We thus see that the Poles scattered in the eastern section of Germany constitute the largest foreign-speaking element in the Empire’s population. Their number is estimated by Niederle at 3,450,000. German census returns for 1900 give 3,086,489. The percentage of Jews in German Poland is high, particularly in the urban areas. The practice of census-takers is to classify them with the German or Polish population according to their vernacular. In Russia the last (1897) available census figures report the existence of 1,267,194 Jews[112] scattered throughout the Polish provinces. This represents 13.48 per cent of the population of Russian Poland. Here, as elsewhere, they are rarely engaged in agricultural pursuits but show a tendency to invade prosperous towns and cities.[113] The Polish Jews, speaking a vernacular of their own, and conscious of the advantage derived from their number, live apart from the Poles, with whom they are generally at odds on economic questions. The presence of this racially alien element has often assisted Russian administrators in their policy of holding Polish urban populations well in hand by pitting one people against the other. Jewish parties wield considerable influence in the local politics of Polish cities. They are openly anti-Slavic and side with the German inhabitants, from whom they receive guidance regarding policy and conduct. The strength of the Polish vote was felt in the 1912 elections for the Duma when Lodz sent a Jewish representative to the national council, while in Warsaw where they form 38 per cent of the population they succeeded in forcing the election of a Polish socialist who in that same year had failed to obtain a majority of the city’s Polish votes. The confinement of Jews within the pale of Poland dates from the time of the first partition, when an edict signed by Catherine II was proclaimed, forbidding them to emigrate from the annexed territory into Russia proper. Since then every succeeding Russian monarch maintained this policy of segregation until, at the time of Poland’s last partition, the ten governments into which the unfortunate nation was divided became the only territory in which the Jews were tolerated. This arrangement was made largely because of the Jew’s well-known aptitude for commerce and through fear that the unsophisticated and large-hearted Russian mujik was no match for him. The state of Poland prior to its dismemberment made such measures imperative for the Russian government. The Poles were either landowners, tillers of the soil or soldiers. Few engaged in trade. The country’s commerce was in the hands of Germans or Jews. Poland’s weakness in the presence of foreign aggression was due to this state of economic inferiority, no less than to her lack of natural frontiers on the east and west.