The most striking method of repression introduced by the new regime and its feudal supporters was that combination of murder, outrage and pillage--the _pogrom_. The revival of this characteristic expression of the antisemitism of the middle ages was not the result of spontaneous outbreaks of fury on the part of the Russian masses, but a deliberate and calculated awakening of latent racial and religious prejudices, evoked as powerful aids to inflame against the Jews the Russian masses, who are, religiously speaking, a tolerant people and whose relations to the Jews had been marked, on the whole, with friendliness. The first _pogroms_ began a month after the accession of Alexander III to the throne, and extended in the course of a year to 160 places in Southern Russia. Though the connivance of the local authorities was clearly established, the originators of the _pogroms_ were never found.[36] However, moral support was lent by the government in the promulgation of the May Laws which closely followed. The doctrine that the misery of the peasants was due to their exploitation by the Jews, and that the _pogroms_ were the instinctive expression of the fury of the peasants, was officially sanctioned. The _pogroms_ of 1881-2 served as notice to all Russia and particularly to Russian Jewry, that the old order had given place to the new. Apart from the loss of life and damage to property they left the Russian Jews in a state of stupefaction and horror, with the sense of living on the brink of a precipice. The first decade of Alexander III's reign had opened with these _pogroms_. The second decade opened with the wholesale expulsions from Moscow. Within six months, more than ten thousand Jews were expelled from the city on the ground of illegal residence. So vast a number of Jewish families was affected and so summary was the manner of executing the decree of expulsion, that several governments, among them our own, protested to the Russian government. President Harrison, discussing this protest in his message to Congress, frankly stated that the banishment, whether by direct decree or by not less certain indirect methods, of so large a number of men and women is not a local question. A decree to leave one country is in the nature of things an order to enter another--some other. This consideration, as well as the suggestion of humanity, furnishes ample ground for the remonstrances which we have presented to Russia.[37]