military duty "--a design which, from
the political point of view, may well be pronounced criminal and which
was evidently at the bottom of the severe military fines imposed upon
the Jews. The same open-hearted chronicler adds:

It may be easily understood how sympathetically the Government
received the proposal of the Jewish Colonization Association in
London, which had been founded by Baron de Hirsch in 1891, to
remove, in the course of twenty-five years, 3,250,000 Jews from
Russia. [1]

[Footnote 1: This figure represents the official estimate of the
number of Russian Jews. In other words, the Government hoped to get
rid of all Jews.]

The name of Maurice de Hirsch was not unknown to the Russian Government.
For a few years previously it had had occasion to carry on negotiations
with him, with results of which it had scant reason to boast. This great
German-Jewish philanthropist, who was resolved to spend hundreds of
millions on the economic and agricultural advancement of his
co-religionists in Eastern Europe, had donated in 1888 fifty million
francs for the purpose of establishing in Russia arts and crafts
schools, as well as workshops and agricultural farms for the Jews. It
was natural for him to assume that the Russian Government would only be
too glad to accept this enormous contribution which was bound to
stimulate productive labor in the country and raise the welfare of its
destitute masses. But he had forgotten that the benefits expected from
the fund would accrue to the Jewish proletariat, which, according to the
catechism of Jew-hatred, was to be "removed from the monarchy." The
stipulation made by the Russian Government to the representatives of
Baron Hirsch was entirely unacceptable: it insisted that the money
should not be handed over to Jewish public agencies but to the Russian
Government which would expend it as it saw fit. Somebody conceived the
shameful idea, which was accepted by the representatives of Baron
Hirsch, of propitiating Pobyedonostzev by a gift of a million francs for
the needs of his pet institution, the Greek-Orthodox parochial schools.
The "gift" was accepted, but Hirsch's proposal was declined. Thus it
came about that the Russian Jews were deprived of a network of model
schools and educational establishments, while a million of Jewish money
went to swell the number of the ecclesiastic Russian schools which
imbued the Russian masses with crass ignorance and anti-Semitic
p