3-052-522 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Polish Jews driving to market: a sketch on the Polish Russian frontier, 1880. 'A Sketch by our Artist in Russia, or rather on the borders of Russian Poland, shows a two-horse cart of rustic appearance, closely packed with eager merchants of country wares and commodities for the use of the peasantry, one and all belonging to the Hebrew race, who carry on most of the inland trade in those parts of the Czar's dominions. They are travelling to the next market-town, where they will buy and sell to a considerable profit, as the Jews never fail to do in Russia, if in any country of the world. The comparative absence, however, of a numerous and active commercial class among the true Russian population, as well as among the Poles and other Slavonic nations, has often been remarked. There is such a class, indeed, but it is not equally diffused over the country. The whole of European Russia, excluding Poland, Lithuania, the Baltic provinces, and Finland, contains but a hundred and twenty-seven towns, of which only twenty-five have so many as 25,000 inhabitants; and it is computed that the townsfolk are not more than a tenth of the population'. From "Illustrated London News", 1880.