That regard for the moral and material welfare of the people, however, was not the sole, or the principal, motive of the Russian Government’s policy is unwittingly confessed by the fair patriot already quoted. Referring to the prohibition of the Jews from keeping public houses, she says: “That our objection is solely to the anti-national Jews, not the Jews who become Russians in all but their origin, is proved by the decision of the Commission in favour of allowing the Karaite Jews to sell drink as freely as any other of their Russian fellow-subjects. It is only the Talmudist Jews who are forbidden that privilege.”[170] It is hard for the ordinary man to see how belief in the Bible justifies a pursuit which is otherwise condemned as injurious to body and soul, or in what mysterious way the Talmud affects the quality of liquor. The ordinary man will find it easier to draw from these facts the inference that the Government’s real end was the suppression of the Jew, the suppression of the drink-selling Jew being only a means to that end. In the attitude of the Russian people towards the Jews at the present moment we recognise all the features made familiar by the history of the Jewish nation in the past. Social nonconformity and aloofness led to anti-Judaism in antiquity. To this motive of persecution the advent of Christianity added religious rancour, and the Middle Ages economic rivalry. The nineteenth century was destined to strengthen the texture of hatred by the addition of a new strand--Nationalism. All these causes, as we have seen, combined to make the Jew an object of detestation variously disguised. In ancient Rome we found impatience of dissent justifying itself by the pretext of regard for public morality; in Catholic and Protestant Europe cruelty and cupidity hallowed by the cloak of religious zeal; in modern Europe we see narrow-minded intolerance and jealousy trying to ennoble themselves by the title of patriotism. Each age has inherited the passions of the past and has increased the sad inheritance by the addition of new prejudices. In Russia modern culture spreads a little way over the face of mediaevalism, as the waters of a river at its mouth spread over the surface of the ocean, modifying its colour without affecting its depths. Consequently the Jew is still persecuted for his heresy, as well as for his usury, exclusiveness, and foreign extraction.