must above all become the guiding principles of the future activity
of the legislator.

The repressive policy, taken by itself, has been and will always be
the first and main source of the clannishness of the Jews and their
aloofness from Russian life.... The prohibitive laws have not
improved the Jews. On the contrary, they have developed in them the
spirit of opposition, and have prompted them to devise all the time
most dexterous means of evading the law, thereby corrupting the
lower executives of the State power. These laws affect the daily
doings of every member of the Jewish population, and they extend to
such spheres of life and activity in which State control is almost
impossible. They touch the domain of private contract law (the
prohibition of land leases), the domain of physical liberty and the
need of human locomotion (the prohibition to transgress the Pale of
Settlement, or to live in villages within fifty versts of the
border), the domain of daily pursuits and earnings (the prohibition
of several professions), and many others.

No law will ever be able to check effectively the legal violations
in these hourly acts and common relations of life. It is impossible
to attach a policeman or a public prosecutor or a justice of the
peace to every Jew. And yet it is perfectly natural that, being
restricted in the most elementary rights of a subject--to take as
one instance only the right of free movement--every Jew should daily
attempt to violate and evade such burdensome regulations. This is
perfectly natural and intelligible....

About ninety per cent of the whole Jewish population form a mass of
people that are entirely unprovided for, and come near being a
proletariat--a mass that lives from hand to mouth, amidst poverty,
and most oppressive sanitary and general conditions. This very
proletariat is occasionally the target of tumultuous popular
uprisings. The Jewish mass lives in fear of pogroms and in fear of
violence. It looks with envy upon the Jews of the adjacent
governments of the Kingdom of Poland, who are almost entirely
emancipated, though living under the jurisdiction of the same State.
[1] The law itself places the Jews in the category of "alien races,"
on the same level with the Samoyeds and pagans. [2] In a word the
abnormal condition of the present position of the Jews in Russia is
evidenced by the instability and vague