yearly interest in these hypotecates 8,300,- 000 crowns. The same is also true with a great many of the "Szlachta." So there has been an indebtedness in large land owning:
1892 more than 31,000,000 crowns 1893 "" "" 43,000,000 "" 1894 "" "" 52,000,000 ""
This enormous indebtedness, especially on the part of the peasants, creates a state of things whose main feature is the deliverance of a great part of the yearly production into the hands of the idle classes, or to speak with political economists,the dissolution of a big amount of capital, that could serve for reproduction into idle and parasitic consumption. It takes away the opportunity from agriculture to meet the demands of modern development. It gives starvation. On the other side the agricultural production tends generally not towards the development of Galicia itself, but towards the development of the western provinces of Austria. Its values are usually turned into the sphere of Austrian industry and helps thus to increase the forces of the latter.
Galicia remains degenerated, down-trod-den, humiliated and crowded with povertywhile it helps to bring a state of prosperity into an alien country!
Economic Position OF THE Jews.
The first arrival of the Jews into Galicia can be traced baek to the epoch of Kasimir the Great, who invited them to settle and take the place of the desired middle class. Many large settlements have been built up since then by Jews, and nearly all interfunctions, those of the middleman, "factor" and petty trader in goods and money, taken by them. It must be borne in mind that in a country like Galicia, until now so rarely visited by king "steam" which has in its possession the smallest amount of means of transportation and exchange, that such a country was the most suitable place for the extension of an immense body of Jewish petty-traders and "factors." There was in Galicia—and is to a certain degree until now—no integral and wide country-market,
but rather as many markets as there are villages, cities and towns, each of them representing a separate and closed world of exchange with its own group of Jewish traders.
In the course of time with the beginnings of Austrian capitalism to step into the dominion of Galicia and to bring forth amidst its population the demand for new industrial products, there grew up among Galician Jews a new class, a class of middle and higher Bourgeoisie, whose mission became the transportation into Austria of the agricultural products of Galicia and the importation of the industrials of Austria. Thus to the old class of peddlers and petty traders, which hold in its hands the local internal markets was added a new one, a class of merchants that took into its hands the foreign market. And although these two classes did have on the surface opposing interests, no direct competition, each of them operating in its own sphere of distribution and exchange of commodities, there nevertheless sprang up an indirect competition, that found its expression in the development of railroads, carried by this intercourse of Galicia and Austria, and consequently in the defiance of a great many of the local markets. However, the number of those Jewish petty-traders and middlemen defeated by this process, was not of any great significance and value. The majority of this class remained rooted in the economic soil of Galicia and could not be nullified because of the village-character of the country. But there came new tendencies that took up the matter of destroying this class. Poverty and starvation had led the peasants to unite into leagues of consumers whose function consists in buying for the peasants all their wants and selling many of their products, as: eggs, butter, milk, meat, etc. The intercourse between production and consumption was thus and is furthermore taken up by the peasants themselves. In the year 1890 there were in Galicia 607 consumers's leagues; in the year 1896—1,220, and in 1900—3,000. That means, that in 1900 there were three thousand leagues, which fulfilled the former function of the Jewish