In 1881 a violent outbreak of anti-Jewish feeling, encouraged by the Nationalist newspapers, on one hand, and by the Nihilists on the other, led to much bloodshed and to the destruction of Jewish property and life in the southern and western provinces of Russia, especially in Russian Poland. Many causes contributed to the explosion. For years past, indeed since the abolition of serfdom, the peasantry, especially in South Russia, had been deteriorating both materially and morally. A contemporary observer thus describes the state of things on the eve of the event: “The bad harvests in the succession of years immediately preceding 1881, and the accompanying ravages of a virulent and widespread cattle plague, have completed the misery which idleness and improvidence were steadily producing; and the removal of restraint, the separation of families, and the assemblage of large numbers of the most ignorant classes amid the strange scenes of town and camp life, have unsettled their minds and degraded their morals.” After relating the effect of these conditions on the relations between peasant and landlord, the writer proceeds to explain some of the causes of the peasant’s ill-feeling towards the Jew. “Besides the landlord, there is another class in the south and west by whom the peasant thinks that he has been defrauded. The Jews, whom Government restrictions prevent from becoming agriculturists, and who are debarred from accepting employment in any ordinary industrial establishment, by the fact of their Sabbath limiting them to four and a half days of labour during the Christian week, have from necessity turned their attention almost exclusively to trade. The improvidence of the agriculturist and his want of capital have rendered the assistance of a money-lender and middleman an absolute necessity to him, and this requirement has been naturally supplied by the presence of the Jew, whose sobriety, thrift, energy, and commercial instincts render him especially fit for the vocation. The more improvident the peasantry, the greater are the immediate profits of the Jews, and whilst the former have become steadily impoverished, many of the latter have acquired comparative wealth. There is nothing astonishing, therefore, in the ill-feeling which has arisen towards the Jews, and that ill-feeling has been accompanied by the persuasion that there must be a special injustice in the superior material prosperity of a race whom the Government, by penal legislation, had emphatically marked out as inferior to the Christians. Religious fanaticism is almost unknown in Russia, and indifferentism is rather the rule among a peasantry which lives in amity with Mahommedans, Roman Catholics, and Lutherans alike; but it requires a strong hand to restrain a semi-civilized and poverty-stricken people from attacking and plundering their richer and defenceless neighbours. The Government did not show this strong hand in defence of the Jews,