The political upheavals of the transition period (1789-1815) were bound to react violently on the economic status of Russo-Polish Jewry. The vast Jewish population of Western Russia was at that time divided into two parts: the larger part resided in the towns and townlets, the smaller lived in the villages. The efforts made by the Russian Government during that period, to squeeze the whole Jewish population into the urban estates and to single out from its midst a new class of agriculturists, failed to produce the desired effect. Instead it succeeded in disturbing the former equilibrium between the urban and the rural occupations of the Jews. The urban Jew was either a business man or an artisan or a saloon-keeper. In many cities the Jewish mercantile element was numerically superior to the Christian. The increased Jewish activity in the export trade is particularly noticeable. Jewish merchants traveled annually in large numbers to the fairs abroad, particularly to that of Leipsic, to buy merchandise, principally dry goods, at the same time exporting the products of Poland and Russia, such as furs, skins, etc. The gradual absorption of Polish territory by Russia opened up a new, immense market, that of the central Russian provinces, for the goods imported from abroad. It was natural that the Jews began to flock to those provinces. But their way was at once blocked by the local Russian merchants, who began to clamor against Jewish competition, and forced the Government to recognize the monopoly of native "interests," to the detriment of the consumer.[253] True, the monopolists did not succeed altogether in shutting the Russian interior to foreign cheap goods and finery, which the Jewish merchants still continued to import, under the clause in the Statute of 1804 which granted Jews the right of visiting the interior Governments on special gubernatorial passports. Yet an untrammeled development of Jewish commerce was rendered impossible by this artificial barrier between Western and Eastern Russia. The second urban profession, handicrafts, was considered of lower rank than commerce. It was pursued by the poorest class of the population. Artisan labor commanded very low prices. Purely Jewish trade-unions were rare, and when a Jewish artisan summoned enough courage to leave his native townlet and seek employment in a large city, he was sure to encounter the animosity of the organized Christian guilds. We have seen that before the second partition of Poland such an "encounter" assumed the shape of a pogrom in the Polish capital.[254] By the side of the store and the workshop stood the public house or saloon, which was generally connected with an inn or a hostelry. The sale of liquor in the cities depended primarily on the peasants arriving from the villages on festival and market days. On the whole the liquor traffic occupied a subordinate place in the cities. Its mainstay was in the villages.