brawl, and the inactivity of the troops was explained either by the inadequacy of their numbers--despite the fact that several battalions were stationed in the city--or by the incapacity of the police, while the dead and wounded were referred to in a vague manner so as to suggest that the victims of the "brawl" were to be found on both sides. But the revelations in the foreign press were of a nature to stagger all Europe and America. The correspondent of the London _Times_ published the text of a secret letter addressed by Plehve to the governor of Bessarabia, in which, two weeks before the pogrom, the latter official was told that, in the case of anti-Jewish "disorders," "no recourse shall be taken to armed interference with the urban population, so as not to arouse hostility to the Government in a population which has not yet been affected by the revolutionary propaganda." The authenticity of this letter is not entirely beyond suspicion. But there can be no doubt that instructions to that effect, rather by word of mouth than in writing, probably through the secret agent Levendahl, had been actually transmitted to the authorities in Kishinev. From the fact that on the second day of the pogrom the governor was still waiting for instructions from St. Petersburg permitting him to discontinue the massacre it is evident that he must have received previous orders to allow it to proceed up to a certain point. The horrors of the Armenian massacres in Turkey, against which even Russian diplomacy had protested more than once, faded into insignificance before the wholesale butchery at Kishinev. Europe and America were deeply agitated. The Jews outside of Russia collected large funds for their unhappy Russian brethren, but their efforts exhausted themselves in sympathy and philanthropy. The effect of the catastrophe upon Russian Jewry was more lasting. A mixed feeling of wrath and shame seized the Jewish public--wrath against the organizers and abetters of the terrible crime, and shame for the tortured and degraded brethren who, not having a chance to save their lives, had failed to save their honor by offering stout resistance to these beasts in human shape, who were sure of immunity. The poet Frug poured forth his sentiments in a Yiddish poem, voicing his sorrow at the physical helplessness of his nation and confining himself to an appeal to the kind Jewish heart: Too keen and grievous is our pain, too weak our hand the blow to parry. Come on, then, tender Jewish heart, and love and comfort to us carry! Brothers, sisters, pray, have pity; dire and dreadful is our need: Shrouds we want the dead to bury, and bread that the living we may feed.[38] A little later, the young poet Bialik gave powerful utterance to his feeling of wrath and shame in his "Burden of Nemirov."[39] He makes God address these words to the martyred nation: