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.”