The Maccabaean

Ever since the outbreak of the present war of wars, the Western powers have been in difficulties over their compromising Ally in the East. Two compurgators of the highest reputation, two nations in the front rank of human progress are everlastingly kept busy before the bar of civilization to make out a case for their Eastern champion in arms. Their client, however, proves untractable and past all whitewashing. Russia autocracy cannot change its principles. It cannot modify its tactics, not even in the minutest details of its routine. It is the least pliable, least adaptable of all the forces regulating the life of the earth's great nations. It turns a deaf ear to diplomatic representations and dissolves quasi-parliamentary bodies at the first signs of remonstrance. In every newly arising situation its phenomena can be foretold like those of a well-known disease. For eight months this Asiatic plague of a governmental system foreign to the fundamentals of Western civilizations has held sway in Galicia and the Bukovina. The Russian establishment began with the capture of Lemberg in September, 1914. Its overthrow was accomplished in May and June, 1914. Between these two dates lies the first debut, in a hundred years, of autocratic Russia as a suzerain over European territories outside of its own boundaries. Let the peoples of Europe and America study this first essay in Russian overlordship in charge of Western areas. Evidential material from trustworthy eyewitnesses is now gradually forthcoming, ever since the evacuation, during the summer months, of two ruined Austrian crown lands.

The classical witnesses for the truth as to Eastern occurrences are the Jews. A landless race, they have furnished legions of soldiers to either side in the terrific contest. This loyalty to their adopted fatherlands does not cloud the impartial Jewish outlook upon things, which is international in its essence, the same as their sufferings, their ethics, and their racial coherence.

Mr. Benjamin Segel, a noted Jewish author of Lemberg, has come forward in a recent publication* and in several letters to the present writer as a first deponent regarding the Russian rule of conquest. From both manifestations we glean the following passages:

"The Russian regime in Galicia after the fall of Lemberg early in September, 1914, began with the usual postboard-Russification of populations utterly alien and distinctly hostile to the language, customs, traditions and laws of the Muscovite Empire. Polish, Ruthenian and Jewish shopkeepers unable to frame a single sentence in the Russian language were compelled to take down all front signs in their own idloms and to put up Russian ones. In the manifests of Grand Duke Nikolai, addressed the middle of August, to the natives of Russian Poland, these latter were treated as a separate national unit: 'Poles' it began 'the hour has struck in which the holy dream of your forefathers and grandfathers may be fulfilled. Let the borders cutting asunder the Polish people be effaced; let them unite

* Der Weltkrieg und das Schicksal der Juden Von Benjamin Segel. George Stilke, Berlin, N. W. 7, 1915.

under the sceptre of the Czar. Under this sceptre Poland will regenerate, free in religion, language and autonomy."

An entirely different tone was taken with the Poles and Ruthenians of Galicia. Though at mortal enmity with everything Russian, they were both proclaimed as "Russians sighing under the Austrian yoke" and Galicia as an "arch-Russian land, now linked to other Russian lands by force of reconquest." The third important racial element of Galicia, the Jews, were simply treated by the invaders as a prize of war, a human booty to be shared with the natives on condition of their national surrender. A Russian manifesto distributed in hundred thousands of copies among the Ruthenian peasantry of the Bukovina contains a direct incitement to the slaughter of all land-owning Jews, with a promise of the Russian military commander, to distribute their lands, cattle, grain and fodder among the murderers. "Where the Russians take possession" the manifesto concludes "there the Jewish plague disappears, never to return." In the wake of this playbill of battle, murder and sudden death came a most frightful, long-continued debauch of spoilation, looting, burning, the outraging of womenkind and the slaying of the helpless." Mr. Segel quotes the typical story of a typical victim, an erstwhile denizen of a Bukovina village, now driven into exile:

"It is a Rumanian that speaks, a man with deeply sunken, tragic eyes, moustache and beard full of icicles, he stands before me as if bent under an invisible load, speaking with a hoarse voice of troubled times and visitations too heavy to be borne:

"Day before yesterday (so runs his tale) early in the morning, the Cossaks fired my house until it burned like tinder. When they came to us into the mountains as victors, the sacking of houses was common enough. They simply took whatever they could lay hands on. But we didn't drain the full measure of evil, until they returned beaten and in retreat. It was then that they overran us in hordes drunk with rage. They demanded provender in a hurry, hay and oats for their horses, and food for themselves. First came the order to fire the house of the town judge. Then they dragged the Jewish inn-keeper into the street to dispatch him. One of the horsemen speared him with his lance, another finished him by shooting him through the head. Then the villagers came in a mass and begged to have their houses protected against looting. They were speared by the soldiers and knocked down. It was terrible. And with the inn-keeper slain, brandy was flowing freely from casks in an ownerless inn. The soldiers drank themselves into a state of furious madness, and then went into the houses to gratify their bestial lusts. To me they came as they did to the others— I don't know to how many houses in all. They outraged my wife in plain view of the children, and violated my little girl. Me they bound with ropes and threw me under a bench so that I might witness my shame without power of interfering, that I might be poisoned and not die, that I might live the most miserable of mankind. At last they fired our house. The women ran about distracted, wherever their feet would