“Forgive me.  What I have said is probably wild and incoherent.  But I am somewhat agitated.  Forgive me.  I continue.  We thieves by profession know better than any one else how these pogroms were organised.  We wander everywhere:  into public houses, markets, tea-shops, doss-houses, public places, the harbour.  We can swear before God and man and posterity that we have seen how the police organise the massacres, without shame and almost without concealment.  We know them all by face, in uniform or disguise.  They invited many of us to take part; but there was none so vile among us as to give even the outward consent that fear might have extorted.

“You know, of course, how the various strata of Russian society behave towards the police?  It is not even respected by those who avail themselves of its dark services.  But we despise and hate it three, ten times more—­not because many of us have been tortured in the detective departments, which are just chambers of horror, beaten almost to death, beaten with whips of ox-hide and of rubber in order to extort a confession or to make us betray a comrade.  Yes, we hate them for that too.  But we thieves, all of us who have been in prison, have a mad passion for freedom.  Therefore we despise our gaolers with all the hatred that a human heart can feel.  I will speak for myself.  I have been tortured three times by police detectives till I was half dead.  My lungs and liver have been shattered.  In the mornings I spit blood until I can breathe no more.  But if I were told that I will be spared a fourth flogging only by shaking hands with a chief of the detective police, I would refuse to do it!

“And then the newspapers say that we took from these hands Judas-money, dripping with human blood.  No, gentlemen, it is a slander which stabs our very soul, and inflicts insufferable pain.  Not money, nor threats, nor promises will suffice to make us mercenary murderers of our brethren, nor accomplices with them.”

“Never ...  No ...  No ... ,” his comrades standing behind him began to murmur.

“I will say more,” the thief continued.  “Many of us protected the victims during this pogrom.  Our friend, called Sesoi the Great—­you have just seen him, gentlemen—­was then lodging with a Jewish braid-maker on the Moldavanka.  With a poker in his hands he defended his landlord from a great horde of assassins.  It is true, Sesoi the Great is a man of enormous physical strength, and this is well known to many of the inhabitants of the Moldavanka.  But you must agree, gentlemen, that in these moments Sesoi the Great looked straight into the face of death.  Our comrade Martin the Miner—­this gentleman here” —­the orator pointed to a pale, bearded man with beautiful eyes who was holding himself in the background—­“saved an old Jewess, whom he had never seen before, who was being pursued by a crowd of these canaille.  They broke his head with a crowbar for his pains, smashed his arm in two places and splintered a rib.  He is only just out of hospital.  That is the way our most ardent and determined members acted.  The others trembled for anger and wept for their own impotence.