The progressive elements of Russia were not in a mood to be reconciled to the duplicity of these enactments in which threats and concessions followed upon one another, or to the pettiness of the concessions in themselves. They took, however, full advantage of the permission to "lay" their views before the Government, and indulged in an avalanche of resolutions and declarations, demanding the substitution of a parliamentary system of government for the existing system of autocracy. The Jewish institutions joined in this general campaign. The oldest Jewish organization, the "Society for the Diffusion of Enlightenment Among the Jews," in St. Petersburg, at a meeting, held on February 27, adopted the following resolution:
The proper organization of Jewish education such as would be in keeping with the social and cultural peculiarities of the Jewish people, will only be possible when the Jews will be placed on a footing of complete equality of rights with the rest of the Russian population. As a firm guarantee of the untrammelled cultural development and the complete equality of all nationalities, it is necessary that the legislative power and the administrative control of the country shall have the co-operation of popular representatives, to be elected upon the basis of the universal, direct, and secret vote of all citizens of the country, without any distinction of nationality, denomination or calling.
The need of a non-partisan political organization to direct the struggle for Jewish emancipation which was to be waged by all classes of Jewry--outside the small fraction which had already been united in the labor organization of the "Bund"--was universally felt.
Such an organization was formed at the conference of public-spirited Jews which took place in Vilna at the end of March, 1905. It assumed the name of "The League for the Attainment of Equal Rights for the Jewish People in Russia," and proclaimed as its object "the realization to their full extent of the _civil, political, and national rights_ of the Jewish people in Russia." The complete civil emancipation of the Jews, the assurance of their proportionate participation in the Russian popular representation, "the freedom of national-cultural self-determination in all its manifestations," in the shape of "a comprehensive system of communal self-government, the freedom of language and school education"--such was the threefold program of the League.