Immediately before the war the struggle had assumed its bitterest form—that of an unrelenting boycott waged against the Jews. When the war broke out the political status of the Poles changed overnight. Both the Russian and the German armies found it politic to cultivate the good will of the Polish population. Many Poles seized the opportunity to gratify personal animosity, religious bigotry or chauvinistic mania by denouncing the Jews, now to the one invader and now to the other, as spies and traitors. In Germany the animus of the attacks was to some extent uncovered and the lies refuted. But in Russia they found fertile soil. The Russian military machine had met with defeat at the hands of the Germans. To exonerate themselves in the eyes of their own people the military camarilla eagerly seized the pretext so readily furnished them by the Poles and unloaded the burden of their ill-fortune upon the helpless shoulders of the Jew. Men, women, even children were executed without the shadow of evidence or the formality of a trial. Circumstantial stories of Jewish treachery, invented by the Poles, were accepted as the truth and circulated freely through the Russian press and on the local government bulletin boards; but when official investigation proved these stories false in every particular, the publication of the refutation was discouraged by the censorship. The authorities gave the troops a free hand to loot and ravage, even encouraging them by the publication of orders which officially denounced all Jews as spies and traitors. The result was a series of outrages unprecedented even in Russia. A million Jews were driven from their homes in a state of absolute destitution. Protest of Liberal Russia All of the liberal elements of Russia protested against this campaign of extermination, but were powerless in the face of the military Government. Hundreds of municipal bodies, trade and professional organizations, writers, publicists and priests, petitioned the civil government to admit the Jews to human equality or at least to suspend its policy of persecution. These memorials, together with the speeches delivered in the Duma, constitute a body of evidence from non-Jewish sources, which must condemn the Russian Government in the eyes of the world. (See pages 70–83; 117–120.) GALICIA