In 1896 the Jewish Question was re-opened, and the Jews, as well as other sufferers, ventured to hope for an improvement of their lot from Nicholas II.’s reputed zeal for reform. Much also was expected from “the generous and sympathetic instincts of the young Empress.” But these expectations were not realised, and at the present hour the country in which the race is most numerous[174] is also the country in which it suffers most grievously. The treatment of the Jews in Russia can be summed up in one sentence: deliberate starvation of body and soul. The Jew, as has been seen, is loathed not only as a non-Slav and non-Orthodox, but also as a parasite who exhausts the organism on which he lives. Isolation, it is held, by forcing him to feed upon himself, will kill him. The Jews are, therefore, only allowed to reside in certain specified quarters of certain towns in certain districts, and are forbidden to move from place to place without special permission or such a special form of passport as is granted to prostitutes. Overcrowding produces poverty, disease, and all the filthy degradation of ghetto life. A faint conception of what such life means may be formed from a recent petition to the Russian Committee of Ministers signed by many thousands of Russian Jews: “Not less than 20 per cent. of the entire population of the Jewish Pale of Settlement,” say the petitioners, “are reduced to such a condition of wretchedness that they have to be supported from charitable sources. In great Jewish communities like those of Vilna, Berditcheff, and Odessa, the number of the Jewish poor amounts to as much as 25 to 33 per cent. Co-extensive with this widespread poverty there is in all the Jewish communities an enormous labouring and artisan proletariat that knows not to-day wherewith it may exist on the morrow. The simple weapon which the labourer and artisan possesses in his relations with his employer--the power of leaving his work and seeking better conditions of employment elsewhere--has become impossible of use on account of the limitation of freedom of movement and the prohibition of residence elsewhere than in the few towns of the Pale of Settlement. If they do not wish to die of hunger or go begging Jewish workmen must submit unreservedly to the conditions prescribed by the manufacturers. The Jewish capitalists, too, are seriously injured by the burdensome effect of the special regulations which have, owing to the restraints of the May laws, taken from them every freedom of action, and deprived them of the power of disposing of their products in markets outside the Pale of Settlement....”[175]