“So we call them Motients, which means ‘half,’ a corruption of moitie ...  Original etymology.  I pay him only because he knows and may inform against me.  And it mostly happens that even when he’s got his share he runs off to the police in order to get another dollar.  We, honest thieves...  Yes, you may laugh, gentlemen, but I repeat it:  we honest thieves detest these reptiles.  We have another name for them, a stigma of ignominy; but I dare not utter it here out of respect for the place and for my audience.  Oh, yes, they would gladly accept an invitation to a pogrom.  The thought that we may be confused with them is a hundred times more insulting to us even than the accusation of taking part in a pogrom.

“Gentlemen!  While I have been speaking I have often noticed smiles on your faces.  I understand you.  Our presence here, our application for your assistance, and above all the unexpectedness of such a phenomenon as a systematic organisation of thieves, with delegates who are thieves, and a leader of the deputation, also a thief by profession—­it is all so original that it must inevitably arouse a smile.  But now I will speak from the depth of my heart.  Let us be rid of our outward wrappings, gentlemen, let us speak as men to men.

“Almost all of us are educated, and all love books.  We don’t only read the adventures of Roqueambole, as the realistic writers say of us.  Do you think our hearts did not bleed and our cheeks did not burn from shame, as though we had been slapped in the face, all the time that this unfortunate, disgraceful, accursed, cowardly war lasted.  Do you really think that our souls do not flame with anger when our country is lashed with Cossack-whips, and trodden under foot, shot and spit at by mad, exasperated men?  Will you not believe that we thieves meet every step towards the liberation to come with a thrill of ecstasy?

“We understand, every one of us—­perhaps only a little less than you barristers, gentlemen—­the real sense of the pogroms.  Every time that some dastardly event or some ignominious failure has occurred, after executing a martyr in a dark corner of a fortress, or after deceiving public confidence, some one who is hidden and unapproachable gets frightened of the people’s anger and diverts its vicious element upon the heads of innocent Jews.  Whose diabolical mind invents these pogroms—­these titanic blood-lettings, these cannibal amusements for the dark, bestial souls?

“We all see with certain clearness that the last convulsions of the bureaucracy are at hand.  Forgive me if I present it imaginatively.  There was a people that had a chief temple, wherein dwelt a bloodthirsty deity, behind a curtain, guarded by priests.  Once fearless hands tore the curtain away.  Then all the people saw, instead of a god, a huge, shaggy, voracious spider, like a loathsome cuttlefish.  They beat it and shoot at it:  it is dismembered already; but still in the frenzy of its final agony it stretches over all the ancient temple its disgusting, clawing tentacles.  And the priests, themselves under sentence of death, push into the monster’s grasp all whom they can seize in their terrified, trembling fingers.