The Government submitted. In yielding it was moved not so much by the clear and incontrovertible arguments of the Committee, which amounted to a deadly criticism of the current system of state patronage, as by the "political circumstances" alluded to in the concluding sentences of the report. Napoleon's army was marching towards the Russian frontier. The war which was to embroil the whole of Russia and subsequently the whole of Europe had broken out. At such a moment, when the French army was flooding the whole of Western Russia, it seemed far more dangerous to create groups of persecuted and embittered outcasts than it had been in 1807, when the French invasion was merely a matter of apprehension. In these circumstances the question whether the Jews should be left in the villages and hamlets found a favorable solution of itself, without any special ukase. Stirred to the core, Russia, in the moment of national danger, had to rely for her salvation upon the strenuous exertions of all her inhabitants, Jews included. 4. THE PATRIOTIC ATTITUDE OF RUSSIAN JEWRY DURING THE WAR OF 1812 The part played by the Jews in the War of 1812 was not so insignificant as historians are generally disposed to assume, being misled by the fact that the Jews of Russia were not yet drafted into the army. It must be borne in mind that the great war was enacted in western Russia, more particularly in northwestern Russia, on territory inhabited by a compact Jewish population scattered all over the cities, townlets, and villages. The sympathy of this population with one or the other of the belligerents frequently decided the success or failure of the detachment situated in that locality. It is a well-known fact that the Poles of the western region were mostly on the side of Napoleon, from whom they expected the restoration of the Polish kingdom. As for the Russian Jews, their attitude towards the belligerent parties was of a more complicated character. The recent persecutions of the rural Jews were apt, on the one hand, to set their hearts against the Russian Government, and, had these persecutions continued, the French would have been hailed by the oppressed Jews as their saviors. But the expulsions from the villages had been stopped three years before the war, and the Jews anticipated the complete repeal of the cruel law, which had been so severely condemned in the official report of the Committee laid before the Tzar in the beginning of 1812. Moreover, the deputies of the Kahals, who had been summoned twice to share in the work of the Government (in 1803 and 1807), had an opportunity to convince themselves that Alexander I.'s Government was on the whole favorably disposed towards the Jews, and its mistakes were merely the outcome of the wrong system of state patronage, of the desire of the Government to make the Jews happy, according to its own lights, by employing compulsory and "correctional" measures.