Yet when we condemn Russia for her pogroms and her Jew-baitings, we must not forget two facts:  first, that these occurrences are the work, not of the real Russian people, the peasantry which has been described above, but of the dregs of the population which are to be found at the base of the social structure in the towns of Russia as in towns nearer home; second, that Russia is not the only country in the world that has these racial problems to face.  I once heard a Russian and an American discussing the comparative demerits of their respective lands, and I am bound to say that the former held his own very well.  When, for example, the American said, “What about the Jews?” the other answered, “Well, what about the negroes?” and he parried the further question, “What about pogroms?” with another of his own, “What about lynching?” The problems are not, of course, quite on all fours, nor do two wrongs make a right, but a reminder that similar problems exist in other parts of the world will perhaps be enough to show that the Jewish question in Russia is neither unique nor at all easy to solve.  Let us, instead of visiting the sins of a few townships upon the heads of the entire Russian nation, be thankful that we have no such problems in our own islands.  Recent riots outside the shops of German pork-butchers in different parts of the country do not, it must be confessed, lead one to hope that our people would behave much more calmly and discreetly than the Whites of the Southern States or the Christians of South-West Russia, were they placed in the same circumstances.

The Polish question is at once simpler and its story less damaging to the Russian Government than that of the Jews.  The partitions, an account of which has already been given,[1] were of course iniquitous, but, as we have seen, Prussia must bear the chief blame for them.  In any case, the Tsar Alexander I. did his utmost for Poland at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.  He pleaded eloquently for a reunited Poland, and he almost won over Prussia by making arrangements to compensate her for her Polish territory at the expense of Saxony.  But France, England, and Austria opposed his project, and he was obliged to yield to the combined pressure of these powers.  Russia is, therefore, not more but less guilty of the present dismembered state of Poland than her Western neighbours, among whom we must not forget ourselves;[2] and she is to-day only attempting to carry out the promise which she made, but was not allowed to fulfill, a century ago.  Disappointed as he was, Alexander I. made the best of a bad job by granting a liberal constitution to that part of Poland which the Congress assigned to Russia.  Indeed he did everything possible, short of a grant of absolute independence, which at that time would have been absurd, to conciliate public opinion in the Grand-Duchy of Warsaw.  Unfortunately the experiment proved a complete failure, largely owing to the factious and self-seeking Polish nobility