The charge most frequently brought against the Jews by the Russian people is, as has been shown, their aversion from productive labour, and their exclusive attachment to traffic in goods and money. The Russian Government some years ago attempted to remove the grievance by affording to the Jews facilities for the pursuit of agriculture. In seven out of the fifteen provinces open to the Jews, efforts were made to form Jewish agricultural settlements. But they do not seem to have been attended by conspicuous success. Towards the end of 1903 an inquiry instituted into the matter elicited conflicting answers. Three of the seven reports, drawn up by provincial Governors, are altogether discouraging. It is pointed out that the Jewish peasant shirks the hard work of tilling the soil and only helps to reap the produce. In one province, the official document asserts, sixty per cent. of the Jews have already abandoned the settlement and turned to the more congenial pursuits of commerce and industry. Another report draws an unfavourable comparison between the Jewish and the Christian farmer, and repeats the opinion that the former takes little interest in the culture of the soil, preferring less laborious occupations. All three reports agree in showing that the experiment of making a husbandman of the Hebrew is a complete failure. On the other hand, we find a fourth Governor maintaining that in his province the only difference between a Christian and a Jewish agriculturist consists in their respective religions. A fifth, while admitting the Jew’s practical ill-success, attributes it to the smallness of his farm, which forces him to give up agriculture as profitless, and he adds that under favourable conditions the results have been not disappointing. The Governor of Kherson states that, though at first the Jews evinced little inclination to turn to the land, upon the revision and improvement of the original conditions, the settlements became more popular; so that in 1898 seventy-three per cent. of the Jewish population were exclusively devoted to agriculture, nineteen per cent. varied the monotony of farming by the combination of trade, while only eight per cent. were engaged entirely in commerce or industry. This authority expresses the conviction that, as time goes on, the Jew will develop into a successful agriculturist, provided he is allowed to compete on fair terms with the Christian farmers.193

An impartial examination of these contradictory opinions seems to lead to the conclusion that the Jew, by nature and the education of two thousand years, is too good a tradesman to make a good husbandman. He is too keen-witted, too enterprising, too ambitious to find adequate satisfaction in the slow and solitary culture of the soil. In this respect the modern Jew is like the modern Greek. The drudgery of field work repels him. The tedium of country life depresses him. “No profit goes where no pleasure is ta’en.” It is in the bustle of the market-place, where man meets man, where wit is pitted against wit, and the intellect is sharpened on the whetstone of competition, that his restless soul finds its highest gratification and most congenial employment. He is a born townsman and a born traveller. He has none of the stolid endurance of the earth-born. Although he can excel in most pursuits, there is apparently one thing beyond the reach of his versatility. He cannot dig.

The Russian peasant under normal conditions is the reverse of all this: indolent, intemperate, improvident, unintelligent, and unambitious, he lives entirely in the present, unhaunted by regrets of the past, unharassed by plans for the future, and blissfully unaware of the existence of any world beyond the world which his eye can see—a very type of the earth-born, such as England knew him in the glorious days of Chivalry and Wat Tyler. To such a race even less formidable and foreign a competitor than the unbelieving Jew would appear a monster of iniquity. And yet, there is abundant evidence to prove that it is not the Russian peasant’s instinctive antipathy which is primarily responsible for the sufferings of the Jew. The Russian Jew, owing to his difference from the Russian Christian in race, religion, temperament and mode of living, is by the latter regarded with contempt and prejudice. These feelings, however, are not the only causes of persecution. Formerly, as we have seen, the Jews were reproached with excessive addiction to trade in liquor, whereby, it was alleged, they ruined the peasantry in health, purse and morals. This charge, whatever its value may have once been, can no longer be brought against the Jews; for the Russian Government, since it established a monopoly of spirits, has become the exclusive public-house keeper in the Empire. The charge of usury still remains. But it can easily be proved that in many districts the usurer is the powerful Russian landlord and not the Jew. As a distinguished Russian Liberal has appositely remarked, “the usurer must needs be a wealthy person—a poor devil like the Jewish colonist settled amidst the ‘Little Russian’ peasantry may possibly long for credit; he certainly is not in a position to give it.”194

