hysicians,
lawyers, artisans were admitted into the interior for the sole purpose
of developing business in those places and filling the palpable shortage
in artisans and professional men. "As soon as this or that category of
Jews was found to be serviceable to the Russian people, it was relieved,
and relieved only in part, from the pressure of exceptional laws, and
received into the dominant population of the Empire." But the millions
of plain Jews, abandoned by the upper classes, have continued to
languish in the suffocating Pale. [1] The Jewish population is denied the
elementary rights guaranteeing liberty of pursuit, freedom of movement
and land ownership, such as only a criminal may be deprived of by a
verdict of the courts. As it is, discontent is rife among these
disinherited masses. "The rising generation of Jews has already begun to
participate in the revolutionary movement to which they had hitherto
been strangers." The system of oppression must be set aside. All the
Jewish defects, their separatism and one-sided economic activity, are
merely the fruits of this oppression. Where the law has no confidence in
the population, there inevitably the population has no confidence in the
law, and it naturally becomes an enemy of the existing order of things,
"Human reason does not admit of any considerations which might justify
the placing of many millions of the Jewish population, on a level with
criminal offenders." The first step in the direction of complete
emancipation ought to be the immediate grant of the right of domicile
all over the Empire.

[Footnote 1: The narrow utilitarianism of the governmental policy in the
Jewish question may also be illustrated by the official attitude towards
the promotion of agriculture among the Jews. Under Alexander I. and
Nicholas I. Jewish agricultural colonization in the South of Russia was
encouraged by the grant of special privileges, though the Jewish
settlers were subjected to the stern tutelage of bureaucratic
inspectors. But under Alexander II., when Southern Russia was no longer
in need of artificial colonization, the Government discontinued its
policy of promoting Jewish colonization, and an ukase issued in 1866
stopped the settlement of Jews in agricultural colonies altogether. A
little later the Jewish colonies in the South-west were deprived of a
large part of their lands, which were distributed among the peasants.]

These bold words which turned the Jews from defe