But, even granting the spontaneity and the disinterestedness of the concessions which the Russian Government declared itself prepared to make to the Jews, they would have only affected a limited number of them. M. De Plehve’s plan at best was to bring about the conciliation of the race by the absorption of the better class of them and by the half-hearted application of some palliatives to the grievances of the poorer, such as the enlargement of the area within which they are confined, and permission to emigrate.[199] The experiment in assimilation, of which the Baltic provinces, Poland and Finland, supplied a sample, was not one that commended itself to the Jews. But, even if it succeeded, the vast majority of the race would continue in their normal state of slavery. The same remark applies to a remedial scheme drafted and adopted a few weeks later by a departmental conference presided over by M. De Witte. The Financial Minister’s association with the step lent colour to the suspicion that this newly-awakened benevolence towards the Jew was not foreign to Russia’s anxiety to procure fresh supplies of money by the assistance of Jewish bankers abroad. However that may be, the measures taken do not seem to have produced any marked effect on the condition of the Russian Jews. That relief which the wretched people could not gain from the Czar’s compassion, they failed to obtain even from his fears. On Aug. 4, 1904, anti-Semitic disturbances broke out at Ostrowez, in the Government of Radom, where, according to private statements, twenty Jews were killed; according to the Russian authorities, one was seriously wounded, and died the following day, while twenty-two persons were slightly injured. The same official account ascribes the disturbances to the fact that a Jewish boy struck a Christian--the blow, it is said, was exaggerated to murder, and the mob set out to revenge themselves on the Jews. At Partscheff also, in the Government of Siedlce, on the following day, it was said that hundreds of Jews perished. The official version of the occurrence stated that “the police dispersed, without using force, a crowd of Jews who had assembled to hide a baptized Jew. In a scuffle that ensued twenty persons were wounded.”[200] On September 4 and 5 anti-Semitic riots occurred at Smela, in the Province of Kieff. This is the official account: “A Jewish shopkeeper struck a peasant woman whom he suspected of having stolen some cloth. Immediately a crowd collected, and plundered and sacked one hundred houses and one hundred and fifty shops belonging to Jews. That evening a party of sixty Jews attacked and beat the Christian inhabitants. When the Jews began to fire on the latter the police were summoned, who made use of their revolvers, wounding two persons. The next evening several hundred railway employés, in spite of the prohibition of the officials, went by train to Smela from the adjacent station of Bobrinskaia. The rioting was renewed, and the