According to the same authority, in “Little Russia” most of the Jewish villagers are either shop-keepers and retail dealers, or cobblers, tailors, smiths and the like. They form the commercial and industrial element in the rural population, and their expulsion means economic distress to the Russian husbandman, who, therefore, if left to himself, is not unwilling to forgive the Jew the Old Crime, and to forget his own prejudice against the foreigner and the follower of an abhorred creed. But he is not left to himself. The peasant’s latent antipathy is stirred to violence by the Nationalist agitators and Government officials, who collaborate in endeavouring to stifle the alien and revolutionary Jew through the brutality of the lower classes; assisted by the artisans and mechanics who by the persecution of the foreigner and the infidel seek the extinction of a successful competitor. All the outbreaks of anti-Jewish hatred, from 1881 to this day, were organised by the police authorities in accordance with a well-matured plan known as pogrom. The procedure consists in deliberately inciting by word of mouth and printed proclamations the dregs of society against the classes or sects of the community obnoxious to the Government, and then, when the work is done, suppressing the riot by the barbarous methods which are so typical of Russian administration. The same process is applied for the mutual extermination of others than the Jews. It is a process based on the maxim divide et impera—the last resource of an incompetent ruler.195

The disasters which befell the Russian arms in the Far East, the discontent which they created at home, and the danger of a revolutionary upheaval of all the oppressed elements of the Empire induced the Czar’s Government to reconsider its attitude towards the suffering subjects of the Czar. The Austrian journal Pester Lloyd ventured to give some good advice to that effect: “During the Napoleonic Wars the rulers captivated their subjects by promising them liberty and constitutions. Whoever wishes well to Russia must advise her to imitate the example.” In accordance with that policy of tardy conciliation which circumstances dictated, some Russian Liberals who had been banished for their championship of the interests of the people were permitted to return from exile, new Governors-General were appointed to Finland and Poland, with instructions to pursue a more lenient policy than their predecessors, a decree was issued ordering the Finnish Parliament to assemble, its property was restored to the Armenian Church, and other steps were taken showing that there was at least a desire to diminish the sources of general discontent by conceding to necessity what had hitherto been denied to justice.

The Jews, naturally enough, could not be forgotten. Besides the danger which, in common with the other distressed and disaffected subjects, they constitute to the Russian State, there were less negative reasons for their propitiation. The Russian Government was anxious to replenish the Treasury, emptied by the unfortunate war. The Jewish financiers of the West constitute a great power, and that power is known to entertain a deep and abiding hostility towards Russia. Jewish capitalists the world over are actuated by a strong desire to avenge the wrongs of their co-religionists, and they have the means of gratifying that desire. Once more the Jew’s wealth has proved potent enough to blunt the edge of prejudice. The Czar’s Ministers endeavoured to pacify the Jewish financiers by making a few trivial concessions to their persecuted brethren. M. De Plehve in May 1904, acting in direct contradiction to the views expressed in April, submitted to the Council of the Empire a Bill for repealing the law under which Jews were forbidden to reside within fifty versts of the Western frontier. It is true that the imputation that the Bill was dictated by a Jewish banker as an indispensable condition for a loan was strongly resented and repudiated in official circles. The Russians, in proof of the spontaneous nature of the proposal, declared that the Minister had, long before the necessity for loans arose, been striving towards a relaxation of Jewish disabilities. This statement has been partially corroborated by a distinguished Jewish gentleman, who also affirms from personal knowledge that M. De Plehve had for some time past endeavoured to alleviate the lot of the Russian Jews by granting to them every liberty—save emancipation.196 It was added that the process had naturally been gradual, owing to Russian social conditions, that as early as May 1903 the Council of the Empire had passed a Bill of M. De Plehve’s permitting the Jews to reside in 103 new places, and that 65 more had been added in the autumn. At the same time a Commission had been appointed to examine the laws relating to the Jews, especially those engaged in productive labour. These statements may, of course, be literally correct. But, until M. De Plehve’s utterances of the previous April be proved to be a forgery, it is permissible to doubt their accuracy in so far as the Minister’s good-will towards the Jews is concerned.

M. De Plehve was in the State what M. Pobiedonostseff was in the Church. The Minister of the Interior, like the Imperial Procurator of the Holy Synod, represented and led for the last two decades or more the party of reaction. By their Panslavist followers these two men were described as the two pillars of the patriotic edifice of Russian national life, which is raised on the ruins of the other nationalities. By their opponents they were denounced as the two ministering demons of Despotism and Dogmatism under their most repulsive aspects. It was, therefore, with no surprise that the civilised world heard on July 28, 1904, that M. De Plehve’s name had been entered on the roll of Russian victims to that ruthless spirit of revenge, whose cult their own ruthlessness helps to promote. He died unlamented, as he had lived unloved; for a tyrant has no friends. But that he was, as an individual, the incarnate fiend that his enemies depicted, is a theory improbable in itself, and disproved by those who came into contact with him. At the very worst he may have been an ambitious man who, by pursuing the course which he did, “sought to win the favour of the reactionary faction which at present controls the Czar, and thus to fight his way towards the highest power.”197 But a less severe estimate would, perhaps, be nearer the true one. M. De Plehve was the champion of an ideal. He honestly believed that in autocracy lay Russia’s salvation. Though surrounded by dangers, and warned by the fate of his former master Alexander II., of his predecessor Sipyaghin, of his instrument in the oppression of Finland Bobrikoff, and of many of his colleagues and subordinates, he unflinchingly persevered in the path which he had marked out for himself. A man who imperils his own life in the pursuit of a certain object is not the man to treat with tenderness those who strive to thwart him. M. De Plehve’s object was to silence opposition to the principles of autocracy. He pursued that object with the unswerving firmness of a strong man, and crushed the obstacles with the relentless conscientiousness of one who is absolutely convinced of the righteousness of his cause. To such a man political virtue means thoroughness combined with an utter lack of scruple and a total disregard of all moral restraint in the service of the State and the pursuit of its welfare. He was engaged in a game the stakes of which were greatness or death. He lost it.

But though the dispassionate student can have nothing but pity for a brave man perishing in the performance of what he deemed to be his duty, he can also sympathise with those who hailed their arch-enemy’s death with savage delight. They saw in M. De Plehve, not a tragic character drawing upon himself the vengeance of an inexorable Atê, but only the merciless Minister, the oppressor of those who differed from him in their political ideals, the executioner of men whose sole crime was their loyalty to the faith of their fathers and the traditions of their race. As the lawyer Korobchevsky said before the Court, in defence of the assassin: “The bomb which killed the late Minister of the Interior was filled, not with dynamite, but with the burning tears of the mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters of the men whom he sent to the gallows, or to die slowly in prison or in Siberia.”

Among the sufferers from M. De Plehve’s policy none had greater reasons to hate him than the Jews. He regarded them, not without cause, as the most energetic opponents to his autocratic schemes, and his antipathy towards them on that account was enhanced by his just appreciation of their abilities. Hence the exceptional rigour in his treatment of them. M. De Plehve used to refer to the revolutionary activity of the Jewish youth as a justification for his own measures of coercion. That the Jews should be ready to join, or even lead, in every attempt to overthrow the social and political system under which they suffer so grievously is only natural. Equally natural it is that the man to whom that system was everything should have tried to suppress them. The Kishineff massacre, as we have seen, was universally attributed to M. De Plehve, and when the news of his assassination went forth few surpassed the Jews in their exultation. The Jewish daily paper Forward, of New York, immediately organised a meeting under the auspices of the United Russian Revolutionists. The demonstrators filled one of the largest halls in New York to overflowing, and at every mention of M. De Plehve’s assassin, Sazonoff, burst into delirious applause. He was praised as the worthy son of a noble cause; his victim was described as the captured Port Arthur of Russian despotism, and the interference of the police alone checked the enthusiasm.198

But, even granting the spontaneity and the disinterestedness of the concessions which the Russian Government declared itself prepared to make to the Jews, they would have only affected a limited number of them. M. De Plehve’s plan at best was to bring about the conciliation of the race by the absorption of the better class of them and by the half-hearted application of some palliatives to the grievances of the poorer, such as the enlargement of the area within which they are confined, and permission to emigrate.199 The experiment in assimilation, of which the Baltic provinces, Poland and Finland, supplied a sample, was not one that commended itself to the Jews. But, even if it succeeded, the vast majority of the race would continue in their normal state of slavery. The same remark applies to a remedial scheme drafted and adopted a few weeks later by a departmental conference presided over by M. De Witte. The Financial Minister’s association with the step lent colour to the suspicion that this newly-awakened benevolence towards the Jew was not foreign to Russia’s anxiety to procure fresh supplies of money by the assistance of Jewish bankers abroad. However that may be, the measures taken do not seem to have produced any marked effect on the condition of the Russian Jews. That relief which the wretched people could not gain from the Czar’s compassion, they failed to obtain even from his fears.

On Aug. 4, 1904, anti-Semitic disturbances broke out at Ostrowez, in the Government of Radom, where, according to private statements, twenty Jews were killed; according to the Russian authorities, one was seriously wounded, and died the following day, while twenty-two persons were slightly injured. The same official account ascribes the disturbances to the fact that a Jewish boy struck a Christian—the blow, it is said, was exaggerated to murder, and the mob set out to revenge themselves on the Jews. At Partscheff also, in the Government of Siedlce, on the following day, it was said that hundreds of Jews perished. The official version of the occurrence stated that “the police dispersed, without using force, a crowd of Jews who had assembled to hide a baptized Jew. In a scuffle that ensued twenty persons were wounded.”200 On September 4 and 5 anti-Semitic riots occurred at Smela, in the Province of Kieff. This is the official account: “A Jewish shopkeeper struck a peasant woman whom he suspected of having stolen some cloth. Immediately a crowd collected, and plundered and sacked one hundred houses and one hundred and fifty shops belonging to Jews. That evening a party of sixty Jews attacked and beat the Christian inhabitants. When the Jews began to fire on the latter the police were summoned, who made use of their revolvers, wounding two persons. The next evening several hundred railway employés, in spite of the prohibition of the officials, went by train to Smela from the adjacent station of Bobrinskaia. The rioting was renewed, and the troops were summoned. The soldiers made use of their weapons, and five persons were seriously wounded, while a large number were slightly injured. Many arrests were made.”201 In reading these official statements one must constantly bear in mind the Russian Government’s desire to minimise a misfortune or a misdeed which they dare not deny. A few days later, on September 11, on the occasion of the Jewish New Year, another anti-Jewish disturbance occurred at Sosnowice, a town on the Siberian frontier. A number of boys threw stones at some Jews who were engaged in their annual ceremony, slightly injuring a child. This gave rise to a rumour that the Jews had killed a child. Numbers of workmen marched through the streets in the evening, smashing the window-panes of Jewish dwelling-houses and of the synagogue. Several Jews were injured by stones or knives. Doctors were afraid to render assistance to the injured, owing to the attitude of the mob.202

Hardly a month had passed since the last-mentioned event, when a new outrage occurred in Mohileff. The following is a condensed description of the occurrence by a well-qualified observer who supports his statements by references to numerous witnesses: A political demonstration in the town of Mohileff took place exactly one week before the anti-Jewish riots. In Russia it is a crime for even four men to come together in a private room without the knowledge and permission of the police, and it is, therefore, a heinous atrocity for a crowd to gather in the streets for a political purpose. Yet that is what happened on October 15 in Mohileff. The Jewish workmen of the place assembled by way of protesting against the cruelty of the police, who, without a word of warning, had shot down harmless and unarmed Hebrew working women and men; and against the unjust condemnation to twelve years’ penal servitude of their comrades in Yakootsk; and they recorded their wish that the war should stop. A few policemen advanced against the workmen and tried to disperse them, but were themselves scattered by the crowd. Then an overwhelming police force marched against the malcontents, but to their disgust found nobody. At this the Prefect of the Police of Mohileff determined that, during the mobilisation which was to take place in a few days, from Tsukermann’s synagogue to the railway station the Jews should be thrashed until not a stone remained on the pavement.

On October 22 the mobilisation of the Reserves was promulgated. According to law, the vodka-shops should have been shut on this occasion, and the Jewish population had earnestly petitioned the authorities to insist on that precaution against disorders being observed. But the shops were opened. To the Jewish Reserve soldiers, who had assembled by order of the military authorities, the Police Prefect addressed the following remarkable words in the presence of a great crowd: “You contemptible Jews! You are all foreign democrats! You ought to kiss the hands and feet of the Christians! You have been beaten too little as yet! You must be thrashed again!”

“We may pitch into the Jews and loot their shops,” the fellows said; “there will be no punishment. The police allow it; hurrah!” The subsequent attitude of the police amply bore out this expectation. At three p.m. a band of petty local traders, not reserves, who had been steadily gathering since morning, and were now led by striplings, swept across the city, crying, “Pitch into the Jews!” and belabouring all passing Jews with cudgels and stones. That day, however, the matter did not go beyond the assaulting of individuals and the breaking of windows. But none the less several persons were grievously wounded and disfigured in the presence of the police, who looked on approving.

The next morning, Sunday, October 23, the panic-stricken Jews sent a deputation to the Police Prefect to petition for help and to have the dram-shops closed. The Prefect consulted the Governor, and then told the petitioners that he had been authorised to use his own judgment. This answer was construed as a promise that the taverns would not be opened. But shortly before noon notices were posted up in the streets, signed by the Police Prefect himself, informing the public that the reports to the effect that on the day before there had been disorders in the town, in the course of which several persons had been grievously wounded, were misleading. What had really happened was “an ordinary, insignificant street brawl.” This meant that the deeds of violence already done were but the flowers, and that the fruits were yet to come.

And they came a few minutes later. On the stroke of twelve all the brandy shops were opened, and already at one o’clock the sanguinary battle began. Everything had been organised beforehand. In all there were about one hundred houses and twenty-five shops plundered and gutted. A crowd of about 150 men did the business: sacked the jewellers’ shops, looted the wares, broke the windows and doors of private houses which were tenanted by Jews, and maltreated the people. They chose the poorest quarters of the city for the scene of their depredations, but they advanced to the centre of the town as well. The unfortunate Jews implored the police to intervene and save them, but these were the replies they received: “Be off to your democrats! Let them help you.” “That will teach you to beat the police.” “You have not been thrashed enough yet; when your throats are being cut we shall see.”

The few Jews who dared to defend themselves were arrested and beaten by the police, who refused to lay a finger upon the hooligans. One witness says: “None of the rioters were arrested; but the police said to them, ‘Lads, that’s enough. Now you can go to another place.’”

Why, it may be asked, did the police behave so cruelly and, one may add, so treacherously towards the Jews? The motives are well known, for the Police Prefect himself avowed them. Among the witnesses whom the writer produces in proof of that statement there is one whose words are well worth noting:

“The Police Prefect sent for me on October 24, and said: ‘You Jews are being beaten on three grounds. In the first place, you sneak off to America, and our Russians have to spill their blood instead of you. Secondly, you are not devoted to the autocracy, and you cry, “Down with the autocracy!” And in the third place, you have no liking for the police, and you beat the members of the force.’”

During the height and heat of the riots a deputation from the Jewish community called upon the Governor, Klingenberg, and respectfully petitioned him to shield the Jews from the rioters. And the Czar’s highest representative made answer: “That sort of thing happens everywhere. I cannot set a soldier to guard every Jew.” And as for the police, the Governor publicly praised their exemplary conduct, and a money gratification was given them! Yet the police were morally bound to save the Jews. Doubly bound, indeed, for, besides their duty to the Czar, they were bribed by the Jews to protect them. Bribed to do their duty!

The accusations made against the Jews, and made especially for foreign consumption, are chiefly these: They sell vodka to the reserve soldiers at exorbitant prices and thus incense these men, who naturally avenge themselves by pillaging Jewish shops and houses. They evade military service, and then Orthodox Russians have to serve in lieu of the Jewish deserters. That, of course, embitters the Christian recruits and explains their conduct. These accusations are serious and would, of course, explain everything except the conduct of the police—if they were true. But they are false, and not false only, but impossible, as every Russian knows.

In the first place, it was not reserves who attacked the Jews, but local loafers and hooligans. In the second place, the Jews could not raise the price of alcohol, nor sell it at all, because it is the Imperial Government which alone sells vodka, having a monopoly of it. In the third place, the Christians have not to serve in the army in lieu of Jews. The latter are bound to provide a certain number of reserves, and for all of them who desert the Jewish community must find members of the same faith. In like manner, Russians must take the place of fugitive Russians, not of Jews.

Lastly, there remains the charge of desertion. Is it true? Yes, quite true; but then it is true of Christians and Jews alike, for the war was very unpopular. The interesting part of the story is that the Christians shirked their duty far more extensively and successfully than the Jews. That can be proved by figures, and the following data are not likely to be challenged by anyone. Before the reserves were called out at all the total of Jews in the Manchurian army was roughly thirty thousand men. In all probability it exceeded that number, the bulk of them serving in Siberian regiments. It is as well, however, to state the case moderately. Now, since the mobilisation of the reserves (in the districts where the Jewish element is largely represented, such as Vilna, Odessa, Warsaw, Kieff), the active Russian army had no less than fifty thousand soldiers of the Jewish faith. And that is an enormous percentage. Indeed, so abnormally great is that percentage of Jews that, if the other nationalities who acknowledge the sway of the Czar, contributed a proportionate number of soldiers, Kuropatkin’s army would have numbered approximately one million!

