This extension of Jewish autonomy was a concession wrested from the Government by the force of circumstances, by the power of a compact population living a life of its own and refusing to efface itself to the point of merging with the surrounding population and fusing all its public interests with the affairs of the general city administration. Yet it was just this "municipalization" of the Jewish communities that the Russian Government had been aiming at for a long time. From the time of Catherine II. it cherished the thought of "destroying Jewish separateness," by forcing the Jews into the framework of the Russian class organization, particularly into the estates of the merchants and burghers. When, shortly after 1780, the Jews were accorded the hitherto unheard-of privilege of participating in the city government with the right of active and passive suffrage for the magistracies and municipal courts, the lawgivers of St. Petersburg were confident that Russian Jewry, in a transport of delight, would throw overboard its old Kahal autonomy, and eagerly coalesce with the Christian urban estates, to form a common municipal organization. But neither the Jews nor the Christians justified these confident expectations. The former, while clinging as heretofore to their time-honored communal organization, were glad to participate in the elections to the magistracies, in which up till then their traditional enemies, the Christian merchants and burghers, had been the masters, and in which they frankly proposed to protect their interests, representing as they did a considerable portion of the urban population.