[Footnote 1:  See p. 57.]

It is obvious that it is no easier to make a Jew into a Russian by force than to change the skin of the proverbial Ethiopian; nor is it likely that the Russian Government ever entertained the idea of making such an attempt.  If it had any definite plan at all, it was to render things so uncomfortable to the unfortunate Hebrews that they would gradually leave the country.  Real persecution began at the accession of Alexander III. in 1881, when it spread into Russia, significantly enough, from Germany, where a violent anti-Semite agitation had sprung up at the beginning of the year.  Riots directed against the Jews, and winked at if not encouraged by the authorities, broke out in the towns of Southern Russia.  Edicts followed which excluded the Jews from all direct share in local government, refused to allow more than a small percentage of Jews to attend the schools and universities, forbade them to acquire property outside the towns, laid special taxes upon their backs, and so on.  This attitude of the Government encouraged the populace of the towns to believe that they might attack the Jews with impunity.  The Jews are regarded in modern Russia in much the same light as they were regarded by our forefathers in the Middle Ages.  They are hated, that is to say, on two counts:  as unbelievers and as usurers.  The condition of affairs in a township where the population is half-Jewish, half-Christian, and where the Christians are financially and commercially in the hands of the Jews, and the Jews are politically and administratively in the hands of the Christians, is obviously an extremely dangerous one.  Add to this the presence of a large hooligan section which is found in almost every Russian town of any size, the open disfavour shown towards the Jews by the Government, and the secret intrigues and incitement of the police, and you get a train of circumstances which lead inevitably to those violent anti-Semitic explosions, known as pogroms, which have stained the pages of modern Russian history.  The revolutionary movement has complicated matters still further; for Jews are naturally to be found in the revolutionary ranks, and the bureaucracy and its hooligan supporters have tended to identify the Jewish race with the Revolutionary Party.  Nothing can excuse the treatment of the Jews in Russia during the last thirty-five years, and the guilt lies almost entirely upon the Government, which, instead of leading the people and educating them by initiating an enlightened policy towards the Jews, a policy which might in fact have done more than anything else to “Russify” the latter, has persistently aided and abetted the worst elements of the population in their acts of violence.  It has reaped its reward in the rise of one of the most formidable of the revolutionary parties in modern Russia, the so-called Jewish “Bund.”  The Governor of Vilna, in a confidential report written in 1903, declared that “this political movement is undoubtedly a result of the abnormal position of the Jews, legal and economic, which has been created by our legislation.  A revision of the laws concerning the Jews is absolutely urgent, and every postponement of it is pregnant with the most dangerous consequences.”