ction to which the
tragic death of the tsar Alexander II. gave rise. This, however, like
the Strousberg _Krach_ in Germany, was only the proximate cause of the
outbreak. There were other elements which had created a _milieu_
peculiarly favourable to the transplantation of the German craze. In the
first place the medieval anti-Semitism was still an integral part of the
polity of the empire. The Jews were cooped up in one huge ghetto in the
western provinces, "marked out to all their fellow-countrymen as aliens,
and a pariah caste set apart for special and degrading treatment"
(_Persecution of the Jews in Russia_, 1891, p.5). In the next place,
owing to the emancipation of the serfs which had half ruined the
landowners, while creating a free but moneyless peasantry, the Jews, who
could be neither nobles nor peasants, had found a vocation as
money-lenders and as middlemen between the grain producers, and the
grain consumers and exporters. There is no evidence that this function
was performed, as a rule, in an exorbitant or oppressive way. On the
contrary, the fall in the value of cereals on all the provincial
markets, after the riots of 1881, shows that the Jewish competition had
previously assured full prices to the farmers (Schwabacher,
_Denkschrift_, 1882, p. 27). Nevertheless, the Jewish activity or
"exploitation," as it was called, was resented, and the ill-feeling it
caused among landowners and farmers was shared by non-Jewish middlemen
and merchants who had thereby been compelled to be satisfied with small
profits. Still there was but little thought of seeking a remedy in an
organized anti-Jewish movement. On the contrary, the abnormal situation
aggravated by the disappointments and depression caused by the Turkish
war, had stimulated a widespread demand for constitutional changes which
would enable the people to adopt a state-machinery more exactly suited
to their needs. Among the peasantry this demand was promoted and
fomented by the Nihilists, and among the landowners it was largely
adopted as a means of checking what threatened to become a new Jacquerie
(Walcker, _Gegertwartige Lage Russlands_, 1873; _Innere Krisis
Russlands_, 1876). The tsar, Alexander II., strongly sympathized with
this movement, and on the advice of Count Loris-Melikov and the council
of ministers a rudimentary scheme of parliamentary government had been
drafted and actually signed when the emperor was assassinated. Meanwhile
a nationalist and