But here they encountered furious opposition on the part of their Christian fellow-residents. In the two White Russian Governments of Vitebsk and Moghilev several Jews had been elected to the magistracies as aldermen and members of the law courts. But in the majority of cases the Christians managed to obtain an artificial majority and keep the Jews out of the municipal administration. Complaints lodged with the central authorities in St. Petersburg were of no avail, for the Russian, and even more so the Polish, burghers regarded the bestowal of municipal rights upon the Jews as a violation of their own chartered privileges. Yielding to this mood of the Christian population, the administrators of the southwestern Governments established on their own responsibility a restrictive percentage for the participation of Jews in the magistracies, by limiting, even in places with a predominatingly Jewish population, the number of Jewish members to be elected to the magistracies to one-third. The representatives of the Jewish majority of the population in the city administration were thus invariably reduced to a minority, and were not in a position to protect the interests of their coreligionists, either in the assessment of the municipal taxes or in the cases brought before the municipal law courts. Here, too, the protest addressed to St. Petersburg by a delegate acting on behalf of the Podolian Jews did not remedy the situation. In the two Lithuanian Governments which had fallen into the hands of Russia after the third partition of Poland, in 1795, the Christian opposition scored even a greater success. For here it became necessary to suspend altogether the operation of the law granting the Jews representation in the magistracies. When the Senatorial ukase of 1802, making the Jews eligible for public office, became known in Vilna, the local Christian population raised a cry of indignation. The Philistine arrogance of the old "city fathers," combined with the low motives of religious and class hatred, manifested itself in a petition addressed in February, 1803, by the Christian burghers of Vilna to Alexander I. In this petition the residents of Vilna protest against the violation of their ancient privilege, in pursuance of which "Jews and members of other faiths are forbidden to hold office" in Lithuania. The admission of Jews to the magistracies is a misfortune and a disgrace for the capital of Lithuania, for they [the Jews] have not the slightest conception of morality, while their form of education does not fit them for the calling of a judge, and altogether this people can only maintain itself by all kinds of trickery.... The Christians will lose all interest in accepting public office once the Jews are given the right to dominate them.