3. Investigations of the excesses were made mostly in the presence of representatives of the Polish Government and of the Jewish communities. There were also present in many cases military and civil officials and, wherever possible, officials in command at the time the excesses occurred were conferred with and interrogated. In this work the Polish authorities and the American Minister to Poland, Mr. Hughes Gibson, lent the mission every facility. Deputations of all kinds of organizations were received and interviewed. A large number of public meetings and gatherings were attended, and the mission endeavoured to obtain a correct impression of what had occurred, of the present mental state of the public, and of the attitude of the various factions toward one another. 4. The Jews first entered Poland in large numbers during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when they migrated from Germany and other countries as the result of severe persecutions. Their language was German, which subsequently developed into a Hebrew-German dialect, or Yiddish. As prior to this immigration only two classes or estates had existed in Poland (the owners and the tillers of the soil), the Jewish immigrant became the pioneer of trade and finance, settling in the towns and villages. As time went on it became generally known throughout Europe that Poland was a place of refuge for the Jews, and their numbers were augmented as a result of persecutions in western Europe. Still more recently, as a result of the expulsion of the Jews from Russia, on account of the enforcement of the pale of settlement, and of the May laws of 1882, their number was further increased. 5. Notwithstanding the fact that Poland has been a place of refuge for the Jews, there have been anti-Jewish movements at various times. The present anti-Semitic feeling took a definite political form after the Russian revolution of 1905. This feeling reached an intense stage in 1912, when the Polish National Democratic Party nominated an anti-Semite to represent Warsaw in the Russian Duma and the Jews cast their vote for a Polish Socialist and carried the election. The National Democratic Party then commenced a vigorous anti-Semitic campaign. During the German occupation this campaign was temporarily reduced. At the end of the Great War the chaotic and unnatural state of affairs in which Poland found itself gave good ground for a condition of social unrest, which, together with the world-stimulated tendency toward national self-determination, accentuated the feeling between Jewish and non-Jewish elements. The chauvinistic reaction created by the sudden acquisition of a long-coveted freedom ripened the public mind for anti-Semitic or anti-alien sentiment, which was strongly agitated by the press and by politicians. This finally encouraged physical manifestations of violent outcroppings of an unbalanced social condition.