The third cause of the persecution of the Jews is to be found in the Satanic brain of Plehve, who wishes to furnish to the humane Czar, and perhaps still more to the Czaritza, who has western European ways of thinking, an indication that without the Jews there would be no opposition whatever in Russia. For this purpose he not only has the Jews entered more strictly on the police-registers, if they are guilty of any political offence, such as being present in a forbidden assemblage, but he also directly provokes them, in order to drive them into the ranks of the revolutionaries and thereby to compromise the latter. In Hungary and Bohemia ritual murder cases were incited in order to give the Jews a lesson to remember, and to make them national--_i. e._, more Magyar or Czechic--in feeling, since they stubbornly persisted in remaining German. In Russia, however, they are driven into the camp of the revolutionaries, in order to extirpate the former and to cast suspicion upon the latter. Nevertheless, some governors, who in other respects readily comply with the directions given from above, yet dare to step in in behalf of the Jews, contrary to the measures appointed by higher authorities, as for example, Prince Urussoff, governor of Bessarabia, who is to be thanked that in spite of all the efforts of Krushevan, the creature of Plehve, no outbreaks of the mob against the Jews took place in Kishinef recently.
As personal but nevertheless effectual causes of the persecution of the Jews, the anti-Semitism of the dowager Empress and of the Grand-Duke Sergius, governor-general of Moscow, must be mentioned. Respectively brother and wife of Alexander III., they conservatively hold to his opinions. This unfortunate and narrow-minded man had been persuaded by conscience-smitten persons that Jewish army-contractors were the cause of the defeat of the Russians in the Turkish war; and it was as hard to get an idea out of his head as to get one in. The inclination of the Grand-Duke Sergius to torture human beings amounts to a disease. He can satisfy it most easily upon the defenceless Jews.