The hatred towards the Jew is shared by the Russian’s enemy, the Pole, and for similar reasons--economic preponderance and excessive addiction to usury and the trade in liquor. In 1863 the revolutionary Government of Poland endeavoured to enlist the sympathies of the Jews in the struggle against the common oppressor by conceding to them civic equality. The experiment was crowned with brilliant success. Justice turned the Jews of Poland into Polish patriots. But the reconciliation did not outlive the revolution. After that short spell of liberty the ancient prejudice revived, and now, though legally the Jews of Poland are still Polish citizens, the Catholics of Poland, encouraged by their Orthodox tyrants of Russia, vie with them in their fierce contempt for the race which stood their common fatherland in so good stead in the hour of its need. How intense this feeling is, may be seen from the following account by an English eye-witness: “To the Jew in Warsaw is meted out a wealth of disfavour and contempt that is hardly pleasant to witness. The British stranger, however, who normally lives far from any personal contact with these huge Jewish populations, is not altogether in a position to pass judgment on this deeply-seated anti-Semitic rancour. It pervades all classes of Polish society, and finds expression in a variety of ways. The youth who obligingly performs my minor marketing for me, in return for a tolerant attitude on my part on the subject of small change, was interested in the fate of an egg which I had pronounced to have passed the age limit of culinary usefulness. “‘Don’t throw it away,’ he begged; ‘give it to me.’ “‘What do you want it for?’ “‘Oh, it will do to throw at a Jew.’”[177] One exception to the mutual antipathy which divides the Jew of Poland from his Gentile fellow-countryman is offered by the upper class of the Jews of Warsaw. While the masses of the nation, cut-off from all but commercial intercourse with their Christian neighbours, live huddled together in separate quarters, fed on the traditions of the past, and observing, in dress, diet and deportment, the ordinances of the Talmud in all their ancient strictness, a small minority of their cultured brethren has overstepped the narrow limits of orthodox Judaism and identified itself in all things, save creed, with the Poles, whose national aspirations it shares and with whom it does not even shrink from intermarrying occasionally. But this reconciliation is confined to that infinitesimal class which, thanks to its wealth, is free from persecution, and in temperament, sentiment, and ideas belongs to the most advanced section of Occidental Jews rather than to the Jewry of Eastern Europe. Besides, it is a reconciliation strenuously opposed by the Russian authorities which, while inciting the Poles against the Jews, encourage the Jews to cling to their exclusiveness and to resist all Polish national aspirations as alien to them.