For two years, the Beilis case provided the pabulum for a wild anti-Semitic campaign which was carried on among the so-called better classes, on the streets, in the press, and in the Imperial Duma. The court trial which took place in Kiev in October, 1913, was expected to crown with success the criminal design harbored by the Minister of Justice and the Black Hundred, but the expectations of the Government were disappointed. In spite of a carefully selected court personnel, which consisted of anti-Semitic judges representing the Crown, and of sworn jurymen, ignorant peasants and burghers who believed in the ritual murder legend, Beilis was acquitted, and the authorities found it impossible to fasten the guilt upon the Jews. Exasperated by the failure, the Government wreaked its vengeance upon the liberal-minded intellectuals and newspaper men, who, by their agitation against the hideous libel, had wrested the prey from the hands of the Black Hundred. Scores of legal actions were instituted not only against newspaper editors and contributors but also against the St. Petersburg Bar Association, which had adopted a resolution protesting against the method pursued by Shcheglovitov in the Beilis trial. The sensational case against the metropolitan lawyers was tried in June, 1914, one month before the declaration of the World War, and terminated in a verdict of guilty for twenty-five lawyers, on the charge of "having agitated against the Government." The triennium preceding the World War witnessed the rise of a new danger for Judaism, this time coming from Poland. The extraordinary intensity of the national and religious sentiment of the Poles, accentuated by the political oppression which for more than a hundred years had been inflicted upon them, particularly by the hands of Russian despotism, has, during the last decade, been directed against the Jewish people. The economic progress made by the Jews in the two industrial centers of Russian Poland, in Warsaw and Lodz, gave rise to the boycott agitation. Polish anti-Semites proclaimed the slogan "Do not buy from Jews!", aiming the cry specifically against the "Litvaks," that is, the hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews who, in the course of the last few decades, had been chiefly instrumental in the economic advancement of those two centers. The cloak beneath which this agitation was carried on was purely that of Polish nationalism: the Russian Jews were alleged, on the one hand, "to Russify Poland," and, accused, on the other hand, of an opposite tendency, of asserting themselves as the members of a separate Jewish nationality, with a press and a social organization of their own, which refuses to be merged in the Polish people.