[1] As regards your question concerning the transplantation of Jews into the Russian interior, the Government will, of course, avoid everything that may further complicate the relations between the Jews and the original population.

For this reason, though keeping the Pale of Jewish Settlement intact, I have already suggested to the Jewish Committee [attached to the Ministry] [2] to indicate those localities which, being thinly populated and in need of colonization, might admit of the settlement of the Jewish element ...

without injury to the original population.
[Footnote 1: According to an old Russian law which had come into disuse, departure from the country without a special Government permit is punishable as a criminal offence.] [Footnote 2: See p.

277.] This reply of the all-powerful Minister, which was published as a special supplement to the Jewish weekly _Razsvyet_, increased the panic among the Jews of Russia.

The Jews were publicly told that the Government wished to get rid of them, and that the only "right" they were to be granted was the right to depart; that no enlargement of the Pale of Settlement could possibly be hoped for, and that only as an extreme necessity would the Government allow groups of Jews to colonize the uninhabitable steppes of central Asia or the swamps of Siberia.
Well-informed people were in possession of much more serious information: they knew that the Jewish Committee attached to the Ministry of the Interior was preparing a monstrous plan of reducing the territory of the Pale of Settlement itself by expelling the Jews from the villages and driving them into the over-crowded cities.
The soul of the Jewish people was filled with sorrow, and yet there was no way of protesting publicly in the land of political slavery.