The results of these repressions and persecutions are known. Politically outlawed, socially and economically degraded, the Jewish population imprisoned in the Pale has festered in misery. The merchants have been obliged to resort to fearful competition. Workingmen, overcrowding their industries, have been compelled to work for starvation wages. Most of the Jewish homes in Russia are miserable hovels, with little air or light. In the great cities, the proportion of paupers approximates a fifth of the Jewish population. In Odessa in 1900, of a population of 150,000 Jews no less than 48,500 were supported by charity; 63 per cent. of the dead had pauper burials, and a further 20 per cent. were buried at the lowest possible rate. In the Governments of Ekaterinoslav, Bessarabia, Pietrikov, Chernigov and Siedlets, the number of charity cases at the Passover festival increased from 41.9 per cent. to 46.8 per cent. in four years. THE OUTBREAK OF THE WAR It was against this background of ever-spreading persecution and misery that the great war broke upon the Jews. They accepted it as loyal Russian citizens, and not without hope that it might lead to some improvement in their own conditions. The Kehillas (communities) of Petrograd, Odessa and other cities officially sent large sums in gold for the reservists, established hospitals for the use of the wounded without distinction of race or creed, held great patriotic demonstrations in the synagogues, at which the Rabbis urged the Jewish youth to render their full share of military service, and in other ways, presented, as the Mayor of Odessa said, “an example of readiness to sacrifice everything for the army.” The spirit of the Jews of Russia at the outbreak of the war is well expressed in the appeal which the Jewish community of Vilna, the oldest in Russia, at the very heart of the Pale, issued in connection with the establishment of a military hospital: