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" For the re-establishment of more healthy relations between the Jews and the other inhabitants and counteracting Jewish industrial and other exploitation in the western region , it is necessary to grant the Jews complete civil equality and freedom of choice of residence. This would lead to a greater dissemination of the Jewish population, which is now crowded together in particular districts; to the alleviation of the poverty and hopeless condition of the Jewish masses, and would relieve the part of the country they now occupy from excessive industrial and other competition.

" In order to destroy Jewish exclusiveness and to facilitate the fusion of the Jews with the rest of the population it is necessary to incorporate the Jews with the local rural and urban communities, and to subject them completely in fiscal, administrative, and other respects to the rules and regulations established for these communities. Those Jews who would wish to settle in the interior provinces should be allowed to enjoy the right of joining peasant and burgher communities in the places of their domicile in the ordinary way.

" It is at the same time necessary that serious attention should be directed towards the organisation of elementary schools for the juvenile Jewish population, inasmuch as the school must always be one of the principal instruments for the moral training and Russification of the Jewish masses."

These were the common-sense recommendations of an enlightened mind for the cure of a growing social and political malady in Russian life. They would have effected that cure, had there been a statesmanship in the Government of the Empire capable of rising above anti-Semitic prejudice in the rendering of a great service to the country. In fact, there are but three Russian remedies for this growing danger to Russia, and two of them are impossible; the third being the rational one outlined by Prince Demidoff San Donato. Extermination cannot be thought of. Emigration is out of the question, where poverty is almost the normal condition of two or three millions of people who have inherited the evils associated with social wretchedness, religious intolerance, and race persecution. No other country will consent to receive them. The third remedy is, therefore, that alone which the nature and extent of the evil demand, and which, if wisely and courageously adopted, would make Russia the stronger through the only effective remedy applicable to a growing, deadly danger.

The facts of the economic and social conditions within the Pale of Settlement are so objective that the warning they give of a coming catastrophe cannot be ignored. It would be like leaving an epidemic of smallpox to cure itself by neglect. This condition of things is fully explained and expressed by the term, unnatural. It is analogous to a situation which would result from a Federal law compelling every European-born artisan and labourer within the whole United States to reside inside of Pennsylvania, and to be forbidden to seek employment outside the cities and towns of that state. The murderous competition for employment, the deadly rivalry for existence, the bad blood between opposing races, the poverty and social wretchedness which such a condition of things would create--apart from the operation of coercive laws--can readily be imagined by the American reader. But this is no overdrawn picture of the economic anarchy prevailing within the Russian Pale of Jewish Settlement.

The present estimated population of the Tsar's dominions in Europe and Asia is 145,000,000. The territory of legal domicile for the Russian Jew is embraced in the fifteen "governments," or provinces, of Kovno, Vitebsk, Vilna, Mohilev, Minsk, Grodno, Volhynia, Chernigov, Poltava, Kiev, Podolia, Bessarabia, Cherson, Ekaterinoslav, and Taurida--extending south from near the Gulf of Riga, on the Baltic, to the Crimea and the Sea of Azov, and forming the western provinces of the Empire; having Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Roumania as frontier barriers. Poland is not included in the Pale. The Jews have more freedom of movement there, and are not subject to some of the coercive restrictions imposed within the above provinces.

The Pale itself is again narrowed by the law which forbids a Jew to reside within thirty-three miles of the western frontier. It has a total area about equal to that of France.

The population of the fifteen provinces of the Pale, including Poland, will be about 26,000,000. There are some 4,000,000 Jews comprised in this population, but these, excepting 1,000,000 in Poland, are compelled under the "May Laws" to reside within the "cities, towns, and townlets" of the Pale. The united population of these urban centres will probably not exceed a total of 5,000,000; so that the Jews number three out of every five of the inhabitants of the urban centres within the fifteen provinces.

The percentage of Jews to non-Jews in the towns and townships of the province of Mohilev, is estimated at 94; for those of Volhynia, 71 per cent.; Minsk, 69; Kovno, 68; Podolia, 62; Vitebsk, 61; Grodno, 60; Vilna, 56; Kiev, 49; Poltava, 43; Bessarabia, 38; Chernigov, 29; Cherson, 28; The Taurida, 19; and Ekaterinoslav, 15 per cent.

In the provinces of Russia in which Jews are not permitted to reside the town inhabitants average 59 persons to every 1000 of the rural population. In the population of the Pale the urban inhabitants average 222 for every 1000 of the rural residents and workers. Within the industrial centres of the Jewish Pale to which they are confined there are about 2730 Jews to every square mile of residential area.

These facts and figures show how impossible it is, under such economic conditions, for any healthy or hopeful prospect of industrial life to exist. The towns are crowded with artisans and traders, and as these are out of all proportion to the producers and consumers of an agricultural country they necessarily become more destitute and wretched as their numbers increase. They are too poor to emigrate. They are prohibited from migrating. They cannot seek work on land. They are not permitted to engage in several occupations. Municipal and Government posts are practically closed to them. They have to compete with Russian workers for such means of existence as can be found; and in face of these facts they are reproached for their poverty and made subject to special taxation.

It is also a charge against these people that they are exploiters of labour and not producers. The taunt comes from the apologists for the Ignatieff laws. The charge is not true. In proportion to population, there are relatively more artisans among Jews in Russia than among non-Jews. According to statistics obtained by the Pahlen Commission, the artisans and labourers averaged 15 per cent. of the total Jewish population of the Pale. In England the proportion of labourers and artisans is over 20 per cent.; about 12 per cent. in Belgium; 10 per cent. in France, and 9 in Prussia.

In Kishineff, where the Jews number 50,000 of the city population, the Hebrew artisans, and wage-earners generally, would number fully 10,000 before the recent anti-Semitic outrages.

Nor can the injustice of the "May Laws" be defended or explained by the equally unfounded assertion that the Jew will not work the land. He refuses to do so in Russia only where he is prohibited. Whenever he has obtained access to the land, on fair terms, he has readily embraced the chance, and invariably improved his condition. This has been proved by the records of the Jewish agricultural colonies in the provinces of Vilna, Minsk, Grodno, Kovno, Volhynia, Cherson, and in Ekaterinoslav. There are colonies of more than 50,000 land-workers among the Jews of the southwestern provinces who have more than held their own in every branch of agricultural industry with their Russian or Moldavian neighbours. This taunt is, consequently, no explanation of the Ignatieff laws.

The evils--both to Russia and to the Jews of the Pale--arising out of the economic conditions which these laws must stereotype, would have been swept away or modified in the ten years following the killing and despoiling of the Jews in 1882, had the proposals of the Pahlen Commission been acted upon. The recommendations of provincial governors were preferred instead. Biassed officialism prevailed over the courageously wise counsels of Count Pahlen, Prince Demidoff San Donato, Count Strogonoff, and their colleagues, with the result that M. Pob?donostsev became the virtual administrator of the Ignatieff laws, and the murders, crimes, and expulsions of 1891 followed, in decadal sequence, the outrages of 1882; not, by any means, as a desired or necessary measure of the policy adopted by the famed Procurator of the Holy Synod. M. Pob?donostsev would be as averse to the killing of Jews as General Ignatieff. Both are far above suspicion in this respect. The instigator of the "May Laws" probably believed, as a soldier and diplomat, that such measures were needed the better to subdue a suspected revolutionary tendency among a non-Russian race, and thought they might be enforced according to his plans, without any serious explosion of anti-Semitic feeling. What followed, however, ought to have been a warning to the keeper of the Tsar's conscience on combined religious and national concerns. The Procurator's plans would be as religious in their ultimate object as Ignatieff's policy was the reverse; but both sought the accomplishment of a tyrannical purpose by means which led to such suffering, injustice, and bloodshed as will ever be associated with their records and names.

The Russian Jew was a domestic menace to the mind of Ignatieff; to M. Pob?donostsev he was tainted with the unforgivable sins of heterodoxy, and a religious persecutor is always relentless in proportion to his fanatical sincerity. No one can justly question the honesty of the Procurator's zeal for Church and State in Russia, and this is why the infidel Israelites have found in him the most implacable of their powerful foes.

The measures resorted to in 1891, at the instance of the influence exerted by the Procurator of the Holy Synod, had for their end the carrying into effect of the provisions of the "May Laws." Thousands of Jews were still scattered throughout the provinces beyond the Pale; tolerated in centres of trade and enterprise for utilitarian reasons. Most of these were artisans who had by residence, and membership of trade guilds, acquired the privilege of living and working in various provinces of the Empire. Large numbers of these had been specially encouraged in previous years to settle in cities and towns where their proficiency in crafts was necessary to the development of local industries or manufacture. Suddenly in 1891 an Imperial decree was issued, and all these sober, industrious, skilled, and, in many instances, respected citizens were ordered to quit their homes, property, or employment, within a given time, and take themselves within the Pale of Settlement or outside of the Russian Empire.

The orders issued by the Chief of Police of Moscow to his subordinates, contained the following instructions:

"You must personally verify in all the shops and factories kept by Jews the number of the assistant artisans; also, what category the Jews belong to, and the time of their arrival in Moscow for residence; and then take their signature to a notice of voluntary departure from the Capital; warning them that the computation of their terms of stay will begin on the 14th of July next. Also, take a registry of names, in alphabetical order, of Jewish artisans and, second, of Jews living in Moscow under the right of Circular No. 30 issued by the Minister of the Interior in 1880, specifying in separate columns the time of arrival in Moscow, number of assistant artisans, number in family, and the expiration of the term of departure. In reference to Jews residing according to Circular of 1880, specify their occupations, also the names of commercial houses where they were employed, and present them to me within two weeks."

The penalty for refusing to sign the paper suggested by General Yourkoffsky, was immediate expulsion. The "voluntary" alternative gained only a little time for preparation. It offered, however, some chances to wealthy Jews to come to an arrangement with lower police officials, whereby the general order of expulsion might be evaded, for a consideration.

The attack by Government and people upon the Jews in 1891 was a deliberate proceeding. Prince Dolgorouki was an able and a fair-minded Governor-General of Moscow. Neither Russian nor Jewish complaint had been lodged against him during his tenure of office. His duties had been performed with care and competency, and his administration of the ancient capital and province left no room for official faultfinding at St. Petersburg.

All this being done in the name of the Tsar, the populace were encouraged to co-operate in executing what they were led to believe to be the Emperor's wish. Massacres, raping, and looting became once more the direct results of barbarous decrees. Some 3000 Jews were driven from Moscow after many had been killed. Hundreds of business men were ruined, being compelled to close their establishments, and to dispose of valuable stock at prices which could not realise enough to discharge their obligations. Those who were able to purchase transport to America emigrated, but the mass of the expelled victims wended their way toward the Pale, there to add still more to the congestion of life and labour which had already rendered the vast Ghetto of the Empire the home of poverty, suffering, and despair.

The example set in Moscow was followed in Kiev and other cities, and encouraged police and mobs elsewhere to emulate the inhuman work of hunting the hated race from villages and towns. Throughout the year 1891 outrages were perpetrated in various provinces, despite some apparently earnest efforts on the part of the Government to stop the more violent outbreaks which had been provoked by its own orders. Several villages where Jews resided were burned down. Fully 70,000 Jews emigrated during the year; this fact confirming, in part only, a saying attributed to a conspicuous personality in the Tsar's confidence, that the Russian Jewish question would be ultimately solved by the action of the "May Laws" as these would force one-third of the Jews to emigrate; one-third more would become converted to the Orthodox Church; while the other third would perish of hunger!

Whatever may be the desire of the more violent anti-Semitic Russians to see such an unparalleled programme realised in results, there can be no doubt as to the efficiency of the anti-Jewish code of Russian laws to work out such a solution, if it were a task legally possible of accomplishment.

Allusion has already been briefly made to the tangle of contradictory laws which the ukases, decrees, promulgations, and provisions relating to the Russian Jew have created. Many of these measures appear to have been adopted under the pressure of unreflecting prejudice or apprehension. Some bear the impress of wise and humane intentions, born, however, in the minds of Ministers or Monarchs too weak to carry out the enlightened impulse which gave them birth. But the vast proportion of these repressive and oppressive laws are frankly tyrannical in inspiration and purpose, and the spirit that could suggest measures which are a deliberate violation of the fundamental principles and rights of civilised existence would be a feeling worthy to animate the task of carrying the above programme into execution.

