These are the reasons alleged for the persecution of the Russian Jews. First as to “productiveness,” the neglect of which is brought forward as a criminal charge against the Jew. It is an old complaint. The Andalusian monk of yore inveighed against the Jews of Spain because “they preferred to gain their livelihood by traffic rather than by manual labour or mechanical arts.”[167] Modern economic science teaches us that a country can dispense as little with the distributors as with the producers of wealth. Productiveness, however, is well known to be the pet idea of Russian economists. The last two Ministers of Finance have for close on a quarter of a century been fostering production with a reckless energy which by many unbiassed students is regarded as fatal. Everything is done to encourage production and exportation, with the result that the soil gets exhausted, and the reserves of corn, on which the Russian farmer once relied in time of famine, have disappeared from the country.[168] Like all measures carried to excess and without due regard to local conditions, the fever of productiveness is not an unmixed blessing, and the neglect of it will not be laid, by the impartial outsider, as a crime at the door of the Jew, especially when he remembers that the Jew is not a free agent in the choice of his profession. For, even if the law permitted and the Jew wished to devote himself to agriculture, he would be prevented from doing so by the Russian system of village communes--an intrusion into which on the part of non-Christians would be resented by none more bitterly than by the Russian peasant himself. It is thus seen that the Jew could not in any case become a “producer,” but was irresistibly compelled to turn to handicrafts, retail commerce and money-lending.