BARON HIRSCH AND THE RUSSIAN JEWS. T HE speech of Baron
Hirsch to Reuter's agent in Paris, reported at length in the Times of Wednesday, is enough to make even sanguine men feel a sensation of despair. Baron Hirsch is a mammoth millionaire who is intent on -winning a European position by liberality on the great scale, who has affairs in every country and friends in every capital, and who has, besides, special means of obtaining early and accurate information from St. Peters- burg. Yet he confirms to the full the pessimist view which we were the first to take of the policy adopted by the Russian Government towards the Jews, a view so gloomy that we hardly believed it ourselves, and that many of our friends considered it totally incredible. "It is just one of the benevolent scares," said one observer, "and con- trary to common-sense." 'Unless, however, Baron Hirsch is scattering falsehoods for no conceivable reason all over Europe, he believes that the Russian Government has decided, immovably decided, as a matter of paramount State policy, on the expulsion of the whole of its Jewish subjects,—that is, of five millions of souls, men, women, and children, whose ancestors have lived. under the protection of the Rornanoffs, or of States con- quered by the Romanoffs, as long as descendants of Rurik have reigned in Russia. Without charge of dis- loyalty, for no reason except a bitter popular hatred, partly sociat and partly religious, these unhappy people are being driven out of the cities into the villages, out of the villages into the Western towns, to be huddled and. starved and tormented until they will welcome the final decree which hurls them, across the frontier to live and die among hostile strangers, who for the most part look on them as bandits intent on robbing them of their comfort or prosperity. The expulsion is accomplished by violence, and attended with every kind of cruelty, the women, according to Baron Hirsch, being constantly outraged, a detail we should be slow to believe, but for the known facts as to the conduct of the guards towards the female convicts sent to Siberia. The Jews, in fact, are treated as criminals, and all over the Russian Empire are being harried, oppressed, and, so far as blows go, even tortured, in a way which men had begun to believe in Europe, and under any Christian Government, in "the enlightenment and philanthropy of the age," had become impossible. Some of our readers make themselves miserable over stories of Irish eviction. Let them take the worst of those stories, as told by any priest with a taste for rhetoric, of any one household, and add to it long marches over wind- swept plains, with insufficient food, and under guards who feel it a pleasure to insult and beat their prisoners ; and then add the chance, we will not even affirm the reality, of the foulest outrage for the women; and then multiply the evictions by a million, and conceive as harbours of refuge of ghettos and villages in Poland crowded to repletion, without work or food or poor-houses ; and then they will have some faint idea of what the words, "the expulsion of the Russian Jews," really mean. And yet they will not. Bankrupts in England and evicted families in Ireland find at least sysnpathy, if not assistance, are at least sure that the eyes which watch them will not be full of spite and gratified detestation. These wretched Jewish millions are driven on by enemies, amidst enemies, to enemies, and can take con- solation in their misery only from the sense that, as all suffer alike, they must among themselves all sympathise, however useless sympathy may be. There have been awful crimes committed in this century, but there has been none so colossal in scale as this, to which, indeed, there has been scarcely a parallel in history. And, save in God, there is no remedy. Germany will not make war on Russia for the sake of Jews whom her own people barely tolerate, and. no other Power can ; and the war of the financiers which was threatened will, against the cold determination of the Russian Government, approved as it is by the Russian people, accomplish nothing. Russia does not exist by permission of the Rothschilds, but by her own vast strength, which she is, as against the Jews, so visibly misusing. Baron Hirsch knows perfectly what the financiers can do, and he not only kneels humbly at the Czar's feet begging for respite for his people from his personal " humanity, justice, and mercy," but he proposes a com- promise which accepts as its basis that the expulsion shall be made complete, and that the whole five millions of Russians in gaberdines shall be driven out of Russia as unworthy to desecrate her sacred soil He asks only that the expulsion shall be slower if tlit Jews agree to fly, the whole of them, in a continuous stream for twenty years. In other words, the per- secution, moderated by the absence of direct torture or confiscation, shall continue for a generation, during the whole of which time the wealthy Jews of Europe are to aid their countrymen in settling in that undiscovered land which is willing to receive them. Baron Hirsch, though he is accused of having made his great fortune too rapidly out of contracts in which every advantage was on his side, is one of the great givers of Europe, and certainly in hot earnest about his people ; yet this is the best he is able to suggest for them, a dream of help which, even if realised, would leave millions of men and women for decades at the mercy of a people who look on gladly while they suffer. To move 250,000 persons a year across Europe and the seas is a work which might overtask great Governments, at which the German Etappen department would hesitate, and the British Trea- sury shrink