All this took place during the holy Yom Kippur eve.  The Jews, who did not dare to worship in their synagogues or even to remain in their homes, hid themselves with their wives and children in the garrets and orchards or in the houses of strangers.  Many Jews spent the night in a field outside the city, where, shivering from cold, they could watch the glare of the ghastly flames which destroyed all their belongings.  The police, small in numbers, proved “powerless” against the huge hordes of plunderers and incendiaries.  On the second day, the pogrom was over, the work of destruction having been duly accomplished.  The subsequent judicial inquiry brought out the fact clearly that the pogrom had been engineered by Gladkov and his associates, a fact of which the local authorities could not have been ignorant.  Gladkov fled from the city but returned subsequently, paying but a slight penalty for his monstrous crime.

It should be added, however, that the Government was greatly displeased with the reappearance of the terrible spectre of 1881, as it only tended to throw into bolder relief the policy of legal pogroms by which Western Europe was alarmed.  As a matter of fact, already in October, the semi-official Grazhdanin had occasion to print the following news item: 

  Yesterday [October 15] the financial market [abroad] was marked by
  depression; our securities have fallen, owing to new rumors
  concerning alleged contemplated measures against the Jews.

Commenting upon this, the paper declared that these rumors were entirely unfounded, for the reason that “at the present time all our Government departments are weighed down with problems of first-rate national importance which brook no delay, [1] and they could scarcely find time to busy themselves with such matters as the Jewish question, which requires mature consideration and slow progress in action.”

[Footnote 1:  The paper had in mind the crop failures of that year and the famine which prevailed in consequence in the larger part of Russia.]

The subdued tone adopted by Count Meshcherski, the court journalist, was only partially in accord with the facts.  He was right in stating that the terrible country-wide distress had compelled the deadly enemies of Judaism to pause in the execution of their entire program.  But he forgot to add that the one clause of that program, the realization of which had already begun—­the expulsion from Moscow—­was being carried into effect with merciless cruelty.  The huge emigration wave resulting from this expulsion threw upon the shores of Europe and America the victims of persecution who re-echoed the cries of distress from the land of the Tzars.

Soon afterwards a new surprise, without parallel in history, was sprung upon a baffled world:  the Russian Government was negotiating with the Jewish philanthropist Baron Hirsch concerning the gradual removal of the three millions of its Jewish subjects from Russia to Argentina.