Fourth, to petition the Government to find means for compensating
  the Jewish population, which had suffered from the pogroms as a
  result of inadequate police protection.

At the same time the conference took occasion to refute the old accusation, which had again been brought up in the gubernatorial commissions, that the Jews still retained their ancient autonomous Kahal organization, and that the latter was operating secretly and was fostering Jewish separatism to the detriment of the other elements of the population.

The resolution of the conference on this score read as follows: 

We, the undersigned, the representatives of various centers of Jewish settlement in Russia, rabbis, members of religious organizations and synagogue boards, consider it our sacred duty, calling to witness God Omniscient, to declare publicly, in the presence of the whole of Russia, that there exists neither an open nor a secret Kahal administration among the Russian Jews; that Jewish life is entirely foreign to any organization of this kind and to any of the attributes ascribed to such an organization by evil minded persons.

The signers of this solemn pronouncement were evidently unaware of the degrading renunciation of national rights which was implied in the declaration that not only had the Jews lost their former comprehensive communal organization—­this was in accordance with the facts—­but that, were such an inner autonomous organization to exist, they would regard it as a criminal offence, subversive of the public order and punishable by the forfeiture of civil rights.

CHAPTER XXIV

LEGISLATIVE POGROMS

1.  THE “TEMPORARY RULES” OF MAY 3, 1882

During the interval between the pogrom of Warsaw and that of Balta the Government was preparing for the Jews a series of legislative pogroms.  In the recesses of the Russian Government offices, which served as the laboratories of police barbarism, the authorities were busy forging a chain of legal and administrative restrictions in order to “regulate” Jewish life in the spirit of complete civil disfranchisement.  The Central Committee on Jewish Affairs, attached to the Ministry of the Interior, which was called for short “the Jewish Committee” but might far more appropriately have been called “the Anti-Jewish Committee,” was basing its labors upon the opinions submitted by the gubernatorial commissions and rearing on this foundation a monstrous structure of disabilities.

The new project was based upon the following theory:  The old Russian legislation was marked by its hostility to the Jews as a secluded group of alien faith and race.  A departure from this attitude was attempted during the reign of Alexander II., when the rights of certain categories of Jews were enlarged, and “a period of toleration was inaugurated.”  But subsequent experience proved the inexpediency of this