Many Jews who had contrived to settle in towns outside the “pale” were driven back into it, and others within the “pale” were forced to quit the villages and townships in which they had dwelt for years and, leaving their property and business connections, to take up their abode in the over-crowded larger towns. The persecution reached its climax in the winter of 1891–92, when thousands of men, women and little children were heartlessly expelled from Moscow, at a time of the year when even soldiers are not suffered to drill in the open air on account of the cold. These and other measures of unbearable harshness drove, as it was intended that they should, about a quarter of a million of Jews out of the Empire; and then the nations of the West, alarmed by the influx of the destitute refugees, raised a bitter outcry against the barbarity of the Czar. The Czar, however, in the words of one of his own servants and apologists, “remained deaf to protests of the Lord Mayor of London, for example,” and declared that “he will leave unheeded any and all such foreign remonstrances demanding a change in methods which have been deliberately adopted.” In fact, all the measures of repression and restriction which ignorant foreigners misrepresented as “the barbarous expulsion of the Jews from Russia” had for their virtuous object to prevent collision between the Jews and the peasants, to relieve the latter from what they could not be persuaded was not a Jewish tyranny, and, in one word, to secure good order and to maintain stability in the community.[173] It is interesting to hear the Russian version of the matter. Unfortunately a euphemism does not constitute a refutation.