the effect of the ministerial circular upon them was staggering.  In their own persons they beheld the three millions of Russian Jewry placed at the prisoner’s bar:  one section of the population put on trial before another.  And who were the judges?  Not the representatives of the people, duly elected by all the estates of the population, such as the rural assemblies, but the agents of the administration, bureaucratic office-holders, who were more or less subordinate to the Government.  The court proceedings themselves were carried on in secret, without a sufficient number of counsel for the defendants who in reality were convicted beforehand.  The attitude adopted by the presiding governors, the speeches delivered by the anti-Semitic members, who were In an overwhelming majority, and characterized by attacks, derisive remarks, and subtle affronts, subjected the Jewish members to moral torture and made them lose all hope that they could be of any assistance in attempting a dispassionate, impartial, and comprehensive consideration of the question.  In the majority of the commissions, their voice was suppressed and silenced.  In these circumstances the Jewish members were forced, as a last resort, to defend the interests of their coreligionists in writing, by submitting memoranda and separate opinions.  However, the instances were rare in which these memoranda and protests were dignified by being read during the sessions.

This being the case, it is not to be wondered at that the commissions brought in their “verdicts” in the spirit of the indictment framed by the authorities.  The anti-Semitic officials exhibited their “learning” in ignorant criticisms of the “spirit of Judaism,” of the Talmud and the national separatism of the Jews, and they proposed to extirpate all these influences by means of cultural repression, such as the destruction of the autonomy of the Jewish communities, the closing up of all special Jewish schools, and the placing of all phases of the inner life of the Jews under Government control.  The representatives of the Russian burghers and peasants, many of whom had but recently co-operated or, at least, sympathized with the perpetrators of the pogroms, endeavored to prove the economic “injuriousness” of the Jews, and demanded that they should be restricted in their urban and rural pursuits, as well as in their right of residence outside the cities.  Notwithstanding the prevailing spirit, five commissions voiced the opinion, which, from the point of view of the Russian Government, seemed rank heresy, that it was necessary to grant the Jews the right of domicile all over the empire so as to relieve the excessive congestion of the Jewish population in the Pale of Settlement.

4.  THE SPREAD OF ANTI-SEMITISM