2. Debates and Proceedings in the Imperial Duma and in the Council of the Empire, particularly evidence furnished by non-Jewish deputies or evidence of Jewish deputies that has passed unchallenged or has been challenged unsuccessfully by the Right benches. 3. Statements in the Liberal Russian press and the Jewish press published in Russia, all of which have been rigorously censored. 4. Protests and manifestoes of non-Jewish organizations, parties and leaders against the anti-Jewish policy of the government. These protests have been made publicly and have passed unchallenged by the Russian Government. In brief, the present report is based exclusively upon evidence furnished by the Russian government itself, officially in its own press, or countenanced by reason of the revision applied, through its military and civil censorship, to the opposition press, or in public speeches and declarations that have passed the government benches in the imperial legislative chambers unchallenged. RUSSIA INTRODUCTION Russia acquired the great bulk of her Jewish population through the partitions of Poland, from 1773 to 1795. Strongly medieval in outlook and organization as Russia was at that time, she treated the Jews with the exceptional harshness which the medieval principle and policy sanctioned and required. By confining them to those provinces where they happened to live at the time of the partitions, she created a Ghetto greater than any known to the Middle Ages; and by imposing restrictions upon the right to live and travel even within this Ghetto, she has virtually converted it into a penal settlement, where six million human beings guilty only of adherence to the Jewish faith are compelled to live out their lives in squalor and misery, in constant terror of massacre, subject to the caprice of police officials and a corrupt administration—in short, without legal right or social status. Only twice within the last century have efforts been made to improve the condition of the Jews in Russia; and each interval of relief was followed by a period of greater and more cruel repression. The first was during the reign of Alexander II; but his assassination in 1881 resulted in the complete domination of Russia by the elements of reaction, which immediately renewed the persecution policy. The “May laws” of Ignatieff (1882) which enmesh the Jews to this day, were the immediate product of this régime. The second period, a concomitant of the abortive revolution of 1904–5, was followed by a “pogrom policy” of unprecedented severity which lasted until the outbreak of the present war. THE PALE OF SETTLEMENT