A MURDER-MAKING LEGEND

M. De Plehve and the Tsar can accomplish one good and blessed work, if so minded, without altering a single anti-Semitic Russian law. The Emperor can destroy, in Russia, the atrocious legend about the annual killing of Christian children by Jews as an alleged part of the Blood Atonement in Hebrew Paschal rites. In this humane and Christian task he is entitled to the co-operation of the Emperor of Austria, the King of Roumania, and the heads of other Balkan States, where this story of ritual murder is constantly circulated, and not infrequently as a part of political propaganda. There ought to be a truly Christian crusade waged against this infamous product of ancient, insensate, sectarian hate. It was the inspiration of the most horrible of the Kishineff murders; the driving of nails through the eyes of a woman, the cutting out of the tongue of a two-year-old child, and of nameless sexual mutilations. Thousands of innocent people have been done to death in the centuries through which these crimes have been the bloody fruit of a monstrous invention, born of a spirit of superstitious savagery, which no age has yet made any honest civilised endeavour to exorcise out of ignorant and fanatical Christian minds.

The Jews of Kishineff believe with all right-minded people everywhere that no one deplores these shocking crimes more than the Emperor. His humanity is beyond question in popular belief, and, should a suitable opportunity be given, or be forthcoming, while the recollection of this great stain on his country's reputation remains in the public memory, he may be counted upon, it is to be hoped, to place on record his honest condemnation of such abominable deeds.

Let His Majesty the Tsar add this task to other noble duties with which his name is associated. A special ukase, reciting his own disbelief in the ritual-murder legend, and forbidding under severe penalties its circulation anywhere, and, by any means, in Russia; ordering that this ukase shall be read, in the Emperor's name, in every church in the Empire, a fortnight before Easter each year for the next five years; let this be done, and the good work is virtually accomplished for Christianity, for civilisation, and for Russia, too.

A similar obligation lies upon the governments of Austria and of the Balkan States. Roumania is at present the worst of sinners in this matter. This legend is in constant circulation through the anti-Semitic press there, being used, in fact, as an argument in political campaigns for driving the Jews out of the country.

"The recent ritual murders committed by Jews in Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, Germany, and Russia must still be fresh in everyone's mind. And how many children have disappeared in our own country! How many mutilated bodies have been found, while the criminals have remained undiscovered! Who are these criminals--these bloodthirsty murderers of our prattling babes? They are the fanatical Jews that infest our land. These monsters are the slayers of our Christian children. They are the criminals--the Jews who have invaded our country like locusts.

"The time for peaceful and legal restrictions is passing away. Let all good Roumanians raise their heavy sticks and kill these parasites of their country."

There is another and a higher authority that can deal with the propagation of this crime-stained legend, especially in Catholic countries like Austria and Poland. This is the authority of the Holy See.

In the same book Canon R?hling draws upon other cabalistic documents for suggestions and innuendoes tending to uphold his case, but in every instance in which he quotes passages to support his propositions, they are found, on close inspection, to convey no such meaning as he attempts to attach to them. There is not, in fact, a solitary authenticated instance of this sanguinary sacrifice given in his two works, "My Replies to the Rabbis," and "The Controversy and the Human Sacrifices of Rabbinism," both published in 1883. Still, these writings have been widely read, and have done much harm in misleading minds that look for truth and Christian guidance from clerical authors.

RUSSIA'S ATTITUDE

The absolute truth about the plan and purpose of the massacres at Kishineff in April may be difficult to determine amidst the conflicting accounts of Russian officials, and of Jewish witnesses of what actually occurred. The wronged and the wrongers seldom or ever agree as to disputed facts. But there can be no doubt upon any mind conversant with the state of Russian feeling, and the trend of Russia's domestic policy, as to the intolerable position of the Hebrew subjects of the Tsar. No facts are concealed in this connection. They are as objective and undisguised as the Russian policeman, and as patent to every inquirer from Odessa to Warsaw as the rivers Dniester and Vistula. I brought away with me after a journey through the Jewish Pale, the conviction that there is no horizon of hope for the Russian Jew in any prospective era of future emancipation. He is and will remain an alien until the politically impossible comes to be a reality--until the Empire of the Tsar elects to adopt a government of constitutional liberty.

