weight of his opinion on
their side. The project of the Commission, being out of harmony with the
current Government policies, was disposed of at some secret session of
leading dignitaries. The labor of five years was buried in the official
archives.

As for the Jews themselves, they were at no time deceived about the
effects that were likely to attend the work of the High Commission. They
clearly understood that, if the Government had been genuinely desirous
of "revising" the system of Jewish disabilities, it would have stopped,
for a time at least, to manufacture new legislative whips and scorpions.
The dark polar night of Russian reaction reigned supreme. There seemed
to be no end to these orgies of the Russian night owls, the
Pobyedonostzevs and Tolstois, who were anxious to resuscitate the
savagery of ancient Muscovy, and who kept the people in the grip of
ignorance, drunkenness, and political barbarism. Every one in Russia
kept his peace and held his breath. The progressive elements of the
Empire were held down tightly by the lid of reaction. The press groaned
under the yoke of a ferocious censorship. The mystic doctrine of
non-resistance preached by Leo Tolstoi was attuned to the mood
prevailing among educated Russians, for, in the words of the Russian
poet, "their hearts, subdued by storms, were filled with silence and
lassitude."

In Jewish life, too, silence reigned supreme. The sharp pangs of the
first pogrom year were now dulled, and only suppressed moans echoed the
uninterrupted "silent pogrom" of oppression. These were years of which
the Jewish poet, Simon Frug, could sing:

Round about all is silent and cheerless,
Like a lonesome and desert-like plain.
If but one were courageous and fearless
And would cry out aloud in his pain!
Neither storm-wind nor starshine by night,
And the days neither cloudy nor bright:
O my people, how sad is thy state,
How gray and how cheerless thy fate!

But in this silence the national idea was slowly maturing and gaining in
depth and in strength. The time had not yet arrived for clearly marked
tendencies or well-defined systems of thought. But the temper of the
intellectual classes of Russian Jewry was a clear indication that they
were at the cross-roads. The "titled" _inteligenzia_, reared in the
Russian schools, who had drifted away from Judaism, was now joined by
that other _intelligenzia_, the product