We carry a heavier burden of taxation than the other citizens. We are robbed of the gladsome opportunity of acquiring a piece of land, of building a little house, of founding a household, of erecting a factory, of engaging in commerce unhampered, in a word, doing that which God and nature hold out to man. In Warsaw we are even ordered out of the main streets. And what shall we say of those blessed liberties which citizens value most highly--the right of electing their superiors and of being elected by their compatriots, so as not to be as a dead body in the civic life of the nation? Is the land in which our fathers, paying heavily for this privilege, saw the light of the world, always to remain strange to us? Gentlemen of the Senate, we lay before you the tears of the fathers and of the children and of the coming generations. We beg you to hasten the happy day when we may enter upon the enjoyment of the rights and liberties with which Napoleon the Great has endowed the inhabitants of this country, and which our beloved country recognizes as the possession of her children. To this petition of the Jews, who classed themselves as "members of the Polish nation," and were ready to renounce their own national characteristics, the Senate replied by presenting the Duke with a heartless report, in which it was pointed out that the Jews had brought upon themselves the "curtailment of their rights" by their "dishonest pursuits" and by "their mode of life, subversive of the welfare of society." It was necessary first to reform the life of the Jews and to appoint a committee to elaborate plans of reform. It may be remarked parenthetically that a committee of this kind had been in existence since the end of 1808, and had worked out a "plan of reform" akin in spirit to the projects of the Quadrennial Diet and the Parisian Synhedrion. But all these committees were in reality nothing but a decent way of burying the Jewish question.