Six weeks afterwards a body, which was sworn to be that of Esther Solymosi, was found in the river Theiss. It was dressed in her clothes, and identified by means of a peculiar scar. It was pretended that the body of another person had been dressed in Esther’s clothes, in order to frustrate inquiry. But the case broke down, and the Jews were fully acquitted. The verdict was accompanied by an official declaration that the oft-repeated charge made against the Jews, of using Christian blood in their services, is a baseless calumny. But the popular outcry with which the acquittal was received shows how deeply seated the prejudice of the Hungarian people on this subject still is. The inquiry, in fact, revealed a mass of ignorance, prejudice, and uncharity which would have been bad enough in the twelfth century, but which in the nineteenth is almost incredible. The lower classes, indeed, are, in most European countries, still steeped in ignorance. But what are we to think of men of education—mayors, commissioners of police, lawyers holding high offices—who could believe that the Jews made use of Christian blood in the performance of their religious rites? What are we to think of a public prosecutor who could declare that the Jews wanted Christian blood, and could not have wanted it except for ritual purposes? It is an astonishing instance of how far inveterate prejudice can influence the minds of even educated men.[226] In Russia, as has been before remarked, the number of the Jews is greater, and the treatment they experience more harsh, than in any other country in the world. From Russia proper—‘Holy Russia,’ as it is styled—they have been for many generations excluded, nor are they by the law allowed to remain there now. The law is often evaded, and great misery frequently results from it. Some idle or malicious story gains currency, and stirs the populace to a fierce fanatical outbreak, in which pillage, outrage, and massacre are perpetrated on a large scale; or else the authorities are suddenly stirred up to a real or pretended zeal for the vindication of the law, and thousands of Jewish families are all at a moment required to emigrate from the country. In 1846, the Czar Nicholas issued a new ukase, requiring all Jews who dwelt within five-and-thirty miles of the German and Austrian frontier to remove into the interior. The ground alleged for this edict was, that large quantities of goods had been smuggled across the frontier. The English Board of Deputies, among whom were Montefiore and Rothschild, laid a statement before Lord Aberdeen, then Foreign Minister, pointing out the terrible suffering and ruin which this measure would occasion. Lord Aberdeen pleaded their cause with the emperor, who was induced to suspend his ukase, at first for three years, and after that again for four more. Finding that he could not succeed in obtaining its entire revocation, Montefiore made a personal expedition to St. Petersburg, where he was kindly received