Nemojewski, nay, as Alexander Swientochowski. Literary life presents many changes, metamorphoses, which in thoroughness are not very much inferior to those of Ovid. A good deal is necessary to make one who for one-half century has witnessed the want of character among writers feel even the slightest surprise. But I should willingly have sworn that I should never have lived to see Alexander Swientochowski a nationalist, he the most uncompromising adversary of nationalism, who endured a good deal for his conviction, to see the poet of "Chawa Rubin" an anti-Semitic chief. Not only does all that Alexander Swientochowski wrote rise against him, but also the words, the powerful words, which issued from his mouth in his palmy days.
The whole Polish press placed itself at the disposal of this movement. Young Polish louts were posted outside the Jewish shops and ill-treated the Christian women and children who wanted to buy there. By means of the well-known Dumowski a new paper, Dwa Groszi, was started, which simply urged pogroms. It soon came to bloody struggles. Polish undergraduates killed an old Jew in the Sliska Street in Warsaw. In the little town of Welun peasants poured naphtha on the house of a Jew and put fire to it, burning a large family. Similar acts occurred in several other places, until the Russian Government stopped this pogrom movement in order to prevent the Polish nationalism from getting stronger.
The Polish priests in the villages incited the people from the pulpit to boycotting of and war against the Jews. After the sentence in the Beilis action the Polish newspapers were almost alone in publishing on circulars the information that Beilis had been acquitted, but that the existence of religious murder had been satisfactorily proved. Nay, the free thinker, Nemojewski, wrote a book, in which he maintained the monstrous lie that Jewish religious murders are facts, and traveled all over the country with an agitatorial lecture to the same purpose.
Under these circumstances, the Jews in Russian Poland turned to the few men whose names were so esteemed or whose characters were so unimpeachable that their words could not be unheeded.
Ladislas Mickiewicz, the excellent son of the great Mickiewicz, who had passed his whole life in Paris, first as a publisher and translator of the works of his father, and then as a Polish patriotic author, convened, together with some other prominent men, a great meeting at Warsaw to restore the inner peace. In vain he begged and besought his countrymen, who had enemies enough otherwise, not to act as enemies of the Jews, who had always been their friends. No Polish newspaper gave any report of his speech.
All this took place before the war. The provisional result was the economic destruction of the Russian-Polish Jews. But now during the war the glow of the bloody hatred of the Jews has blazed out in far stronger flames and the Russian Government has as yet done nothing to subdue or quench the fire.