m
women, children, and old men, with remnants of their household
belongings lying around them, filled the station of the Brest railroad.
Threatened by police convoy and transportation prison and having failed
to obtain a reprieve, they had made up their mind to leave, despite a
temperature of thirty degrees below zero. Fate, it would seem, wanted to
play a practical joke on them. At the representations of the police
commissioner-in-chief, the governor-general of Moscow had ordered to
stop the expulsions until the great colds had passed, but ... the order
was not published until the expulsion had been carried out. In this way
some 20,000 Jews who had lived in Moscow fifteen, twenty-five, and even
forty years were forcibly removed to the Jewish Pale of Settlement.

[Footnote 1: Under the Russian law (compare Vol. I, p. 308, n. 2)
burghers are subject to corporal punishment, whereas the higher
estates, among them the merchants, enjoy immunity in this
direction.]

3. EFFECT OF PROTESTS

All these horrors, which remind one of the expulsion from Spain in 1492,
were passed over in complete silence by the Russian public press. The
cringing and reactionary papers would not, and the liberal papers could
not, report the exploits of the Russian Government in their war against
the Jews. The liberal press was ordered by the Russian censor to refrain
altogether from touching on the Jewish question. The only Russian-Jewish
press organ which, defying the threats of the censor, had dared to fight
against official Russian Judaeophobia, the _Voskhod_, had been
suppressed already in March, before the promulgation of the Moscow
expulsion edict, "for the extremely detrimental course pursued by it." A
similar fate overtook the _Novosti_ of St. Petersburg which had printed
a couple of sympathetic articles on the Jews.

In this way the Government managed to gag the independent press on the
eve of its surprise attack upon Moscow Jewry, so that everything could
be carried out noiselessly, under the veil of a state secret.
Fortunately, the foreign press managed to unveil the mystery. The
Government of the United States, faced by a huge immigration tide from
Russia, sent in June, 1891, two commissioners, Weber and Kempster, to
that country. They visited Moscow at the height of the expulsion fever,
and, travelling through the principal centers of the Pale of Settlement,
gathered carefully sifted documentary evidence of wha