which was rather an indictment against the Jews than against the rioters.  He argued that these disorders had been called forth entirely by the “exploitation of the Jews,” who had seized the principal economic positions in the province, and he conducted his cross-examination of the Jewish witnesses in the same hostile spirit.  When one of the witnesses retorted that the aggravation of the economic struggle was due to the artificial congestion of the Jews in the pent-up Pale of Settlement, the prosecutor shouted:  “If the Eastern frontier is closed to the Jews, the Western frontier is open to them; why don’t they take advantage of it?” This summons to leave the country, doubly revolting in the mouth of a guardian of the law, addressed to those who under the influence of the pogrom panic had already made up their minds to flee from the land of slavery, produced a staggering effect upon the Jewish public.  The last ray of hope, the hope for legal justice, vanished.  The courts of law had become a weapon in the hands of the anti-Jewish leaders.

2.  THE POGROM PANIC AND THE BEGINNING OF THE EXODUS

The feeling of safety, which had been restored by the published portion of the imperial reply at the audience of May 11, was rapidly evaporating.  The Jews were again filled with alarm, while the instigators of the pogroms took courage and decided that the time had arrived to finish their interrupted street performance.  The early days of July marked the inauguration of the second series of riots, the so-called summer pogroms.

The new conflagration started in the city of Pereyaslav, in the government of Poltava, which had not yet discarded its anti-Jewish Cossack traditions. [1] Pereyaslav at that time harbored many fugitives from Kiev, who had escaped from the spring pogroms in that city.  The increase in the Jewish population of Pereyaslav was evidently displeasing to the local Christian inhabitants.  Four hundred and twenty Christian burghers of Pereyaslav, avowed believers in the Gospels which enjoin Christians to love those that suffer, passed a resolution calling for the expulsion of the Jews from their city, and, in anticipation of this legalized violence, they decided to teach the Jews a “lesson” on their own responsibility.  On June 30 and July 1, Pereyaslav was the scene of a pogrom, marked by all the paraphernalia of the Russian ritual, though unaccompanied this time by human sacrifices.  The epilogue to the pogrom was marked by an originality of its own.  A committee consisting of representatives of the municipal administration, four Christians and three Jews, was appointed to inquire into the causes of the disorders.  This committee was presented by the local Christian burghers with a set of demands, some of which were in substance as follows: 

[Footnote 1:  Comp.  Vol.  I, p. 145.]