Subsequent events soon made it clear that the Government, represented by Ignatyev, was far from harboring any sympathy for the victims of the pogroms.  The public did not fail to notice the fact that the Russian Government, which was in the habit of rendering financial help to the population in the case of elemental catastrophes, such as conflagrations or inundations, had refrained from granting the slightest monetary assistance to the Jewish sufferers from the pogroms.  Apart from its material usefulness, such assistance would have had an enormous moral effect, inasmuch as it would have stood forth in the public eye as an official condemnation of the violent acts perpetrated against the Jews—­particularly if the Tzar himself had made a large donation for that purpose, as he was wont to do in other cases of this kind.  As it was, the authorities not only neglected to take such a step, but they even went so far as to forbid the Jews of St. Petersburg to start a public collection for the relief of the pogrom victims.  Nay, the governor-general of Odessa refused to accept a large sum of money offered to him by well-to-do Jews for the benefit of the sufferers.

Nor was this the worst.  The local authorities did everything in their power to manifest their solidarity with the enemies of Judaism.  The street pogroms were followed by administrative pogroms sui generis.  Already in the month of May, the police of Kiev began to track all the Jews residing “illegally” in that city [1] and to expel these “criminals” by the thousands.  Similar wholesale expulsions took place in Moscow, Oryol, and other places outside the Pale of Settlement.  These persecutions constituted evidently an object-lesson in religious toleration, and the Russian masses which had but recently shown to what 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