T HE line between civilisation and savagery is still narrow. We
are so surrounded by an atmosphere of philanthropy and enlightenment that we scarcely realise how easily naked human passion can change it all into an Inferno. In Russia, as well as in England, there are numbers of people who hate cruelty and revere law and order, and hold the most modern views on conduct. And yet the world has seen in the past weeks the thin surface of civilisation cracked and the vapours of the pit emerging, till it is hard not to imagine that we are back again in the days of some twelfth-century massacre of unbelievers, when, in the name of Christ, His kinsfolk were pillaged and tortured. The facts are the same, the cruelties are not a whit less great ; indeed, the horror is a thousandfold greater, when these things happen in the midst of a society which has the same manners and codes as ourselves, reads the same books, and does homage to the same ideals of culture. The only difference is that there is now no official glorification of the atrocities. Instead of a sleek Bishop rejoicing in the crusade and sending to Rome glowing accounts of how the work of Christ prospered, we have a Governor or Commissioner of Police prating about order and moderation and at the same time giving his men the hint to begin. Mr. Israel Gollancz in a striking letter in last Saturday's Times compared the massacre of the Russian Jews to that of the Waldenses, and regretted the absence of a Cromwell with his summary demands. But there is this difference between the two cases, that in the first it was possible to fix responsibility clearly, and in the second it is not. A modern Cromwell would be met by grave regrets and a denial of all com- plicity. The bureaucracy fix the blame on the Socialists, the Socialists on the bureaucracy, the Generals on a too zealous soldiery, the soldiery upon insufficiently explicit orders. Whatever the proximate cause, the true cause lies in the nature of the whole social organism in Russia, and her blunders of the last three hundred years. Anti-Semitism is an ugly force in the background of all European politics. We have seen it in our own land, when so-called Nation- alists sometimes raise the cry in their campaigns against Imperialism. We saw it some years ago in an extreme form in France ; it crops up every now and again in Germany and. Austria. But in Russia it is not a party cry, it is almost a part of the racial character, a fact as indubitable as the thrift of the French peasant or the stolidity of the German. It is worth while looking at the source of this strange mephitic vapour which every now and again kindles into a devas- tating fire.
Many reasons are obvious. If you herd a race within the limits of a Pale, and debar its youth for ages from the liberal professions, you compel it to turn its attention exclusively to trade. Concentration of interest breeds aptitude, and soon the Jew is a better merchant than his neighbour. All this matters little so long as commerce is less important to the nation than war and state- craft. But in modern times trade has risen in the scale, fortunes have been amassed, and men whose grandfathers would have despised it now turn their attention to money- making. They find in their way a, race with an hereditary aptitude and infinite patience, with whom they cannot cope ; a race, moreover, whom they have been brought up to despise. This explains the feeling of the middle-class man. But look next at the point of view of the proletariat. There are far fewer fortunes among Jews in proportion to their numbers than among Christians, but in Russia a rich Christian p'asses unnoticed, while a rich Jew, from the fact of his birth and peculiar status, is set upon a pedestal for all to mark. The workman sees one whom he has been taught to regard as an outcast living in comfort, and goes home and broods over it. Moreover, he finds Jewish rivals in his own trade, men who live on next to nothing and take any wages. The mere number of Jews in Russia has much to do with the hatred which they excite. In Odessa, for example, one- third of the population is Jewish, and in Poland they number more Mae a million and a half. Wherever he turns the average poor man finds them around him, equally offensive to him in their riches and in their poverty. Take, again, the Universities. Before a Jew can enter one of these he must pass tests far stricter than those for a Christian. The result is that Jewish students are a picked class, and take naturally the highest academic honours, and the best places in the learned professions. The learned Jew, like the rich Jew, is set on a pedestal, with no shield against popular envy and dislike. It is to be said to the honour of Russian students that they are one of the few classes of the population who do not persecute the Jews ; but a certain amount of animosity is inevitable. Last of all take the peasant. He hates, to begin with, any adherent of the Jewish faith on religious grounds. The Jew trader from the city comes to his village and makes him an offer for his crops as they stand in the fields. With the fear of drought and storms before him, he closes, and thinks he has made a good bargain, the Jew taking the risks of all disasters. But a good harvest comes, and the trader makes a modest profit out of the transaction. Ho deserves it, for he took the risks ; but this does not prevent the peasant from believing he has been cheated. Such a, feeling is bound to arise when more advanced traders attempt to introduce business methods among a profoundly ignorant people, and accounts for much of the general antipathy to the Jews. Finally there is the fact that they are a close corporation, tenacious of old customs, and admitting no stranger within their bounds. The ordinary man is suspicious of all sects and clans, political, religious, or social, and he hates what he does not understand, without reflecting that it was the perse- cution of his forefathers which created this cohesion. The result of it all is that the whole of Russia, except a small section of the " intelligents," looks upon the Jew with a dislike which can readily be transformed into hate.
Unpopularity, however, is one thing, but these merciless. atrocities are surely another. What spark has fired the powder-magazine, and changed repugnance towards a neighbour into a desire to kill him with every circum- stance of horror? We fear that the blame for the ghastly occurrence lies largely on the shoulders of the bureaucracy. We acquit them, indeed, of any of the crude Judenhetze which fills the lower classes. Though stupid men as a rule, they see well enough the useful part which the Jew plays in the social economy. Theirs is the far more terrible guilt that without fanaticism and in cold blood they use the lives of miserable men and women to cover their own retreat. We do not say that the intention is universal, for there are many of the higher officials who would scorn the thought; but we fear that it does exist in certain quarters and has been put into force. No doubt they have a kind, of justification ready. They may say— what is a fact—that the revolutionary societies are filled with Jews, and that the Jewish Bund is the most ably organised of all the sections of the Social Democrats. But they have not waged war upon Anarchists as Anarchists ; they have tried to turn the tide of popular hatred from themselves to a traditionally unpopular class, and focus the illwill of centuries. It was not hard to do, for once the spark touched the vapour the flames blazed far beyond human power. Then came the time for well-expressed regrets and so-called attempts at repression. Cossack and peasant, workman and ne'er-do-well, revolutionary and reactionary, found for a moment a task of murder and plunder on which they were agreed. And yet in the long run it is bad policy. Discontent may be averted for a second, but it will come back again to its true object ; and meanwhile the moral sense of Europe has been shocked as deeply as by the Commune or the Terror.
It may be asked why antipathy has so readily resulted in massacre. The answer, we think, lies in the kind of political education Russia has received. In a country governed by. an arbitrary will two consequences appear. One is a carelessness of human life, which its rulers hold so cheap. Another is a kind of hopelessness in the down- trodden classes. They see injustice on all sides, and they feel miserably that they have no pacific remedy. It is like Lynch-law in the Southern States, which people resort to not because they are naturally brutal or lawless, but because they despair of speedy justice by any other means. If the Russian peasant is got to believe that he is being ousted or robbed by the Jew, he will see no remedy except to kill him ; and some day, if he is persuaded that his rulers are evil, he may be equally intolerant of a bloodless reform.
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