CHAPTER V

RUSSIA’S ATTITUDE

The absolute truth about the plan and purpose of the massacres at Kishineff in April may be difficult to determine amidst the conflicting accounts of Russian officials, and of Jewish witnesses of what actually occurred. The wronged and the wrongers seldom or ever agree as to disputed facts. But there can be no doubt upon any mind conversant with the state of Russian feeling, and the trend of Russia’s domestic policy, as to the intolerable position of the Hebrew subjects of the Tsar. No facts are concealed in this connection. They are as objective and undisguised as the Russian policeman, and as patent to every inquirer from Odessa to Warsaw as the rivers Dniester and Vistula. I brought away with me after a journey through the Jewish Pale, the conviction that there is no horizon of hope for the Russian Jew in any prospective era of future emancipation. He is and will remain an alien until the politically impossible comes to be a reality--until the Empire of the Tsar elects to adopt a government of constitutional liberty.

He is under no personal or political restraint, it is true, in the matter of emigration. The Jews are free to leave Russia to-morrow. Such freedom of action, however, is like the tempting waters which only aggravated the thirst of Tantalus by the mockery of a nearness made impossible to reach. The poverty of the vast mass of these unfortunate people renders the thought of finding refuge in America or the Argentine a hopeless dream. And, as an educated Russian official said, in discussing this question with the writer, “What can we do with them? They are the racial antithesis of our nation. A fusion with us is impossible, owing to religious and other disturbing causes. They will always be a potential source of sectarian and economic disorder in our country. We cannot admit them to equal rights of citizenship for these reasons and, let me add, because their intellectual superiority would enable them in a few years’ time to gain possession of most of the posts of our civil administration. They are a growing danger of a most serious nature to our Empire in two of its most vulnerable points,--their discontent is a menace to us along the Austrian and German frontiers, while they are the active propagandists of the Socialism of Western Europe within our borders. The only solution of the problem of the Russian Jew is his departure from Russia.”

This is the conclusion to which one is irresistibly driven by a full survey of the cruelly anomalous position occupied by the Jew in relation to all the dominant factors of Russian life and government. He is under the obligations of citizenship, military and otherwise, without its privileges or full protection. Special taxes are imposed upon him. He is confined by law within a kind of economic concentration camp. The legal difficulties put in the way of the full exercise of his industrial capacities are both the source of his poverty and of his oppression. He cannot own land, within the Pale, or work it; but he must live. Therefore, he is compelled to exploit those who will hate him all the more on account of a resourcefulness which conquers some of the obstacles purposely placed in the way of his livelihood. His faith is assailed by almost every form of human temptation, including the terrorism of such periodical crimes as those perpetrated a few weeks ago. And the very fidelity which enables him to resist both the powers of proselytism and of persecution, only adds one more prejudiced ground to the many which appeal against him to the religious side of an autocratic regime which decrees that an invulnerable heterodoxy is one of the worst of crimes in Russia.

The Jew has no friend outside his own race in Russia, while not infrequently those of his own household are the worst paymasters of his talent and industry. The peasant dislikes him for his race, his religion, and his exploiting propensities. The artisan and labourer in urban centres of the crowded Pale look upon him as an economic black-leg, because he is compelled to work at anything for the wages of bare subsistence, in order to live. He is, by the cruel decree of his fate, and not by choice, the cause of low wages. This is one reason why a great number of the sanguinary rioters at Kishineff were Russian and Moldavian workingmen.

The shop-keeper and petty dealer see in their Hebrew rival a competitor who outclasses them in all the dexterous tricks of trade, and who can succeed where the business capacity of the Slavonic gentile is wanting in perseverance and resource. Here hatred is born of a sordid jealousy.

As rich merchant and banker he is tolerated. The wealthy Russian Jew is, at present, a Russian necessity. Odessa, one of the richest cities of the Empire, is “run” by the superior abilities of the proscribed race. Its commercial prosperity would collapse to-morrow if they were expelled; just as the business and progress of Kishineff have been all but paralysed by the outbreak against them at Easter.

Anti-Semitic prejudices grow as we proceed from the rivalries of economic pursuits to the classes and interests associated with the administration of the Empire. The policeman knows the Jew is made an alien by law, and that the necessity he is under to evade the legal disabilities to which he is subject renders him a profitable source of blackmail. Where his poverty repels the exercise of this corruption, the guardian of the peace looks upon the Jew with all the mixed antipathy--racial, religious, and economic--of the superstitious, uniformed Mujik.

