When I reached Odessa, after travelling over the peculiarly desolate steppe from Kieff, only about eleven weeks had passed since she celebrated an amazing festival of liberty. Her straight streets had laughed for joy, and the old Black Sea had reflected the smile. Youths paraded with flags and trumpets, aged professors embraced in tears, and women, as on a Russian Easter Day, felt hurt if they were not kissed—all because the Tsar had issued a manifesto and freedom had risen into life. The long struggle was surely near its end, and those who had fallen for the cause had not died in vain.

Two days later they buried freedom, and whilst I was there the Government was still busy stamping down the bloody earth to lay her ghost. There was no longer any talk of manifesto or concession. Every promise had been falsified, and every hope deceived. No meetings were allowed, except to legal Hooligans. No papers could appear, except the Government organ of violence. Even the paper of the Constitutional Democrats had been suddenly suppressed. The friends of liberty choked the prisons, and as I went down the streets I saw their white faces peering between the bars. All was still, except when the stagnation of tyranny was broken by the murder of some police-officer conspicuous for brutality, or by a bomb such as had just fallen into the Café Liebmann on the central square by the cathedral. No schools had been open since October, and there seemed no prospect of the University ever opening again.

Trepoff began it when he sent an order from St. Petersburg urging the Governor-General Neidhart to allow a demonstration of the loyalist Black Hundred on November 1st. Infuriated by religious conviction and the lust for stolen goods, the Black Hundred exhibited an enthusiastic loyalty, unchecked by the police, who directed their movements, or by the troops, who were confined to barracks. For three days the city lay at the mercy of law and order, and in the cemetery may be seen the oblong of loose earth where 350 bodies were heaped into a common grave. The Government’s victory was complete and so far-reaching that memorials of it might still be seen on every side. Even in the middle of the town, shops that had been the richest had the shutters up in January, their windows were broken to pieces, their stores all gone. And in the northern and north-west districts, where the Jews and some work-people live, whole rows of houses stood desolate. The marks of bullets were thick upon the walls. The empty sockets of the windows were roughly boarded over. The roofs had been broken in or sometimes burnt away, and even on the main streets people pointed out the windows, three storeys high, from which babies, girls, and women had been pitched sheer upon the stony pavement below.

It was in the miserable lanes of this north-west district that the plunder and slaughtering began—a district so wretched that my top-boots kept sticking in the deep slough of the streets, and the worst Jewish slum off Commercial Road would have seemed in comparison a County Council paradise. But passing beyond this quarter, I crossed a deep watercourse, and came out upon the kind of land which serves for country at the backdoor of Odessa. It is part of the wild and almost uninhabited steppe which stretches for mile on mile round the basin of the Dniester and far away into Bessarabia—an uninterrupted, water-worn plain, like the Orange River veldt, but streaked at that time with melting snow. On the edge of this steppe stands a semi-detached town or large village, called Slobodka Romanovka, conspicuous for its madhouse and its hospital. Providence itself must have ordained the site of these buildings, for nowhere else upon earth’s surface could they have been more wanted. And, indeed, it was the Chosen People of Providence who wanted them most, for none of the rabid Christians who there hunted them down were afterwards confined in the asylum for mania.

The village numbered about 26,000 souls, and there was hardly a house which did not still show the marks of wrecking and murder. Clubs were the weapons chiefly used by the champions of Christ and the Tsar—such clubs as the Turks used in Constantinople when they brained the Armenians in the name of the Prophet and the Sultan. But long butcher knives were found even more convenient for killing children, and when there was the least show of resistance, nothing could be more serviceable than a revolver at five yards’ range. In that three days’ massacre nearly all who suffered were Jews, and out of a population of about 600,000 in Odessa, the Jews are estimated at a little under or a little over 300,000, so that the game for the Christian sportsmen lay thick upon the ground.

