This flunkeyish notion of the necessity of deserving civil rights coincided with the views of the official Polish Committee in Warsaw.  Soon afterwards a memorandum, prepared by the Committee, was submitted through its Chairman, Count Chartoryski, to the Polish viceroy Zayonchek. [1] Formerly a comrade of Koszciuszko, Zayonchek later turned from a revolutionary into a reactionary, who was anxious to curry favor with the supreme commander of the province, Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich. [2] No wonder, therefore, that the plan of the Committee, conservative though it was, seemed too liberal for his liking.  In his report to Emperor Alexander I., dated March 8, 1816, he wrote as follows: 

[Footnote 1:  He was appointed viceroy in 1815, after the formation of the Kingdom of Poland, and continued in this office until his death in 1826.]

[Footnote 2:  He was the military commander of the province.  See above, p. 13, n. 2.]

The growth of the Jewish population in your Kingdom of Poland is becoming a menace.  In 1790 they formed here a thirteenth part of the whole population; to-day they form no less than an eighth.  Sober and resourceful, they are satisfied with little; they earn their livelihood by cheating, and, owing to early marriages, multiply beyond measure.  Shunning hard labor, they produce nothing themselves, and live only at the expense of the working classes which they help to ruin.  Their peculiar institutions keep them apart within the state, marking them as a foreign nationality, and, as a result, they are unable in their present condition to furnish the state either with good citizens or with capable soldiers.  Unless means are adopted to utilize for the common weal the useful qualities of the Jews, they will soon exhaust all the sources of the national wealth and will threaten to surpass and suppress the Christian population.

In the same year, 1816, a scheme looking to the solution of the Jewish question was proposed by the Russian statesman Nicholas Novosiltzev, the imperial commissioner attached to the Provincial Government in Warsaw.[1] Novosiltzev, who was not sympathetic to the Poles, showed himself in his project to be a friend of the Jews.  Instead of the principle laid down by the official Committee:  “correction first, and civil rights last,” he suggests another more liberal procedure:  the immediate bestowal of civil and in part even political rights upon the Jews, to be accompanied by a reorganization, of Jewish life along the lines of European progress and a modernized scheme of autonomy.  All communal and cultural affairs shall be put in charge of “directorates,” one central directorate in Warsaw and local ones in every province of the Kingdom, after the pattern of the Jewish consistories of France.  These directorates shall be composed of rabbis, elders of the community, and a commissioner representing the Government; in the central directorate this commissioner shall be replaced by a “procurator” to be appointed directly by the king.