The new exodus - 1892 Author:Harold Frederic Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE PARIAH COMMUNITY Properly to follow what has happened and is happening in Russia, not to speak of the still more impressive events to come, ... more »one must first of all realise that all over the empire the administrative power is above the law. It is by the failure to comprehend this that men even of Mr. Goldwin Smith's intellectual rank are led to write and print misleading and mischievous nonsense about Russo- Jewish matters. In Anglo-Saxon countries, when we speak of a law-abiding community, we mean that the people therein obey the laws and give the officials appointed to administer the law a minimum of trouble. There is no equivalent phrase in Russian, and there is no need for one. That the people obey is taken for granted. It is the officials who do not observe the laws, but who instead use — - - V the vast and conflicting jumble of ukases, decrees, and Ministerial instructions as a general basis for doing whatever they want to do. There is no study or science of jurisprudence in our sense of the word. If a Governor-General sees that the drift of Imperial or Ministerial inclination is in acertain direction, his underlings and all the small officials who serve the courts and police offices of the province make a search and find a thousand and one smart ways of interpreting what is called the law to suit His Excellency's purpose, which, of course, is to keep abreast of the St. Petersburg current. If this current is suddenly arrested, if it backs, shifts, flows off at a tangent, the law as promptly assumes a wholly different complexion. Moreover, if warrant for any given line of action which seems desirable to the local officials is not to be found at all in the law, the fact does not deter them for a minute. They go ahead without it, confident that th...« less