"A detailed description of these disabilities would carry you too far afield. Suffice it to state that we possess a very complicated system, particularly developed in Moscow, for the exclusion of Jewish children from the schools. The ratio of three to one hundred must, however, be conveniently tolerated. Now it happens quite frequently that, no matter how strict the director at admission, on promotion from the lower to the higher class this relation is shifted in favor of the Jews, because of their diligence and sobriety in contrast to the characteristics of the sons of the Russian officials. Then the trouble begins anew. Splendidly qualified candidates cannot enter the university, since the prescribed percentage has already been reached. The professors, however, who are not pronounced anti-Semites really like these Jewish students who have survived this process of selection, for they are really studious. But that again is opposed to the principles of the accepted policy. And whoever is inclined to take sides with the professors rather than with the bulwarks of this general policy may easily find himself in the toils, as it happened, for instance, in Sänger's case." "Who are these bulwarks of this general policy?" An involuntary glance towards the door, as if to see whether some uninvited listener was not accidentally near--a glance I have frequently seen only in Russia--was the first answer. Then, even in lower tones than before, he proceeded. "That is still a portion of the legacy of Alexander III., rigidly guarded by the dowager-empress, and particularly by the Grand-Duke Sergius in Moscow. When in the Russo-Turkish war enormous peculations of the military stores were discovered, the heir to the throne, then commander of a corps in the reserve, was persuaded that the Jewish contractors had defrauded the army, and the officer of the secret police, Zhikharev, exerted himself to prove that two-thirds of all the revolutionaries were Jews. That belief remained, just as a great portion of the French still cling to the belief that Dreyfus is a traitor because he is used as a scapegoat for the information-mongers of high rank on the general staff. Something similar happened here. I really have no desire to defend any Jewish contractor; but when there was in our stores lime-dust instead of flour in the sacks, quite other people than the Jews pocketed the difference. However, that is another story. Grand-Duke Sergius, of Moscow, has among his other passions bigotry and a fanatical hatred of Jews. And he is the uncle and brother-in-law of the Czar." "Then Sänger found himself in a rather dubious position mainly as a philo-Semite?" "At least as a man of not sufficiently pronounced anti-Semitism. But also because he was not really the man to hold his own with the generals and talents of the career-maker von Plehve. Finally, he was blamed for adverse criticism of the general principles of the government expressed at various conventions."