cor of the highest
Government circles in Russia found undisguised expression:

The Semites--quoth the semi-official organ with an impudent
disregard of truth--have never yet had such an easy life in Russia
as they have at the present time, and yet they have never complained
so bitterly. There is a reason for it. It is a peculiarity of
Semitism: a Semite is never satisfied with anything; the more you
give him the more he wishes to have.

In the evident desire to fool its readers, _Le Nord_ declared that the
protesters at the London meeting might have saved themselves the trouble
of demanding "religious liberty" for the Jews--which in the London
petition was understood, of course, to imply civil liberty for the
professors of Judaism--since nobody in Russia restricted the Jews in
their worship. Nor did the civil disabilities weigh heavily upon the
Jews. On the contrary, they felt so happy in Russia that even the Jewish
emigrants in America dreamt of returning to their homeland.

4. THE PROTEST OF AMERICA

The same attitude of double-dealing was adopted by the smooth-tongued
Russian diplomats toward the Government of the United States. Aroused
over the inhuman treatment of the Jews in Russia, and alarmed by the
effects of a sudden Russian-Jewish immigration to America, which was
bound to follow as a result of this treatment, the House of
Representatives adopted a resolution on August 20, 1890, requesting the
President--

To communicate to the House of Representatives, if not incompatible
with the public interests, any information in his possession
concerning the enforcement of proscriptive edicts against the Jews
in Russia, recently ordered, as reported in the public press; and
whether any American citizens have, because of their religion, been
ordered to be expelled from Russia, or forbidden the exercise of the
ordinary privileges enjoyed by the inhabitants.

In response to this resolution, President Harrison laid before Congress
all the correspondence and papers bearing on the Jewish question in
Russia. [1]

[Footnote 1: The material was printed as _Executive Document_ No. 470,
dated October 1, 1890. It reproduced all the documents originally
embodied in _Executive Document_ No. 192 (see above, p. 294, n. 1), in
addition to the new material.]

A little later, on December 19 of the same year, the following
resolution of protest was introduced in the House of Representatives and
referr