the Council
of the Ministers. Here is a quotation from this memoir: "In the
economic life of the country the Jews play the part of middlemen,
placed between the producer and the consumer of goods. In the
Northwestern, Southern, and Southwestern provinces this function is
almost exclusively that of the Jews. To isolate under such conditions,
the commercial and industrial population of a considerable section of
the country from the centre of its manufacturing districts is
equivalent to inflicting a tremendous loss not only on the Jewish
merchant class but also on the many millions of the non-Jewish
population.... To isolate the village from the town, the towns of the
West and South from the towns and villages of the Centre and the East,
is to disturb intentionally the economic life of the country, to
undermine credit and depreciate the people's labour."

That is the opinion of the Moscow manufacturers. Well aware of the
real needs of the country, and unwilling to sacrifice their commercial
interests to anti-humanitarian mottoes, they expressed their fear that
the actions of the administration would hinder the realisation of the
harvest and that the "stocks of goods would find neither consumers nor
buyers nor energetic middlemen to the extent to which they otherwise
would have."

The Jewish people has grown to be a living part of Russia's economic
organism, and the blows which are directed against the Jews affect in
an equal, if not a greater, degree the mass of the aboriginal Russian
population. We do not intend to discuss here the Zionistic dreams and
aspirations of the Jews. One thing is clear to us, namely, that a
complete exodus of the Jews from Russia would be greatly detrimental
to her economic development. The Western world understands this truth
very well. Werner Sombart in his work _Die Zukunft der Juden_ (The
Future of the Jews) reaches the following conclusion: "If by a miracle
all the Jews would decide to-morrow to emigrate to Palestine we (the
Germans) would never allow them to. For it would mean a catastrophe in
the field of economic relation, not to speak of other fields, such as
we have never as yet experienced and which would probably cripple our
economic organism forever."

But we, Russians, give little thought to such questions. As late as
the year 1914 we did not hesitate to inaugurate new restrictive
measures, which it took the great trial of this War to stop.

Whoever has our economic welfare at