But why, it will be asked, are the Jews killed? First of all, at the root of the matter, there is the following cause: In a country which is as politically unripe and undeveloped as other European countries were in the sixteenth century, in a country which is at the present moment engaged in fighting for its Magna Charta, you are certain to find the phenomena which accompanied similar conditions and processes in other countries. And one of the phenomena inseparable from political immaturity, in a country where the desire for reform is struggling to get the upper hand, is a prejudice against Jews and a desire to render them responsible for the evils and disorders which are the natural result of all processes of change. It was so in England in the days of King John. It was so in France at the beginning of the French Revolution. With the exception of the peasants, who follow their own line, the whole of Russia, as well as the whole of the administration, is a blend like pepper and salt of a numerically large mass of people without any political knowledge and a strong Liberal enlightened but inexperienced faction. In the administration, at all events, the Liberal element is in the minority, since it has been drilled during ages by the old régime to a system of prejudice and reaction. The conflict which is being fought at the present moment between the obscurantist majority and the enlightened minority (beneath which the proletariat seethes independently, and from which the peasants hold aloof in the special groove of their own particular interests) is the cause of the present state of anarchy. The one consoling element in the situation is that revolutions have always been carried out by influential or energetic minorities who have finally rallied the people round them. In the obscurantist element all political prejudices have strong roots. One of the strongest of these prejudices is the anti-Semite prejudice, which all Europe shared in the sixteenth century, deeds of violence being the result, and which many countries still share at the present day. Only in such countries now (as in Hungary, for instance, where the natural anti-Semitism is stronger than it is in Russia) the Government is strong enough to quell it and to prevent its finding its natural expression.