The National Democratic party, comprising the landed gentry and the educated classes in general, who had led the independence movement, thought that it was their right to control the government. But from the beginning they had to contend with the peasant and labor and Socialist combination, which matched them in strength, and which could easily run the country by Jewish and German-Ukrainian support. Pilsudski, who retained for four years the transitional title of Chief of the State, insisted that no conservative Government could live in Poland. The natural majority was Socialist (with the peasant support), and any attempt to keep the Nationalists in the saddle, according to Pilsudski, would be futile. The first General Election under the new constitution was held on November 5 and 12, 1922. Strenuous efforts were made in every part of the country to prevent the exercise of suffrage on the part of the new alien Minorities and the Jews. Despite intimidation and glaring fraud, the new Parliament did not contain a Nationalist majority. The Nationalist Right and the Populist-Socialist-Labor Left had about the same strength in both Diet and Senate, with a center group of Jews and “foreigners” holding the balance of power. The test came in the election of the first president of Poland. Pilsudski refused to run, not wanting to owe his election to the votes of Jews and Germans. Count Maurice Zamoyski, Polish minister in Paris, whose family had played a glorious rôle in Poland for centuries, was the candidate of the Right. The Left put up Professor Narutowicz, who had been living in exile at Zurich for many years, and who returned to Poland to become minister of foreign affairs after the resurrection. Zamoyski, idol of the Nationalists, was defeated. Feeling ran high in Warsaw. For several days a pogrom was feared. Molested in the streets, the Jews took to cover. Had not the police behaved admirably there would have been serious loss of life and destruction of property. The worst offenders were not hooligans but students and older men of the so-called intelligentsia. General Haller, former commander of the Polish Corps in France during the war and later of the volunteer army that stemmed the Bolshevist advance in 1920, imprudently allowed himself to be drawn into the street manifestations. He addressed the students in an inflammatory manner, crying out that the Poles had been outvoted in their own country by Jews and foreigners. It was unthinkable, General Haller said, that a man like Zamoyski, who represented the noblest traditions of Poland, should have been defeated.