THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1909. JEW-BAITING IN RUSSIA.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9608, 30 September 1909, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1909. JEW-BAITING IN RUSSIA.

Kieff, in Southern Russia, has earned such an unenviable notoriety for "pogroms" that though the civilis-

ed world as a whole wiil view the recent deplorable massacre of Jews in that Russian city with poignant sorrow, it will hardly view it with surprise. In 1904 there were several appalling massacres at Kieif and neighbouring lities, following upon the great massacre at Kishineff in 1903, when fifteen streets of Jewish houses were sacked, 43 Jews were killed, and 424 wounded. According to the "Berliner Tageblatt" 29 Jews have just been murdered at Kieff and 1,150 wounded, so that if the account is accurate the massacre in i even greater than that at Kishineff, which provoked an outburst of horrified protest from Europe. It is true that a semi-official denial of the massacre has been issued by the authorise* at St. Petersburg, but the stnet censorship of all news of the event casts suspicion upon the semi-official statement, and there can be no reasonable doubt that another savage exhibition of racial and religious hatred must be entered up against the hooligans and reactionaries of Southern Russia, The worst feature of this massacre is the fact that, like the massacres of Jews n 1903 and 1904, it was countenanced, even if it was not actually organised, by the military; and police authorities charged with the maintenance of order. When the late M. Plehve, formerly Minister of the Interior, was interviewed by a Jewish deputation after the Kishineff massacre, he told the deputation that he was greatly displeased with the conduct of the Jewish population, that "the Jewish revolutionary movement which was already consi ierable compelled the Government to take its revenge"; and he threatened that in future he would not recoil before any measure of rigor, and would allow no opportunity to escape of rendering the lives of the Jews intolerable if the Jewish revelutionary movement continued to develop. It waul.d otherwise be better, he continued, if they would all clear out of the country. M. Plehve was assassinated by means of a bomb in the following year, but his ] dark spirit st:ll seems to brood over Southern Russia, although M. Stolypin, who is said to be an enlightened and humane administrator, sits in his chair. The recent massacre at Kieff is a fearful proof that the establishment of the Duma, and the small measure of political ernancipation granted thereby to the people, cannot be regarded as having swept awuy the blind superstition and barbarous savagery that still beset large sections of the populace. Scratch

the unenlightened Russian and vou t will still find the Tartar barbarian. I This appalling recrudescence of mur derous anti-Semitism is a startling indication of the unfitness of the Russians —at any rate, those of Southern Russia—to govern themselves. To people who have been bred in the Anglo-Saxon traditions of large-minded tpleration the persistent hostility of the populations of central and eastern Europe towards the Jews within their territory is something of an enigma. Russia includes in her population 5,000,000 Jews, who are rigorously battined down in their ghettoes and prevented as far as possible from mingling with the Russians. Austria concains about 2,000,000 Jews, Germany about 500,000., France about 100,000, England about 250,000, and the United States about 1,450,000. Speaking generally, it may be said that the further west they travel in Europe from their original home in Asia the better they are treated, and the less risk do they incur of being engulfed in one of those cataclysms of racial hostility which occasionally occur in Eastern Europe. Centuries of hard usage have bred in the Jewish people an extraordinary tenacity and power of resisting the ravages of persecution. Their troubles began long before the coming of Christianity, and the Egyptians, Assyrians, and Babylonians in turn laid them under the same yoke of persecution, which, long centuries afterwards, the hooligans of Kieff, have just fitted to their necks. This age-long apprenticeship in suffering, together with the repression of the natural aptitudes of the people, has had the effect uf turning their energies into one direction. Porbidd n to own land or tr> practise agricul jre, they were driven into the one 1 ranch of commerce which was not already monopolised, and thus became tne principal bankers and mo leybrjkers of every community an-ong whom they settled. The sword of Titus and the torch of Torquemada, the rope, the rack, the dagger, end the faggot in every country of me iieval Europe, lessened but could ik-S exterminate the race, which di.vsloped fresh energy in following nut the only means of livelihood p rmitted to it, and thus eventually secured a ''ontrolling influence in international finance. The members of the great house of Rothschild, with its branches in London and Paris. Berlin and Vienna, and their allies of their own raco and faith on every bourse in Europe, stand behind the scenes when the drama of diplomacy is staged, and if rumour speaks truth, dictate the situations that are to be represented and the words that the chief actors are to utter. This is possibly the rwal reason of the bitter antipathy shown by the Russian bureaucracy and by the governing clas-ses in central Europe also towards the Jews. Jealous resent- ' ment of the financial power that is

wielded by the Jewish race is the key to the thinly-disguised sympathy with whic-h the representatives of the Government in Southern Russia regard the programme of rapine and rmssacre inflicted by their frenzied tools in the illiterate proletariat upon the unhappy Jaws in their midst And nf course each new excess merely leads to another turn wf the financial thumbscrew by the leaders ot the persecuted race. The Russian Government finds it impossible to get all the money they want for the development of Ru&sia's vast internal resources, because the Rothschilds and their powerful supporters in the world of high finance have passed round the word, ''No money for Jew-baiters." In fact; with the sure operation of the taw of evolution, the long-continued persecution of the Jews has developed ' in them precisely that quality which enables them to hit back at their persecutors most effectively. And possibly one of the immediate results of the massacre at Kieff will be a few more cuts of the financial rod which is kept in pickle for Russia by the great Jewish banking houses of Europe.