"That is also, then, one of the causes of the ill-treatment of the Jews?"
"It is _the_ cause. Do not suppose that the Holy Synod alone has power to influence legislation in favor of orthodoxy. Sectarians and Jews are demonstrably the only people who have a moral code of their own, and, therefore, know how to distinguish justice from injustice. They are also the only ones who criticise the actions of the authorities. They were, therefore, a dangerous leaven in the community, otherwise slipping off to sleep in a body. Therefore, it was a matter of self-preservation for the autocracy to isolate the Jews and make them harmless. Do not suppose that any anti-Semitic feeling is prevalent among us. The autocrats are trying artfully to implant it by means of such people as Plehve's intimate, Krushevan, of the 'Bessarabetz.' But the effect does not go deep, thanks to the same circumstance which makes the progress of civilization difficult; the peasant cannot read, and does not in the least believe the priest. The massacres of Kishinef were directly commanded. Every man was killed by order of the Czar. No anti-Semitism exists among the people. Whatever anti-Semitism there is is sown by the government for the purpose of isolating the peasants in order that 'the urchins may grow up stupid.'"
"Ought not the Jews to take that into account and not meddle with politics?"
"In the first place, I see no reason why the Jews should become accomplices of this formidable and soul-killing régime of ours. They will be oppressed all the same, whether meek or unruly. They will remain under special legislation, simply because no one can stop the flow of the official's unfailing spring of revenue--the ravaging of the Jews. Moreover, the Jews have never received so much sympathy from us as since they began to place themselves on the defensive and to make common cause with our Radicals. Now for the first time they belong to us, and yet really only those who actually fight with us and for us. This matter, too, is misrepresented. Statistics, which show a percentage of eighty-five Jews in every hundred revolutionaries, are falsified, because gentiles are allowed to slip through in order to injure the Radical--_i. e._, the constitutional--movement by representing it as un-Russian and Jewish, and to mobilize foreign anti-Semitism against us. But the Jews ought to be grateful to Plehve, for, thanks to his machinations, all the intelligent opinion among us has become favorable to the Jews, and recognizes the solidarity of its interest and those of the Jews. The struggle conduces much, however, to the assimilation of the Jews. They are our brothers; they suffer with us and for us, even if also for themselves; for our whole Jewish legislation for twenty years past has consisted only in the curtailing of the rights accorded them under Alexander II. Why should they not become revolutionaries? But they are enemies of the administration merely, not of the state; therefore, we find ourselves on the same footing."