The Jews of Odessa are said by their Christian neighbours—even by such as restrained themselves from putting them to death—to represent a particularly unpleasant type. They are accused of peculiar selfishness, greediness, and indifference to suffering, even to their own. I cannot say for certain whether that is so. I only know that they have a particularly unpleasant time, and, whether indifferent to their own sufferings or not, they are an amazing people. Their Christian neighbours, as in Kieff and all centres of Jewish persecution, chalk a conspicuous cross on their shutters in dangerous times, or stick a sixpenny saint’s portrait over the door. Most people also, as I noticed in Moscow, wear big crosses hidden round their necks, so that, when the supporters of the Government are out cutting throats, they may have some chance of salvation. No Jew would do any such thing—not for dear life itself would he do it. Christians say he could not conceal himself, even if he wished—his look, his dwelling, his passport, the police, all would betray him. And no doubt that is true, though, if I were a Jew, I would cover my house with crosses from ground to roof in the hope of saving any one I cared for from being flung out of my top window. But, even if such hope were vain, that is no reason why a Jew should cover his outside shutters and the lintel of his door with Hebrew inscriptions or Hebrew information about his Kosher goods and the Shomer who is in attendance. Yet on ruin after ruin I saw these inscriptions written; and, what is more remarkable, I saw the surviving owners repainting these inscriptions as they patched up the wreckage of their homes.

They are not, perhaps, exactly the race I should call chosen, but certainly they are a peculiar people. I saw, for instance, one aged type of wretched Israel who had been counted a prosperous man, but in the massacre had lost wife, family, ducats, and all. When his seed was buried and the days of the mourning passed, he borrowed a few cigarettes, and sat down on the pavement outside the wilderness of his habitation. Next day he had more cigarettes to sell. Next week he had a stall, and when I saw him he was hoping to open a tobacconist shop where before he sold secondhand clothes and saw his family murdered. It seems impossible that all the Christians in Russia, backed as they are by the open support of the army, police, and Church, can ever succeed in exterminating such a race.

But for the time their misery was extreme. They had crowded for refuge into courts which ran far back from the ordinary streets—something like the old “rents” in Holborn. There I found them living in stinking and steaming rooms or cellars, and often I had to grow accustomed to the darkness before I could discern exactly how many families were accommodated in the corners. The assistant of one of the University professors was my guide, for a certain amount of relief work was being carried on by such Liberals as happened to be still out of gaol. I was told the town had already spent £15,000 in relief, and the Zemstvo had voted as much again to keep the distressed alive till the end of April. I dimly heard, also, of a fund contributed by Jews in England, but I did not discover their methods. As to the town fund, I could not be certain how much of it reached the Jews, but some did, for with an agent I visited one of the ten “sanitary districts” into which the town had been divided, and saw how he dealt with the cases.

Money had been given at first, but, as usual, imposture came, and the professors had found themselves no match for a race whose whole weekday existence is devoted to gathering where they have not strown. Later on, the town bound itself only to feed the destitute by a system of free tickets, or at a very small charge. It was the ordinary soup-kitchen method—not scientific, not inhumanly discriminating; but Russia has the happiness of being young in philanthropy, as in politics, and has not yet developed the caution of our charity societies, which in their strained quality are so little like mercy. As was to be expected, crowds of the unemployed came wandering in from other towns, even as far away as Kharkoff and Kieff; and under the passport system most of them were routed out and sent back again. What was worse, some 15,000 men and women had lately been turned upon the streets because the rich people of Odessa, who live in the pleasant quarter by the cliffs overlooking the sea, began to run for their lives that day in June when the mutinous warship Potemkin made them all jump by throwing two shells into the town near the cathedral; and they had been running ever since. Behind them they left all that host of valets, cooks, nurses, housemaids, grooms, coachmen, gardeners, boot-boys, barbers, and washerwomen who depend on the rich for existence, just as the rich depend on them. The shopkeepers who sell the things that only rich people can buy suffered equally, and many of their assistants were dismissed. It is bad for all when, according to the old parable, the members refuse to feed the belly, and it is worse when the belly runs away from the members. But if any one supposes on that account that the expenditure of the rich confers an inestimable benefit upon the working classes, he is involved in a very comfortable old fallacy.

