The petitioners point out threateningly that the domination of the Jews, _i. e._ their participation in the magistracies, though it be limited to one-third of the number of aldermen, will undermine the people's confidence in the municipal administration and judiciary. "For the obedience of the mob will be turned into defamation when the Christian who enters the sacred place [of justice] beholds a Jew as his superior and judge, submission to whom is unnatural, by reason of class and religion." The Christian population of Kovno resorted, in presenting a similar petition, to another incontrovertible argument against the admission of Jews to municipal offices. Referring to the cross with the "sacred figure" of the crucifixion, which is placed on the court table for the administration of the oath, the petitioners assert that the Jewish members of the court "will refuse to look upon it, but, by reason of their faith, will think disrespectfully of it, so that, instead of judicial impartiality, there will be mockery of the Christian law." The Government found these arguments convincing, and in 1805 repealed the ukase of the Senate concerning the election of Jews to the magistracies of Lithuania. In this way the stolid rancor of the "privileged" burghers in some places handicapped the activity of the Jews in the city administration, and in others entirely suppressed it. The Jewish communities, backward though they were, displayed sufficient civic courage to send their representatives to the camp of the enemy to work in common with him for the benefit of the whole urban population. But the narrow-minded burghers, who were thoroughly saturated with medieval prejudices, would not recognize the Jews as their fellow-townsmen. The Jews had to reckon with this coarse conservatism of the surrounding population. They were still able to fall back upon their own communal self-government, and, had their social energies been directed towards that end, the old Kahal autonomy, in spite of all Government restrictions, might to a certain extent have come into its own again. But another factor thwarted this revival--the deep rift in the Russian Jewish community, which began with the rise of Hasidism in the second half of the eighteenth century, and was an accomplished fact at the beginning of the nineteenth century. 2. THE HASIDIC SCHISM AND THE INTERVENTION OF THE GOVERNMENT