I have no faith in a Polish kingdom. There may be a Polish revolution to-morrow, perhaps, when the Russians shall meet defeat in eastern Asia, as the Russian patriots hope, but a Polish kingdom there will never be. It is quite apparent how the influence of the times is changing the entire social structure of the people. No nation can maintain itself without a middle class, and Poland still has no middle class. The material for such a class, the strong Jewish population, has been so ground down that a half-century would not be sufficient for its restoration and the Russian régime of to-day is disposed to anything rather than to the uplifting and the education of the Polish Jewry. It is stated that there are in Warsaw a quarter of a million Jews, a few well-to-do people among them, who have hastened, for the most part, to transform themselves into "Poles of the Mosaic faith," without disarming thereby the clerical anti-Semitism of the Polish people, and innumerable beggars or half-beggars, who are designated in western Europe as "schnorrer." And of these there are in Warsaw an unknown number. It is hard to draw the line between the "schnorrer" and the "Luftmensch" (a man without any certain source of income), who has not yet resigned himself to beggary, and yet cannot tell in the morning whence he is to draw his sustenance at noon. These include artisans, sweat-shop workers, agents, and go-betweens, a city proletariat of the very worst kind. I have seen no such shocking misery in the Jewish quarters on the Moldau as I encountered in the brilliant capital Warsaw. The Polish Jew, everywhere despised and unwelcome, is the wandering poverty-witness of Polish mismanagement. A system that succeeds in depraving the sober, pious, and sexually disciplined orthodox Jew to the extent observed in a portion of the Jewish Polish proletariat should be accorded recognition as the most useless system on the face of the earth. In the last analysis it was the Polish "schlachtzitz," and the Polish clerical going hand-in-hand with him, that constituted the prime cause of all the miseries of the nineteenth century.
And yet, to be just, one should compare this cheerless Polish-Jewish proletariat with its immediate environment--the Polish peasants and the common people. Here one would still find a plus of virtues on the Jewish side. The wretched Polish peasant is not more cleanly than the Jew. On the contrary, he lives in the same room with his pig, and no ritual requirement compels him to wash his body at least once a week. The Jew, under his patched garment, is for the most part comparatively clean, only hopelessly stunted and emaciated. The Jew does not drink, while his "master," the Pole, has a kindly disposition towards all sorts of spirituous liquors. Also, the modesty of the Jewish women has yielded but lately to the pressure of endless misery or the temptations of the cities, while of the higher classes of Polish and Russian society but little of an exemplary character has been told. And finally: