TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES.

Sir,—There is to be a great meeting in the Guildhall, a meeting of protest, of demonstration, and of indignation, under the presidency of the Lord Mayor. Why not? For my part, I expected as much; for, like every one else, I have been reading that awful volume by “General” Booth, in which he describes, with terrible vividness, the misery and horrors in which one-tenth of the population of your free and civilized England раss their lives. “In Darkest England” to an unenlightened foreigner seems to afford material enough for any number of meetings in the Guildhall, which stands in the midst of the squalid abominations described in its pages.

If these things be true, then it is only natural that the Lord Mayor should summon the citizens to take instant and united action against evils so horrible. If they are false, it is equally natural that the citizens should meet to repudiate the calumnies which discredit England before the world. A friend of mine, to whom I was expressing the above commonplaces, interrupted me, exclaiming, “Nonsense, the meeting at the Guildhall has nothing to do with the ‘General.’ The Lord Mayor has more important business in hand than that—in the interests of humanity.”

“Oh, I understand now,’’ I replied, “it is about the horrors of the Congo? Ah, well, it is no wonder that a nation so exceedingly sensitive about the treatment of convicted murderers in Siberia, and which is so indignant at every tale of violence told by escaped prisoners from the penal settlement of any country, should be uncontrollable in its indignation. It is not only the English who are indignant. There is not a white man or woman on the Continent who does not feel that the story of the cannibal camp and the torture to death by flogging the natives is a disgrace to European civilization. It is a reproach which the English have brought upon the white skins of the world, which you do well to wipe off as best you can.”

Here again I am interrupted by my friend. “How strange you are,” he protests, “how can you take these things so seriously? Do you suppose the Lord Mayor could ever dream of holding a City meeting to denounce the horrors of the camp on the Aruwhimi? Why, look at one of our leading papers; there is a correspondence, signed by an ‘Anglo-Australian;’ that gentleman distinctly says that the only astonishing thing about the disclosures of cruelty made by Stanley and Mr. Bonny is the incredulous astonishment with which they have been received. It is a great mistake to imagine that these young Englishmen (who are accused of torturing natives to death in passion, and buying a child in order to have her killed and eaten as a scientific demonstration) are worse than most of us. “Low-class natives are most irritating people, and one hardly recognizes in them the rights of humanity.” The Guildhall meeting is concerned with much more serious business than this—viz. “with the laws by which Russia regulates her Jews.”

What a comedy is life!—a comedy degenerating sometimes into the lowest farce! And so it is not about your submerged millions at home, or the atrocities of your own officers abroad that you are to have this meeting in the Guildhall. I should have thought—if I may venture the observation without offence—that your Lord Mayor might have found something more worthy of his attention nearer home. A public meeting might be less useless if those who attended it were imbued with a little sense of responsibility, a little elementary knowledge of the facts, a little experience of the difficulties of the case with which they propose to deal. I am far from pretending that we have solved the Jewish difficulty. Far from it. We are painfully conscious of that fact. And it is, of course, very kind of the Lord Mayor and his party to intervene with their unasked for prescriptions. We should, however, have more confidence in the certainty of the cure if the self-appointed physicians had ever been within a thousand miles of the patient, or if they would show sufficient confidence in their diagnosis to undertake the cure themselves. Comparaison n’est pas raison! The Jewish question in England is quite different from the Jewish question in Russia; and an army of 60,000 men is less dangerous than an army of four millions and a half! The Russians are too much accustomed to abuse from abroad for any one greatly to care what twaddlers may say, even in the sacred precinct of the Guildhall. There are many things in Russia which you do not like, and you are, of course, quite right to say so. But while your meeting will have no effect whatever upon Russians, it will have a great effect upon the Jews of Russia. It will proclaim aloud, in the hearing of these millions, that England and its great Lord Mayor, with all the wealth of London at their back, have undertaken the cause of the Russian Jews. And these poor people will believe it. And thousands, and tens of thousands, will sell all they have and come over to experience the first fruits of the generosity which promises them a new land of Canaan—in the City of London.

I adjourn the further discussion of the Jewish question until you have had, let us say, 10 per cent of the immigration which these meetings will invite.

There is no urgency in the matter. Russia has made no new laws against the Jews. As long as our educational schools were not overcrowded to the last degree, Russian and Talmudist Jews were admitted on equal terms. The number of the latter had to be limited only by the scarcity of space which often affects the Russians themselves. My late husband, being the curator of the St. Petersburg University, had more than 50 different schools under him. I had often opportunities of seeing the difficulty he had to satisfy even half of the applications made to him daily by Greek orthodox Russians.

As for other laws, they are of old standing, and do not really prevent the Jews from being in large numbers almost in every great Russian town.

OLGA NOVIKOFF.

Claridge’s Hotel. Brook-street.