He is under no personal or political restraint, it is true, in the matter of emigration. The Jews are free to leave Russia to-morrow. Such freedom of action, however, is like the tempting waters which only aggravated the thirst of Tantalus by the mockery of a nearness made impossible to reach. The poverty of the vast mass of these unfortunate people renders the thought of finding refuge in America or the Argentine a hopeless dream. And, as an educated Russian official said, in discussing this question with the writer, "What can we do with them? They are the racial antithesis of our nation. A fusion with us is impossible, owing to religious and other disturbing causes. They will always be a potential source of sectarian and economic disorder in our country. We cannot admit them to equal rights of citizenship for these reasons and, let me add, because their intellectual superiority would enable them in a few years' time to gain possession of most of the posts of our civil administration. They are a growing danger of a most serious nature to our Empire in two of its most vulnerable points,--their discontent is a menace to us along the Austrian and German frontiers, while they are the active propagandists of the Socialism of Western Europe within our borders. The only solution of the problem of the Russian Jew is his departure from Russia."

This is the conclusion to which one is irresistibly driven by a full survey of the cruelly anomalous position occupied by the Jew in relation to all the dominant factors of Russian life and government. He is under the obligations of citizenship, military and otherwise, without its privileges or full protection. Special taxes are imposed upon him. He is confined by law within a kind of economic concentration camp. The legal difficulties put in the way of the full exercise of his industrial capacities are both the source of his poverty and of his oppression. He cannot own land, within the Pale, or work it; but he must live. Therefore, he is compelled to exploit those who will hate him all the more on account of a resourcefulness which conquers some of the obstacles purposely placed in the way of his livelihood. His faith is assailed by almost every form of human temptation, including the terrorism of such periodical crimes as those perpetrated a few weeks ago. And the very fidelity which enables him to resist both the powers of proselytism and of persecution, only adds one more prejudiced ground to the many which appeal against him to the religious side of an autocratic regime which decrees that an invulnerable heterodoxy is one of the worst of crimes in Russia.

The Jew has no friend outside his own race in Russia, while not infrequently those of his own household are the worst paymasters of his talent and industry. The peasant dislikes him for his race, his religion, and his exploiting propensities. The artisan and labourer in urban centres of the crowded Pale look upon him as an economic black-leg, because he is compelled to work at anything for the wages of bare subsistence, in order to live. He is, by the cruel decree of his fate, and not by choice, the cause of low wages. This is one reason why a great number of the sanguinary rioters at Kishineff were Russian and Moldavian workingmen.

The shop-keeper and petty dealer see in their Hebrew rival a competitor who outclasses them in all the dexterous tricks of trade, and who can succeed where the business capacity of the Slavonic gentile is wanting in perseverance and resource. Here hatred is born of a sordid jealousy.

As rich merchant and banker he is tolerated. The wealthy Russian Jew is, at present, a Russian necessity. Odessa, one of the richest cities of the Empire, is "run" by the superior abilities of the proscribed race. Its commercial prosperity would collapse to-morrow if they were expelled; just as the business and progress of Kishineff have been all but paralysed by the outbreak against them at Easter.

Anti-Semitic prejudices grow as we proceed from the rivalries of economic pursuits to the classes and interests associated with the administration of the Empire. The policeman knows the Jew is made an alien by law, and that the necessity he is under to evade the legal disabilities to which he is subject renders him a profitable source of blackmail. Where his poverty repels the exercise of this corruption, the guardian of the peace looks upon the Jew with all the mixed antipathy--racial, religious, and economic--of the superstitious, uniformed Mujik.

In the lower and middle grades of the civil service the Jew is feared as well as disliked. He is known to be far more intellectual, more industrious, and more capable than the average Russian, and there is a dread lest employment in the innumerable posts of a vast administration should, at some future period, be thrown open to a race so versatile, so sober, and so ambitious to succeed. In every Royal School or Gymnasium to which a Jewish youth is admitted--the number must never exceed 10 per cent. of the whole attendance, in some schools not 5 per cent.--the son of Abraham is certain to eclipse his rivals, and to walk off with whatever honours are to be won.

