for the hapless Jewish race.  For a number of years the High Commission was nothing more than a cover to screen these cruel experiments of the powers at the helm of the state.  At the very time in which the ministerial officials serving on the High Commission indulged in abstract speculations about the Jewish question and invented various methods for its solution, the Council of Ministers anticipated this solution in the spirit of rabid anti-Semitism, and was quick to give it effect in concrete life.

The wind which was blowing from the heights of Russian bureaucracy was decidedly unfavorable to the Jews.  The belated coronation of Alexander III., which took place in May, 1883, and, in accordance with Russian tradition, brought, in the form of an imperial manifesto, [1] various privileges and alleviations for different sections of the Russian population, left the Jews severely alone.  The Tzar lent an attentive ear to those zealous governors and governors-general, who in their “most humble reports” propounded the new-fangled theory of the “injuriousness” of the Jews; the marginal remarks frequently attached by him to these reports assumed the force of binding resolutions. [2] In the beginning of 1883, the governor-general of Odessa, Gurko, took occasion in his report to the Tzar to comment on the excessive growth of the number of Jewish pupils in the gymnazia [3] and on their “injurious effect” upon their Christian fellow-pupils.  Gurko proposed to fix a limited percentage for the admission of Jews to these schools, and the Tzar made the annotation:  “I share this conviction; the matter ought to receive attention.”

[Footnote 1:  See above, p. 246, n. 1]

[Footnote 2:  See on the term “Resolution,” Vol.  I, p. 253, n. 1.]

[Footnote 3:  See above, p. 161, n. 1.]

The matter did of course “receive attention.”  It was brought up before the Committee of Ministers.  But the latter was reluctant to pass upon it at once, and thought it wiser to have it prepared and duly submitted for legislative action at some future time.  However, when the governor-general of Odessa and the governor of Kharkov, in their reports for the following year, expatiated again on the necessity of fixing a school norm for the Jews, the Tzar made another annotation, in a more emphatic tone:  “It is desirable to decide this question finally.”  This sufficed to impress the Committee of Ministers with the conviction “that the growing influx of the non-Christian element into the educational establishments exerts, from a moral and religious point of view, a most injurious influence upon the Christian children.”  The question was submitted for consideration to the High Commission under the chairmanship of Count Pahlen.  The Minister of Public Instruction was ordered to frame post-haste an enactment embodying the spirit of the imperial resolution.  Soon the new fruit of the Russian bureaucratic genius was ready to be plucked—­“the school norm,” which was destined to occupy a prominent place in the fabric of Russian-Jewish disabilities.