in for so many years, are suddenly destroyed, when the catastrophe comes with the force of an avalanche so that even the Jewish heart which is open to sorrow cannot grasp the whole misfortune?....

Despite the winter cold, people hid themselves on cemeteries to avoid jail and transportation.  Women were confined in railroad cars.  There were many cases of expulsions of sick people who were brought to the railroad station in conveyances and carried into the cars on stretchers....  In those rare instances in which the police physician pronounced the transportation to be dangerous, the authorities insisted on the chronic character of the illness, and the sufferers were brought to the station in writhing pain, as the police could not well be expected to wait until the invalids were cured of their chronic ailments.  Eye-witnesses will never forget one bitterly cold night in January, 1892.  Crowds of Jews dressed in beggarly fashion, among them women, children, and old men, with remnants of their household belongings lying around them, filled the station of the Brest railroad.  Threatened by police convoy and transportation prison and having failed to obtain a reprieve, they had made up their mind to leave, despite a temperature of thirty degrees below zero.  Fate, it would seem, wanted to play a practical joke on them.  At the representations of the police commissioner-in-chief, the governor-general of Moscow had ordered to stop the expulsions until the great colds had passed, but ... the order was not published until the expulsion had been carried out.  In this way some 20,000 Jews who had lived in Moscow fifteen, twenty-five, and even forty years were forcibly removed to the Jewish Pale of Settlement.

[Footnote 1:  Under the Russian law (compare Vol.  I, p. 308, n. 2) burghers are subject to corporal punishment, whereas the higher estates, among them the merchants, enjoy immunity in this direction.]

3.  EFFECT OF PROTESTS

All these horrors, which remind one of the expulsion from Spain in 1492, were passed over in complete silence by the Russian public press.  The cringing and reactionary papers would not, and the liberal papers could not, report the exploits of the Russian Government in their war against the Jews.  The liberal press was ordered by the Russian censor to refrain altogether from touching on the Jewish question.  The only Russian-Jewish press organ which, defying the threats of the censor, had dared to fight against official Russian Judaeophobia, the Voskhod, had been suppressed already in March, before the promulgation of the Moscow expulsion edict, “for the extremely detrimental course pursued by it.”  A similar fate overtook the Novosti of St. Petersburg which had printed a couple of sympathetic articles on the Jews.