The final cause of the persecution of the Jews, and one which is regarded by many people as the weightiest, is the certain income which legislation against the Jews means for every unscrupulous official. Most of the laws passed against the Jews are quite impossible of execution, or are executed only in a very imperfect way, thanks to the corruptibility of the Russian officials. "Absolutism palliated by corruption"--this bitter saying fits the case of the Jews best. Yet what relieves the situation for them in a certain way renders it worse for them in another. It certainly is a question whether the ransom-money of one generation will not become the purchase-money of the next. The Russian bureaucracy will not be willing to renounce its income from bribes and extortions. Thus it prevents all legislative decrees in favor of the Jews. These poorly paid, much feared, but still despised officials are, in the inclined plane of their evil consciences, quite as much victims of the system as the Jews, but in a different way. We are all human, whether Christian or Jew, and in the long run, under the operation of the most depraved of all rules, neither the one nor the other can keep himself pure. The worst thing that has happened to the Jews, however, is not, as can well be understood, an occasional "pogrom" (riot), in which, to the indignation of all civilized mankind, defenceless people are slain and plundered by command of the authorities. The worst is the restriction to particular zones and to particular callings. That is systematic massacre, a deliberate policy of destruction and extirpation. Even if the misery of the ghetto has, thanks to the strict abstemiousness of the Jews, failed as yet to kill them in the way that the peasantry, weakened by alcoholism, are killed in the famine provinces, nevertheless the moral result is frightful. Even the iron family morality of the Jews is shaken in the western governments. A deplorable percentage of prostitutes is made up of Jewesses. Experience shows that sexual deprivation is the beginning of every other form of degeneration. Moreover, the matter does not generally end with the individual who sinks into prostitution. The ethical ideas of such a morally defective person spread contagion in a wide circle. Families are broken up, or unchastity makes its way into them. The whole conception of life becomes different when the chastity of women becomes an article of trade or an object of ironical scepticism. Still, in comparison with their environment even these Jews may be called chaste, for they are merely stained by the barbarism of the Orient. But it is, nevertheless, monstrous that in a Christian country the hard-won sexual morality of a part of the population, once gained, must be endangered only because malevolent politics will have it so. The moral purity of the Jews and of the Teutonic races has redeemed the world from the deep depravity of the Roman decadence. Now a