=9. In Russia and Poland.=――The two and a half million Jews who are to be found at the present day in these wide and but semi-civilised territories, are still unhappily circumstanced. The ignorance and fanaticism of the native population, and the unintelligent policy of the governing classes, combine to make the position of the Jews a painful and a precarious one. Little progress has been made in the last hundred years. Many of the ‘blunders worse than crimes’ of the Middle Ages seem to lead a charmed life in Russia and in Russian Poland, and to be proof against the educating and humanising influences of these latter days. Jews are still confined to mean trades for their sole occupation, and are separate in dress and in social usage from their neighbours. Numberless legal restrictions are in force, which practically shut out Russian and Polish Jews from any worthy ambition, and condemn them to seek inglorious ends by sordid means. In spite, however, of ‘ukase’ after ‘ukase’ conceived in this ‘Middle Age’ spirit, the Jews are struggling upward in the old good fashion to the light, and a society for the promotion of education, which, since 1870, has been established at St. Petersburg, is helping them much in their efforts to rise. =10. In Danubian Provinces.=――At the beginning of this century the persecutions in Russia caused a number of Jews to emigrate to those States on the Danube which, by the treaty of Berlin in 1878, at which Lord Beaconsfield presided, received a recognition of independence from the European Powers. The emancipation of the Jewish inhabitants of these provinces was a condition of the treaty, a condition which the conduct of the refugees since their settlement has fully justified. The Jewish immigrants rapidly multiplied, and their intelligence, industry, sobriety, and loyalty bore down prejudice, and won them friends. Of these Danubian states, Servia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro have honestly observed their part of the compact, but Roumania has distinguished itself by its systematic disregard of it――an attitude the more ignorantly ungrateful since, in the Roumanian war of independence, the Jewish Roumanians were among the bravest and staunchest of the soldiery.