I have presented to you, reader, a man of deep culture, known and respected in the highest circles, and yet inseparably connected with his race and religion, and ready to offer his life for their welfare; a man who worked with might and main for others at the sacrifice of his own comfort and advancement; an orator whose exalted phrases shattered the pillars and foundations of ignorance and superstition; a hero who in time of peril was proof against the arrows and missiles of the enemy, and who did not relax his hand from the flag. But what was the fruit he reaped? Mostly ingratitude and persecution, a heart lacerated with despair, a soul writhing under the pangs of frustrated hopes. Such a personality with its fine shades, and with the poetry of the artist superimposed, would afford splendid material for the hero of a novel--a hero to captivate the eye and heart of the reader by his nobility and grandeur.[15] For a long time Russian officialdom discussed the question, whether the establishment of exclusively Jewish schools would prove beneficial, but nobody doubted the efficacy of rabbinical seminaries. Yet it was these latter institutions that evoked the strongest protests from the Jews. The advocates of Haskalah gradually came to recognize the truth, which Lilienthal admitted afterwards, that for a Russian rabbi a thorough knowledge of the Talmud was absolutely indispensable. But it was with the object of discouraging such knowledge that the seminaries had been suggested by Uvarov, and it was this study that was almost entirely ignored in them. What congregation, many of whose members were profound Talmudists, would accept a rabbi to whom unvocalized Hebrew was a snare and a stumbling-block? Moreover, the whole atmosphere of the seminaries was Christian, nay, military. Not a few members of their faculties or boards of governors were discharged police officers or superannuated soldiers, and at the head of the seminary in Vilna, the metropolis of Russian Jewry, stood an apostate Jew! They became, as it were, infirmaries of the bureaucracy, where, at the expense of the Jews, it could stow away anyone who had proved a failure or was no longer useful. The Government also undertook to provide the graduates with positions, patronage which rendered the students insolently independent of their coreligionists, and encouraged some of them to indulge in a _modus vivendi_ distasteful to their future flocks. The graduates, therefore, proved failures as rabbis, and the Government was forced to provide for them by appointing them as teachers.[16]