my audience. Oh, yes, they would gladly
accept an invitation to a pogrom. The thought that we may be confused
with them is a hundred times more insulting to us even than the
accusation of taking part in a pogrom.

"Gentlemen! While I have been speaking I have often noticed smiles on
your faces. I understand you. Our presence here, our application for
your assistance, and above all the unexpectedness of such a phenomenon
as a systematic organisation of thieves, with delegates who are
thieves, and a leader of the deputation, also a thief by
profession--it is all so original that it must inevitably arouse a
smile. But now I will speak from the depth of my heart. Let us be rid
of our outward wrappings, gentlemen, let us speak as men to men.

"Almost all of us are educated, and all love books. We don't only read
the adventures of Roqueambole, as the realistic writers say of us. Do
you think our hearts did not bleed and our cheeks did not burn from
shame, as though we had been slapped in the face, all the time that
this unfortunate, disgraceful, accursed, cowardly war lasted. Do you
really think that our souls do not flame with anger when our country
is lashed with Cossack-whips, and trodden under foot, shot and spit at
by mad, exasperated men? Will you not believe that we thieves meet
every step towards the liberation to come with a thrill of ecstasy?

"We understand, every one of us--perhaps only a little less than you
barristers, gentlemen--the real sense of the pogroms. Every time that
some dastardly event or some ignominious failure has occurred, after
executing a martyr in a dark corner of a fortress, or after deceiving
public confidence, some one who is hidden and unapproachable gets
frightened of the people's anger and diverts its vicious element upon
the heads of innocent Jews. Whose diabolical mind invents these
pogroms--these titanic blood-lettings, these cannibal amusements for
the dark, bestial souls?

"We all see with certain clearness that the last convulsions of the
bureaucracy are at hand. Forgive me if I present it imaginatively.
There was a people that had a chief temple, wherein dwelt a
bloodthirsty deity, behind a curtain, guarded by priests. Once
fearless hands tore the curtain away. Then all the people saw, instead
of a god, a huge, shaggy, voracious spider, like a loathsome
cuttlefish. They beat it and shoot at it: it is dismembered already;
but still in the frenzy of its final agony it stretches