In the lower and middle grades of the civil service the Jew is feared as well as disliked. He is known to be far more intellectual, more industrious, and more capable than the average Russian, and there is a dread lest employment in the innumerable posts of a vast administration should, at some future period, be thrown open to a race so versatile, so sober, and so ambitious to succeed. In every Royal School or Gymnasium to which a Jewish youth is admitted--the number must never exceed 10 per cent. of the whole attendance, in some schools not 5 per cent.--the son of Abraham is certain to eclipse his rivals, and to walk off with whatever honours are to be won.

I have already indicated the feeling, candidly expressed, of the higher branches of the public service on the subject of the Jew as a possible rival in that department of the state. An equality of opportunity would mean a monopoly of posts by sheer force of mental and general equipment.

The Russian officer is not averse to the Jew as a soldier, but he must never be--a Russian officer.

Finally, the Government of Russia looks upon the Jew as the most dangerous of disturbing factors in the rapid development of the industrial life of the Empire, and as a political enemy within the ambit of its most vulnerable western frontier. He is believed to be the active propagandist of Socialism, and he is known to have powerful political and financial allies among the pressmen and financiers of France, England, and Germany--allies who can strike at Russia’s financial credit, external policies, and moral prestige, in retaliation for the legal outlawry of their race within the dominions of the Tsar.

Against these governmental, religious, industrial, social, and national forces of a huge empire combined, what chance has a proscribed race, alienised by law, of obtaining redress? It is a hopeless struggle, look at it how we may. The duties and obligations of civilised rule may be put before the Russian Government, and the pleas of an enlightened jurisprudence advanced in behalf of the Russian Jew, but with what result? Russia makes answer, “These people are not of us, any more than the Chinese of San Francisco, or the ten millions of emancipated Negroes, are free citizens of the United States Republic. They are a danger to the Empire from within, more so than the existence of the Boer Republics of South Africa ever was a menace to the prestige of the British Empire, the removal of which, nevertheless, required a great and costly war. We claim the right to resort to our own measures, as other Powers have done, as France is doing to-day, to safeguard the peace of the realm, and to minimise the risks involved in having an unfriendly element, composed of five or six millions of an unpopular race, located where a German or an Austrian attack might some day be made upon our Western frontier. We cannot expect, or induce, other countries to open the gates of emigration to these undesirables, but we will not permit any Power or people to coerce us to admit this race to the common rights of Russian citizenship or nationality.”

This may be despotic, irrational, and all the rest, but it is the answer which every external attempt to nationalise the Semitic alien will obtain from the Russian Empire. The voices of Maxime Gorky, and of Tolstoy, and of a few other noble spirits to the contrary are but moral foils which exhibit by contrast the omnipotent strength of the resisting and resistless ruling influences behind the Tsar; military, religious, social, and industrial; which stand remorseless and irremovable between the Russian Jew and justice and equality.

Russia’s point of view must be understood if she is to be rightly judged in this matter, and if the friends of a persecuted people are to be persuaded to concentrate their sympathetic energies upon some feasible remedy for an intolerable wrong. Socialism has, as yet, about as much of a hold and of a hope in Russia, as Protestantism has in Spain, or Catholicity in Turkey. The soil is not congenial; but the propaganda is a most serious danger which the Russian powers that be fear more as a potential future element of industrial and political agitation than as a present trouble to the forces of law and order. Socialism is like the Jew, an unwelcome intruder, and both are inseparably associated in the ruling and official mind of the Empire.

Russia’s industrial development, like the extension of her power and prestige, must be along lines selected by herself. She wants no external tutelage, and will have no outside meddling in her domestic affairs. Nor, is she taking this stand out of any unwillingness to see labour rightly rewarded, or from any desire that a favoured class or protected interest shall sweat or treat unjustly the growing industrial population of her manufacturing centres. Any such imputation would be untrue and unfair. There is scarcely a practicable reform in the social and industrial programme of Trades-Unionism which some department of Russian administration is not trying its best, at the present time, to put into operation, in some tentative way, for the benefit of the mill, and foundry, and general workshop hands of Russia’s manufacturing activities;--old-age pensions, profit-sharing, sanitation of mills and mines, healthy housing of workers, even to the copying of the _Arbeiterstadt_ of Mülhausen, in the _Cité ouvrière_ of Dago-Kertell. But there shall be no Trades-Unionist combination in Russia except what emanates from and is sanctioned by a paternal government.

