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DISTRIBUTION OF RACES
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whom the vicissitudes of history have thrown together on the same territory to live in peace, we again must have an energetic, military, centralized government, which shall play the part of umpire and peacemaker, and which may refrain and repress spontaneous anarchy and civil war which are always ready to burst out. To all these people the Russian Empire has brought the same supreme benefit as the Roman Empire: Pax Romana, the Peace of the Tsar.


III

Therein precisely consists the civilizing part which Russia has played for centuries. Recent events, the anti-Semitic pogroms, the massacres of Jitomir and Odessa, the Beiliss trial, so far from contradicting this truth, only confirm it. As soon as, in consequence of the external disasters and the internal agitations, the Russian Government began to lose its authority, together with its prestige, as soon as it had to recall its regiments and to send them to the Far East, at once the destructive forces reigned supreme, and religious passions, racial hatreds, got free play. The Baltic peasants murdered the German barons, the Poles murdered the Russian officials, the Russian peasants mur-