The first is the great influence which the rich Russian usurers possess with the authorities. If Shylock is angry with the merchant prince of Venice because the latter lends money without interest, in Russia the rôles of the contestants are reversed. The Jew also exacts usury where he can--no one in seriousness pretends to be surprised at this, in view of the deliberate demoralization of the pale--but in comparison with his Russian colleague he keeps within modest limits, being indeed compelled to do so by his circumstances. He necessarily prefers to keep the debtor solvent rather than to drive him out of house and home, which he, the Jew, moreover, cannot buy in. The Russian usurer, on the other hand, is accustomed to show no mercy, because he calmly seizes the land of his victim, and either leases it or sells it at a profit or adds it to his own property. For a great part of the Russian usurers belong to the guild of village usurers. These people influence the under authorities with bribes, while the great speculators, the millionaire usurers of Moscow and St. Petersburg, who likewise would have to fear the milder methods of their Jewish competitors, are powerful enough to influence senators and ministers according to their wishes. The Russian usurer, therefore, is the first complainant and enemy of the Jews. The second and more powerful cause is the spirit of Pobydonostzev, the fanatic of uniformity. Combining in himself the qualities of jurist, theologian, and scholastic, he is too barren in mental powers to master the conception of a state which should take into account any diversity of creed or race. Above all, however, any toleration would undermine the three pillars upon which alone his conception of the Russian empire can rest--autocracy, orthodoxy, and Russianism. For the preservation of this Asiatic, uniform, absolutist régime, or, better, of the omnipotence of hierarchy, it is above all necessary to keep the people in absolute subjection. This, again, is possible only when every chance of learning anything else than their own condition is closed to them. A prisoner who endangered the spirit of blind obedience by a tendency to dispute orders could not be tolerated in a prison. As little can the great Russian prison state endure men who might lead the prisoner to think whether he must be absolutely a prisoner. Of such thoughts, however, the Jews, who are subject to special taxation, are suspected above all others. Their criminality is certainly of the smallest; they are the most punctilious of tax-payers, and, moreover, the best-conducted citizens in the world. But they are--Heaven knows why--perhaps because of their Talmudic-dialectic occupation, perhaps also because as pariahs they have little cause to be enthusiastic over the ruling order--they are inexorably subtle critics of all existing things, and so could easily upset the simple minds of the Russian lower classes. That is the chief