In many respects and ways Russian autocracy is ahead of constitutional countries in enlightened efforts to solve the complex labour problem of our day. The manifold evils of overcrowded urban centres are recognised and guarded against in the encouragement of rural manufacturing villages. Plans for enabling artisans to acquire the ownership of their homes are the work of Commissions and Societies subsidised by the Government for this special task. There are apprenticeship schools for the children of mechanics, “public workshops” for the unemployed in times of distress, and other progressive schemes having the social and moral betterment of the worker in view. These and kindred reforms are engaging the serious and earnest attention of the Tsar’s ministerial advisers.

In one other most important respect the Russian Government is setting an example in beneficent industrial enterprise which more progressive countries might follow with marked advantage to their labouring classes. This is the national encouragement offered to the “Koustari,” or rural, industries. These play an essential part in the national economy of the Russian people. They help to keep families together, and to minimise migratory labour. These cottage industries give remunerative employment during slack seasons and winter months to several million people, and yield an addition to the general wage fund of the country averaging five hundred million roubles a year. All these industries have direct economic relation to the greatest of all Russian industries, that of agriculture. They, therefore, play a doubly profitable part in the social welfare of the people, in helping to maintain a due economic balance between rural and urban labour, and in upholding the primary importance of land industries to the physical and moral health of the nation.

Russia, unlike England, recognises the national danger of physical degeneracy through overcrowded manufacturing cities. Knowing how the prospect of better wages in these centres attracts the workers of the soil to the employment of mills and foundries, she sets herself the task of encouraging the growth of such counter-industries as will tend to minimise the extent of this movement. Not alone does she want to remove mills from the unhealthy environment of crowded towns by placing them amidst rural surroundings, she also wisely tries to add to the necessarily scant money earnings of farmers’ families the profits of the Koustari occupations, the better to preserve the home influence and the healthy atmosphere of village industrial life for the general benefit of the people’s physique and to the great moral advantage of the Russian masses.

All this is necessary to be understood in order to comprehend the antipathy, economic and political, which the Russian Jew excites in the official and the general Russian mind.

And, above all, this one additional fact must, in like manner, be grasped in any useful discussion of the problem of the Russian Jew.

The enormous development of the industrial resources and energies of Russia is too frequently ignored in an unfriendly foreign press, which finds space and speculation only for the external policy and generally exaggerated plans of the Tsar’s Government. What Russia is accused of coveting in Manchuria, or of devising in Persia, and not what she is strenuously and rapidly achieving in the sphere of her vast domestic activities, exercises the critical attention of West-European and American journalism. And yet, the wide and sure and extraordinary progress that is being made in the economic development of a great empire, as self-contained in its measureless natural resources as the United States, and with an assured domestic market for most of her manufactured products in a population of fully 140,000,000--growing at a rate of upwards of 2,000,000 annually out of a natural increase--ought to be a subject of infinitely greater concern to the public thought of commercial rivals like Great Britain and the United States--as it undoubtedly is to the keener sense of German competition--than what Russian policy may or may not mean in its diplomatic trend in the Far East.

Russia is at the beginning of an enormous manufacturing career. Her surplus urban population will be drawn upon for the needs of her mills and factories. An artisan class, in a comparatively new sphere of industrial energy, is rapidly growing, made up of young men who must inevitably gather new ideas of social life among the influences of associated labour; a class to be recruited from an uneducated peasantry, susceptible to new impressions of capital and labour, of wages and economic rights, of citizenship and political teachings, and of the contending human rivalries of class interests for wealth and influence and power in the rule of the state.

In a word, the government of a country in which freedom of the press is limited, and the right of public meeting denied; where no Parliament, or Congress, exists for the ventilation of theories, the discussion of reforms, or the chances of legislative redress, finds itself confronted with the problem of a huge working class, soon to number millions, and to be emancipated from peasant ignorance; a class, too, which must contribute its quota of strength to Russia’s enormous army. And this autocratic guardian of an Empire’s destinies says: “The enemy of my household is the Jew. I have treated him badly, and he naturally resents it. He retaliates by preaching Socialism in my industrial centres. He is in alliance with the avowed enemies of the Empire in Western Europe. For all these reasons, out he must go! Let him be off to any country whose Constitution may admit him to equal citizenship with people who are ruled by other systems and laws than ours. In Russia the Jew is both a domestic and an Imperial danger, and it is our duty to rid ourselves of its cause.”