individualist native for an alien,
clannish, and successful community. In Russia religious motives may
possibly have weighed with the Czar and the more ignorant and bigoted of
the peasantry; but levelling and communistic ideas certainly accounted
for the widespread plundering--witness the words often on the lips of
the rioters: "We are breakfasting on the Jews; we shall dine on the
landlords, and sup on the priests." In 1890 there appeared a ukase
ordering the return of the Jews to those provinces and districts where
they had been formerly allowed to settle--that is, chiefly in the South
and West; and all foreign Jews were expelled from the Empire. It is
believed that as many as 225,000 Jewish families left Russia in the
sixteen months following[233].

[Footnote 233: Rambaud, _Histoire de la Russie_, ch. xxxviii.; Lowe,
_Alexander III. of Russia_, ch. viii.; H. Frederic, _The New Exodus_;
Professor Errera, _The Russian Jews_.]

The next onslaught was made against a body of Christian dissenters, the
humble community known as Stundists. These God-fearing peasants had
taken a German name because the founder of their sect had been converted
at the _Stunden_, or hour-long services, of German Lutherans long
settled in the south of Russia; they held a simple evangelical faith;
their conduct was admittedly far better than that of the peasants, who
held to the mass of customs and superstitions dignified by the name of
the orthodox Greek creed; and their piety and zeal served to spread the
evangelical faith, especially among the more emotional people of South
Russia, known as Little Russians.

Up to the year 1878, Alexander II. refrained from persecuting them,
possibly because he felt some sympathy with men who were fast raising
themselves and their fellows above the old level of brutish ignorance.
But in that year the Greek Church pressed him to take action. If he
chastised them with whips, his son lashed them with scorpions. He saw
that they were sapping the base of one of the three pillars that
supported the imperial fabric--Orthodoxy, in the Russian sense. Orders
went forth to stamp out the heretic pest. At once all the strength of
the governmental machine was brought to bear on these non-resisting
peasants. Imprisonment, exile, execution--such was their lot. Their
communities, perhaps the happiest then to be found in rural Russia, were
broken up, to be flung into remote corners of Transcaucasia or Siberia,
and there doome