The subdued tone adopted by Count Meshcherski, the court journalist, was only partially in accord with the facts. He was right in stating that the terrible country-wide distress had compelled the deadly enemies of Judaism to pause in the execution of their entire program. But he forgot to add that the one clause of that program, the realization of which had already begun--the expulsion from Moscow--was being carried into effect with merciless cruelty. The huge emigration wave resulting from this expulsion threw upon the shores of Europe and America the victims of persecution who re-echoed the cries of distress from the land of the Tzars. Soon afterwards a new surprise, without parallel in history, was sprung upon a baffled world: the Russian Government was negotiating with the Jewish philanthropist Baron Hirsch concerning the gradual removal of the three millions of its Jewish subjects from Russia to Argentina. CHAPTER XXX BARON HIRSCH'S EMIGRATION SCHEME AND UNRELIEVED SUFFERING 1. NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT Towards the end of the eighties the plan of promoting Jewish emigration from Russia, which had been abandoned with the retirement of Count Ignatyev, was again looked upon favorably by the leading Government circles. The sentiments of the Tzar were expressed in a marginal note which he attached to the report of the governor of Podolia for the year 1888. The passage of the report in which it was pointed out that "the removal of the Jewish proletariat from the monarchy would be very desirable" was supplemented in the Tzar's handwriting by the words "and even very useful." In reply to the proposal of the governor of Odessa to deprive Jewish emigrants of the right to return to Russia, the Tzar answered with a decided "yes." The official Russian chronicler goes even so far as to confess "that it was part of the plan to stimulate the emigration of the Jews (as well as that of the German colonists) by a more rigorous enforcement of the 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.]