question, endeavoring
to bring these materials into some kind of system. It also received a
number of memoranda on the Jewish question from outsiders, among them
from public-minded Jews, who in most cases used Baron Horace Guenzburg as
their go-between--memoranda which sought to put the various aspects of
the question in their right perspective. After four years spent on the
examination of the material, the Commission undertook to formulate its
own conclusions, but, for reasons which will become patent later on,
these conclusions were never crystallized in the form of legal
provisions.

While the High Commission was assiduously engaged in the "revision of
the current laws concerning the Jews," in other words, was repeating the
Sisyphus task abandoned by scores of similar bureaucratic creations in
the past, the Government pursued with unabated vigor its old-time policy
of making the life of the Jews unbearable by turning out endless
varieties of new legal restrictions. These restrictions were generally
passed "outside the law," i.e., without their being previously submitted
to the Council of State; they were simply brought up as suggestions
before the Council of Ministers, and, after adoption by the latter,
received legal sanction through ratification by the Tzar. Without
awaiting the results of the revision of Jewish legislation which it had
itself undertaken, the Russian Government embarked enthusiastically upon
the task of forging new chains for the hapless Jewish race. For a number
of years the High Commission was nothing more than a cover to screen
these cruel experiments of the powers at the helm of the state. At the
very time in which the ministerial officials serving on the High
Commission indulged in abstract speculations about the Jewish question
and invented various methods for its solution, the Council of Ministers
anticipated this solution in the spirit of rabid anti-Semitism, and was
quick to give it effect in concrete life.

The wind which was blowing from the heights of Russian bureaucracy was
decidedly unfavorable to the Jews. The belated coronation of Alexander
III., which took place in May, 1883, and, in accordance with Russian
tradition, brought, in the form of an imperial manifesto, [1] various
privileges and alleviations for different sections of the Russian
population, left the Jews severely alone. The Tzar lent an attentive ear
to those zealous governors and governors-general, who in their "most