I have already indicated the feeling, candidly expressed, of the higher branches of the public service on the subject of the Jew as a possible rival in that department of the state. An equality of opportunity would mean a monopoly of posts by sheer force of mental and general equipment.

The Russian officer is not averse to the Jew as a soldier, but he must never be--a Russian officer.

Finally, the Government of Russia looks upon the Jew as the most dangerous of disturbing factors in the rapid development of the industrial life of the Empire, and as a political enemy within the ambit of its most vulnerable western frontier. He is believed to be the active propagandist of Socialism, and he is known to have powerful political and financial allies among the pressmen and financiers of France, England, and Germany--allies who can strike at Russia's financial credit, external policies, and moral prestige, in retaliation for the legal outlawry of their race within the dominions of the Tsar.

Against these governmental, religious, industrial, social, and national forces of a huge empire combined, what chance has a proscribed race, alienised by law, of obtaining redress? It is a hopeless struggle, look at it how we may. The duties and obligations of civilised rule may be put before the Russian Government, and the pleas of an enlightened jurisprudence advanced in behalf of the Russian Jew, but with what result? Russia makes answer, "These people are not of us, any more than the Chinese of San Francisco, or the ten millions of emancipated Negroes, are free citizens of the United States Republic. They are a danger to the Empire from within, more so than the existence of the Boer Republics of South Africa ever was a menace to the prestige of the British Empire, the removal of which, nevertheless, required a great and costly war. We claim the right to resort to our own measures, as other Powers have done, as France is doing to-day, to safeguard the peace of the realm, and to minimise the risks involved in having an unfriendly element, composed of five or six millions of an unpopular race, located where a German or an Austrian attack might some day be made upon our Western frontier. We cannot expect, or induce, other countries to open the gates of emigration to these undesirables, but we will not permit any Power or people to coerce us to admit this race to the common rights of Russian citizenship or nationality."

This may be despotic, irrational, and all the rest, but it is the answer which every external attempt to nationalise the Semitic alien will obtain from the Russian Empire. The voices of Maxime Gorky, and of Tolstoy, and of a few other noble spirits to the contrary are but moral foils which exhibit by contrast the omnipotent strength of the resisting and resistless ruling influences behind the Tsar; military, religious, social, and industrial; which stand remorseless and irremovable between the Russian Jew and justice and equality.

Russia's point of view must be understood if she is to be rightly judged in this matter, and if the friends of a persecuted people are to be persuaded to concentrate their sympathetic energies upon some feasible remedy for an intolerable wrong. Socialism has, as yet, about as much of a hold and of a hope in Russia, as Protestantism has in Spain, or Catholicity in Turkey. The soil is not congenial; but the propaganda is a most serious danger which the Russian powers that be fear more as a potential future element of industrial and political agitation than as a present trouble to the forces of law and order. Socialism is like the Jew, an unwelcome intruder, and both are inseparably associated in the ruling and official mind of the Empire.

In many respects and ways Russian autocracy is ahead of constitutional countries in enlightened efforts to solve the complex labour problem of our day. The manifold evils of overcrowded urban centres are recognised and guarded against in the encouragement of rural manufacturing villages. Plans for enabling artisans to acquire the ownership of their homes are the work of Commissions and Societies subsidised by the Government for this special task. There are apprenticeship schools for the children of mechanics, "public workshops" for the unemployed in times of distress, and other progressive schemes having the social and moral betterment of the worker in view. These and kindred reforms are engaging the serious and earnest attention of the Tsar's ministerial advisers.

In one other most important respect the Russian Government is setting an example in beneficent industrial enterprise which more progressive countries might follow with marked advantage to their labouring classes. This is the national encouragement offered to the "Koustari," or rural, industries. These play an essential part in the national economy of the Russian people. They help to keep families together, and to minimise migratory labour. These cottage industries give remunerative employment during slack seasons and winter months to several million people, and yield an addition to the general wage fund of the country averaging five hundred million roubles a year. All these industries have direct economic relation to the greatest of all Russian industries, that of agriculture. They, therefore, play a doubly profitable part in the social welfare of the people, in helping to maintain a due economic balance between rural and urban labour, and in upholding the primary importance of land industries to the physical and moral health of the nation.

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