back. Baron Hirsch has done some big works in his time, but does he realise what moving 250,000 souls, two-thirds of them women and children, every year for twenty years across the world would involve ? It would cost in cash £5,000,000 a year, £20 a head ; for even if the emigrants were agriculturists, they must be rationed for a year till a harvest can grow. We do not believe that the wealthy Jews, who, after all said and done, are very few, and who do not possess that great pa wnable estate called a "country," either can or will pay such a tax ; and failing them, whence is the money to be obtained ? The charitable of England hardly contribute such a sum for all their charities, and who else will subscribe ? Baron Hirsch says he will buy land in Argentina by the million acres, and of course that is possible ; but where will he get his plough- men and reapers, those little-considered elements in the social system by whose toil we all live ? The Baron will tell us that Jews can plough, and we do not question their capacity ; but has anybody ever seen them do it, under any stress of circumstances ? A writer in Blackwood for June, obviously a friend to Jews, describes the latest effort at planting a Jewish colony in Palestine, and after descanting on their progress in wealth, thus describes their method The method whereby these destitute immigrants made their remarkable advance is characteristic and simple. They offered themselves as intermediaries and capitalists, though possessing very little cash, They met the peasants, who were bringing their produce to the capital, at some distance from the gates, and purchased all their stock. The peasants were both willing so to save the loss of time and the uncertainty belonging to a sale in the crowded markets, and were also very willing to shorten their day's journey by several miles, But the Jew did not pay in cash but in small promissory-notes, which they had agreed to accept between themselves. By this means the peasant was forced, if he accepted the Jew's offer, either to resell his notes at a discount, or to deal solely with Jewish sellers. These notes were pronounced illegal by the Government, and, their withdrawal was ordered. The Jews refused to accept them save at a very large discount : the loss fell on the peasantry, and the consequence was that they very soon reappeared in the market. When by these means the Jewish middleman has made a considerable profit, there is no doubt that some will undersell their fellows by offering cash to the peasants ; but meantime the city population falls into the hands of Jewish traders, who hold the food-supply in their power ; and the increase of prices, and the coercion thus made practicable, cannot be said to have made the Jews popular with the more primitive population, by whom such sudden changes from ancient methods were entirely unforeseen." Some- body must distribute as well as produce, and if Jews lated. It would be easier to scatter them through• India, and let them become in her hundred thousand • villages the universal Muhajuns, or lenders of money, than to expect them to prosper, or even exist, in raw countries populated by themselves alone. If that ex- periment is to be tried, let it be nearer home. Let Baron Hirsch and his associates scatter the Jews along the southern shore of the Mediterranean, where France can protect them, or induce Europe to give them Morocco, which is nearly empty and an opprobrium to the world, as Lord Salisbury pointed out only a week ago. But the experiment is nearly hopeless.
The melancholy truth is, that if this gigantic oppression must go on unresisted—and we cannot even think of means of resistance, for the Jews of Russia neither will nor can rise in insurrection against one of the great Powers of the world, backed as it is by its whole people—the civilised world must receive the refugees. It does not want them, and will not know what to do with them ; but that or extermination are the only practicable alternatives. If their leaders scatter them sufficiently, directing streams, not to this country or that country, but everywhere, we suppose they can be gradually absorbed, They are i splendidly industrious n their own way ; they have had the habit of enjoying pauperism whipped out of them in the course of ages, during which no man has given them alms ; and wherever there are people they can live somehow,. though for a time it may be in wretchedness. In all the world they can surely find work, and in spite of a dozen attractive plans, we are unable to believe they will find it in any single division of it. It is a horrible nuisance, the result of a horrible crime, which Christianity in the aggregate must just bear, be the consequences what they may, under penalty of being itself criminal. Europe may talk of "locking the Jews out" as much as it likes, and so may America ; but selfish as we all are, when the fire has happened the burnt-out get some shelter somewhere. It is enough to make men cry with rage to think that such a wrong should be done, and done with impunity, in this boastful century, and amidst all our " enlightenment " and progress ; but unless Providence interferes—and it did not interfere when the Flavii struck the same blow, or when Castile and Aragon repeated it—that is, so far as man may see, the only remedy. The water must be suffered to trickle out everywhere, and if it turns some soils into swamps, well, there is a sun, and we must set to work to drain. Europe, we may rely on it, has to pay for its long oppression of the Jews, as America has to pay for its oppression of the Negro, and as Russia will pay for a national outrage almost beyond belief.
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