Beside all this, there was great distress among the dockers, in spite of the considerable share of Jewish wealth which they had obtained in their outburst of religious and patriotic zeal. Most of it went in an immense drinking debauch to celebrate the victory over the enemies of Christ, and work had ceased because the great fire during the mutiny in June destroyed a great part of the docks, and entirely burnt away the wooden viaduct upon which the dock railway runs along the whole face of the port. One day when I was there, trial trains began to run for the first time, amid such popular excitement that I hoped another mutiny had broken out. But no warships were any longer stationed in the port, except one little destroyer. The dockers were only excited at the prospect of regular work. They live by themselves at the foot of the cliffs, below the fashionable boulevard, and they are said to be in every way a race apart. Certainly they adopt a distinctive costume, more astonishing in its incongruity than a West Coast chiefs, and suggesting a burlesque air of intentional raggedness, like an amateur who wants to look Bohemian. The dockers, however, have no need for deliberation in picturesque poverty, for the average wages of unskilled labour through the city is 1s. 8d. for a day of ten hours, or 2d. an hour. And it is not as though 2d. in Russia went as far as the “honest tanner” for which our own dockers struggled so hard in the early nineties. Ordinary living is very expensive in Odessa, more expensive even than in most Russian cities, and in an earlier chapter I noticed how strangely high the cost of living is in St. Petersburg and Moscow, chiefly owing to the heavy rent charges, in spite of the vast extent of unfilled and unoccupied land in the Empire. Except for the hire of street sledges and little open cabs, two shillings in Russia do not go much further than one in London, nor twopence to an Odessa docker much further than a penny in Poplar. No one can dress very sumptuously when he has to feed himself and family on a penny an hour, and we cannot wonder that the unskilled join the party of law and order, in the hope that an occasional massacre will bring a change of clothes.

In politics, Odessa included all the Russian parties, from the rival pioneers of Social Revolution and Social Democracy (most of whom were in gaol) down to the “Russian Order,” or party of violence, which is the Government’s ready instrument for the destruction of Jews, Poles, Liberals, and other heretics. The Russian Order alone was still allowed to hold meetings, every other party organization being forbidden by the police. But, nevertheless, it was in Odessa that I first became intimate with the Constitutional Democratic party, which has since grown to such importance as a possible instrument for reform. They were especially strong in the University, which justly prides itself on its political fearlessness. Their newspapers and all meetings had been suppressed; but most of the Professors and other leaders were still at large, though daily awaiting arrest, with enviable unconcern.

They were energetically preparing the first grade of elections for the Duma, and they expected to secure a majority upon the body, who in turn would select the single representative appointed for the great city in the Duma. Like other Progressive parties, they demanded a Constituent Assembly under the four-headed suffrage (universal, direct, secret, and equal). Their programme included Home Rule for the various nationalities of the Empire, labour legislation, and a sweeping agrarian reform on the basis of compensation for private land, but not for the Crown lands held by the Imperial family. In fact, their immediate objects, as the Professors admitted, were hardly to be distinguished from the “minimum programme” of the Social Democrats. But when we began to talk about “immediate objects” and “minimum programmes,” I remembered that seven weeks had gone by since such conversations seemed natural—seven weeks of bloodshed and suppression and bitter change. They themselves took the mournful difference very calmly. The fight was still in front of them, every hope had been crushed, every effort for freedom would have to begin again from the very start. But nothing discouraged them; the mere struggle was worth the pains; and to this patient people even the bitterest and most cruel experience never ceases to work hope.

But, after all, the Jewish question is the centre of political interest in Odessa, and, in spite of all suppression, the Jewish “Bund” is likely to remain the most powerful progressive organization as long as the Jews continue subject to their hereditary wrongs. Under laws which were called temporary, but have continued unrepealed for fifty years, no Jew may buy land or rent it. He may not live out in the country, and only in certain quarters of the towns. He may not be a schoolmaster or professor. He may not teach in private Christian families. He may not be educated at a high school (gymnasium) or at a University, except at a very low percentage of the whole number of students. Usually it is not higher than three to five per cent., though in Odessa the Professors, being exceptionally Liberal, had on their own authority extended the number to ten per cent., and were on the point of declaring the University open on level terms to Jew and Christian alike, when the University was suddenly shut on level terms to all. A Jew may not sit on the Zemstvo or Town Council; he may not be an officer in the army or navy; he may hold no State appointment; and he must not move from place to place without special permission and a special form of passport, like the prostitutes. Jews are not by nature a revolutionary people. The rigid Conservatism of their customs and ritual, as well as their intense pre-occupation in material gain, deters them from violence and change. Their peculiar dangers lie in exactly the opposite direction—in disregard of the large issues before mankind, and in a narrow devotion to antiquated ideals. But we cannot wonder that in Odessa, as in Russia generally, they are revolutionists almost to a man, and that to the ordinary Russian official or soldier a Jew of the “Bund” is identical with the “Anarchist”—a creature to be shot as quickly as convenient. When I was in Odessa I first heard how the new Aliens Act was being put into operation in England, and as I read of Jewish refugees cast back from the ancient protection of our country to the misery and bloodshed from which they believed they had escaped, I thought of these things.