economic, which has been created by our legislation.
A revision of the laws concerning the Jews is absolutely urgent, and every
postponement of it is pregnant with the most dangerous consequences."

Yet when we condemn Russia for her _pogroms_ and her Jew-baitings, we must
not forget two facts: first, that these occurrences are the work, not of
the real Russian people, the peasantry which has been described above, but
of the dregs of the population which are to be found at the base of the
social structure in the towns of Russia as in towns nearer home; second,
that Russia is not the only country in the world that has these racial
problems to face. I once heard a Russian and an American discussing the
comparative demerits of their respective lands, and I am bound to say that
the former held his own very well. When, for example, the American said,
"What about the Jews?" the other answered, "Well, what about the negroes?"
and he parried the further question, "What about _pogroms_?" with another
of his own, "What about lynching?" The problems are not, of course, quite
on all fours, nor do two wrongs make a right, but a reminder that similar
problems exist in other parts of the world will perhaps be enough to show
that the Jewish question in Russia is neither unique nor at all easy to
solve. Let us, instead of visiting the sins of a few townships upon the
heads of the entire Russian nation, be thankful that we have no such
problems in our own islands. Recent riots outside the shops of German
pork-butchers in different parts of the country do not, it must be
confessed, lead one to hope that our people would behave much more calmly
and discreetly than the Whites of the Southern States or the Christians of
South-West Russia, were they placed in the same circumstances.

The Polish question is at once simpler and its story less damaging to the
Russian Government than that of the Jews. The partitions, an account of
which has already been given,[1] were of course iniquitous, but, as we have
seen, Prussia must bear the chief blame for them. In any case, the Tsar
Alexander I. did his utmost for Poland at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.
He pleaded eloquently for a reunited Poland, and he almost won over Prussia
by making arrangements to compensate her for her Polish territory at the
expense of Saxony. But France, England, and Austria opposed his project,
and he was obliged to yield to the combined pressure of these powers.
Russia is,