police commissioner, the Ispravnik, the military commander, the
burgomaster, and the president of the nobility [1] had either directly or
indirectly abetted the pogrom. Many rioters, who had been arrested by
the police, were soon released, because they threatened otherwise to
point out to the higher authorities the ringleaders from among the local
officials and the representatives of Russian society. The Jews, again,
were constantly terrorized by these scoundrels and cowed by the fear of
massacres and complete annihilation, in case they dared to expose their
hangmen before the courts.

[Footnote 1: The nobility of each government forms an organization of
its own. It is headed by a president for the entire government who has
under his jurisdiction a president for each district (or county). Such a
county president is referred to in the text.]

The pogrom of Balta found but a feeble echo in the immediate
neighborhood--in a few localities of the governments of Podolia and
Kherson. It seemed as if the energy of destruction and savagery had
spent itself in the exploits at Balta. On the whole, the pogrom campaign
conducted in the spring of 1882 covered but an insignificant territory
when compared with the pogrom enterprise of 1881, though
surpassing it considerably in point of quality. The horrors of Balta
were a substantial earnest of the Kishinev atrocities of 1903
and the October pogroms of 1905.

4. THE CONFERENCE OF JEWISH NOTABLES AT ST. PETERSBURG

The horrors of Balta cast their shadow upon the conference of Jewish
delegates which met in St. Petersburg on April 8-11, 1882. The
conference, which had been called by Baron Horace Guenzburg, with the
permission of Ignatyev, was made up of some twenty-five delegates from
the provinces--among them Dr. Mandelstamm of Kiev, Rabbi Isaac Elhanan
Specter of Kovno--and fifteen notables from the capital, including Baron
Guenzburg himself, the railroad magnate Polakov, and Professor Bakst. The
question of Jewish emigration was the central issue of the conference,
although, in connection with it, the general situation of Russian Jewry
came up for discussion. There was a mixed element of tragedy and
timidity in the deliberations of this miniature congress, at which
neither the voice of the masses nor that of the _intelligentzia_ were
given a full hearing. On the one hand, the conference listened to
heartrending speeches, picturing the intolerable position of the Jews;
and one of