And the people who thus shed their blood more freely than the Christian Russians would be excusable if they deserted en masse, because the Jews enjoy none of the privileges accorded to the Russians, and they could not therefore be blamed if they refused to look upon Muscovy as their fatherland. But, in spite of the injustice done them by the Czar’s Government, they generously gave their lives to the Czar. And the Czar’s agents in return egged on the hooligans of all Southern and Western Russia to pillage, burn, and destroy Jewish property, and to beat and kill Jewish men and women.203

These experiences and the apprehension of massacres on a larger scale have impelled the Jews to form a great revolutionary association for organised resistance to the organised forces of their enemies. A secret society—already notorious as the Bund—arose in Lithuania, whence it spread to Poland and other parts of the Russian Empire. Its aims are to foster Jewish national feeling and to protect Jewish interests. But the protection which this body could afford the victims of deliberate persecution was necessarily limited. If it rescued them from occasional slaughter, it could not defend them against chronic starvation. Consequently, the exodus, especially from the Province of Mohileff, continued: The emigrants were, for the most part, Jewish young people of both sexes, who, not having any means of existence, left the towns and villages. Some villages even became quite deserted. In the town of Mohileff itself, where there are no factories of any kind or industrial or commercial undertakings except shops which are held by Jews, business was quite suspended.204 Within the next five months no fewer than 75,160 Russian Jews arrived in New York alone.205

How this readiness to quit hearth and home, in order to seek a new life under unknown skies in the furthest corners of the earth, carries us back across the ages to the flight of Israel from Egypt! To the Russian Jews groaning in servitude the Czar’s Empire is a foreign land; his religion a foreign religion. In leaving Russia they leave a hotbed of idolatry as fierce, as cruel, as Godless as the idolatry of Egypt, Babylon, Syria, or Rome. To them the Russian god who can sanction such persecution is a veritable Moloch. He can claim no kinship with Jehovah. They owe it to themselves to escape from the house of bondage, and to their God to continue bearing witness to His unity. They, therefore, like their remote ancestors, seek freedom of worship by expatriation. Treated as aliens in their native country, they renounce it with as little regret as if they had not been born and bred in it. There are, of course, both in Poland and in Russia proper Jews who would gladly conform in everything except religion. Such Jews deplore the estrangement of the Jew from the Gentile, and believe that the lot of the former can be improved only by the removal of the legal restrictions which perpetuate that estrangement. According to them, if the Jews were allowed to mingle freely with the other inhabitants of the Empire, they would in time lose all those characteristics which mark them off as a people apart, and become patriotic subjects of the Czar. But the Russian Government in its persecution of the race makes no invidious distinctions between these “Assimilators” and their sterner brethren. The Jew who ventures to advise assimilation alienates his friends without conciliating his masters. By its indiscriminate severity the Russian autocracy feeds the old spirit of dogged resistance, sullen resentment, and inflexible arrogance.

It also feeds, as might have been expected, the old dream of Redemption and national rehabilitation. The Russian Ghetto at the present day is the citadel of Hebrew orthodoxy and the recruiting ground for the Zionist movement of which we shall speak in the sequel. It is natural that it should be. The Jew in the Empire of the Czars finds little or no scope for development. As we have seen, he is debarred from holding real property, from pursuing liberal professions, from engaging in many trades. He is a stranger in the land of his birth, an outcast among his fellow-countrymen. Chronic contempt and oppression are only relieved by periodical massacre. Forbidden to be a citizen, he cannot be a patriot. He has no life in the present. He, therefore, lives in the future. He is an uncompromising idealist. The same conditions which deprive him of all inducement to national assimilation also encourage his religious and social separatism. The intolerance of his Christian neighbours reacts on his own bigotry. If politically he lives on hopes, religiously he lives on traditions. Amidst all his calamities, the Jew of the Russian Ghetto is sustained by the expectation that the real history of his race is still to come. He believes that the ruins of the Temple will one day prove the foundations of new greatness. While awaiting the fulfilment of the ancient prophecies, he clings to the tribal distinctions, to the ceremonial laws, and to all those rules of omission and performance which tend to perpetuate his self-isolation. In the West the Jews have, as patriotic citizens of various states, succeeded, by generous concessions quite compatible with true loyalty to their traditions, in the effort to reconcile the old Jewish life with modern political conditions. In Russia the Jews are denied the opportunity. But they still love the land. Therein lies the irony and the hope.

Such is the lot of Israel in Russia. It is hardly better on the western side of the Pruth—in that other European country which within three days’ journey of London continues the Middle Ages.