Under the system of propinacja in Poland, dating from the Middle Ages, the landlord had the sole right to distil and sell alcohol and continued to have this right even after the Partitions of the eighteenth century. It was abolished in Prussia in 1845, in Galicia in 1889 and in Russian Poland only in 1898. Normally the agent of the szlachcic in the sale of alcohol was a Jew. Under this system the landlord could dispose of part of the grain harvest in the form of alcohol and thus cream off from the peasantry such money as they might earn on their own account. The implication was that he and the Jewish innkeeper had an interest in encouraging the consumption of alcohol and thus of acting in the worst interests of the peasants. In addition, the innkeeper could give credit for those periods when the peasants did not possess money and thus obtain an additional income from the interest he charged on the debts incμrred. This was a situation which the reformers of the eighteenth century deplored as a social evil. In his Przestrogi dla Polski, published in 1790, Stanislaw Staszic had written that ‘aside from lawless serfdom, Jews are the second great cause of laziness, stupidity, drunkenness and poverty among the peasants.’ This was an attitude which a political thinker could adopt in search for measures to reform the Polish Commonwealth. In the nineteenth century, writers tended to look at society as it was. Opalski's book, the fourth in a series of works from the Center for Research on the History and Culture of Polish Jews, does not examine the problem from an economic point of view, but, as the title states, analyzes the attitudes of Polish authors to the role of Jewish innkeepers in the Polish countryside. Her view is that nineteenth-century fiction tended to be silent about the role of the noble in using the tavern as a means of exploiting the peasantry. They accepted the fact that the Jewish innkeeper in fact was part of the community. Often it is difficult to draw a distinction between myth and reality. The innkeeper is sometimes represented as being on the fringe of society, having connections with crime and smuggling.