extent they respected the inviolability of Jewish life and property took
the lesson to heart.

[Footnote 1: It will be remembered that the right of residence in Kiev
was restricted in the case of the Jews to a few categories: first-guild
merchants, graduates from institutions of higher learning, and
artisans.]

One hope was still left to the Jews. The law courts, at least, being the
organs of the public conscience of Russia, were bound to condemn
severely the sinister pogrom heroes. But this hope, too, proved
illusory. In the majority of cases the judges treated act of open
pillage and of violence committed against life and limb as petty street
brawls, as "disturbances of the public peace," and imposed upon their
perpetrators ridiculously slight penalties, such as three months'
imprisonment--penalties, moreover, which were simultaneously inflicted
upon the Jews who, as in the case of Odessa, had resorted to
self-defence. When the terrible Kiev pogrom was tried in the local
Military Circuit Court, the public prosecutor Strelnikov, a well-known
reactionary who subsequently met his fate at the hands of the
revolutionaries, delivered himself on May 18 of a speech which was
rather an indictment against the Jews than against the rioters. He
argued that these disorders had been called forth entirely by the
"exploitation of the Jews," who had seized the principal economic
positions in the province, and he conducted his cross-examination of the
Jewish witnesses in the same hostile spirit. When one of the witnesses
retorted that the aggravation of the economic struggle was due to the
artificial congestion of the Jews in the pent-up Pale of Settlement, the
prosecutor shouted: "If the Eastern frontier is closed to the Jews, the
Western frontier is open to them; why don't they take advantage of it?"