Government was
ready to admit into Algiers, as full-fledged citizens, thousands of
destitute Russian Jews, and that the means for transferring them would
be provided by Rothschild's banking house in Paris. At first, while in
St. Petersburg, Altaras was informed that permission to leave Russia
would be granted only on condition that a fixed ransom be paid for every
emigrant.

In Warsaw, however, which city he visited later, in October, 1846, he
was notified that the Tzar had decided to waive the ransom. For some
unexplained reason Altaras left Russia suddenly, and the scheme of a
Jewish mass emigration fell through.

[Footnote 1: A law on the Russian statute books forbids the emigration
of Russian citizens abroad. See later, p. 285, n. 1.]

5. THE ECONOMIC PLIGHT OF RUSSIAN JEWRY AND AGRICULTURAL
EXPERIMENTS

The attempt at thinning the Jewish population by emigration having
failed, the congested Jewish masses continued to gasp for air in their
Pale of Settlement. The slightest effort to penetrate beyond the Pale
into the interior was treated as a criminal offence. In December, 1847,
the Council of State engaged in a protracted and earnest discussion
about the geographical point up to which the Jewish coachmen of Polotzk
should be allowed, to drive the inmates of the local school of cadets on
their annual trips to the Russian capital. The discussion arose out of
the fact that the road leading from Polotzk to St. Petersburg is crossed
by the line separating the Pale from the prohibited interior. A proposal
had been made to permit the coachmen to drive their passengers as far as
Pskov. But when the report was submitted to the Tzar, he appended the
following resolution: "Agreeable; though not to Pskov, but to
Ostrov"--the town nearest to the Pale. Of this trivial kind were
Russia's methods in curtailing Jewish rights three months before the
great upheaval which in adjoining Germany and Austria dealt the
death-blow to absolutism and inaugurated the era of the "Second
Emancipation."

As for the economic life of the Jews, it had been completely undermined
by the system of ruthless tutelage, which the Government had employed
for a quarter of a century in the hope of "reconstructing" it. All these
drumhead methods, such as the hurling of masses of living beings from
villages into towns and from the border-zone into the interior, the
prohibition of certain occupations and the artificial promotion of
others, could not bu