case of the retired Jewish soldiers, who, after discharging their galley-like army service of a quarter of a century, were expelled from the places where they had been stationed and sent back into the Pale.  To the report submitted in 1858 by the Jewish Committee, pointing out the necessity of granting the right of universal residence to these soldiers, the Tzar attached the resolution:  “I decidedly refuse to grant it.”  When petitions to the same effect became more insistent, all he did was to permit in 1860, “by way of exemption,” a group of retired soldiers who had served in St. Petersburg in the body-guard to remain in the capital.  Ultimately, however, he was obliged to yield, and in 1867 he revoked the law prohibiting retired Jewish soldiers to live outside the Pale.  Thus after long wavering the right of domicile was finally bestowed upon the so-called “Nicholas soldiers” and their offspring—­a rather niggardly reward for having served the fatherland under the terrible hardships of the old form of conscription.

4.  FURTHER ALLEVIATIONS AND ATTEMPTS AT RUSSIFICATION

Nevertheless, the liberal spirit of the age did its work slowly but surely, and partial legal alleviations were granted by the Government or wrested from it by the force of circumstances.  The barriers which had been erected for the Jews within the Pale itself were done away with.  Thus the right of residence was extended to the cities of Nicholayev and Sevastopol, which, though geographically situated within the Pale, had been legally placed outside of it.  The obstructions in the way of temporary visits to the holy city of Kiev were mitigated.  The disgraceful old-time privilege of several cities, such as Zhitomir and Vilna, entitling them to exclude the Jews from certain streets, [1] was revoked.  Moreover, by the law of 1862, the Jews were permitted to acquire land in the rural districts on those manorial estates in which after the liberation of the peasants the binding relation of the peasants to the landed proprietors had been completely discontinued.  Unfortunately, what the Jews thus gained through the liberation of the peasants, they lost to a large extent soon afterwards through the Polish insurrection of 1863, forfeiting the right of acquiring immovable property outside the cities in the greater part of the Pale.  For in 1864, after quelling the Polish insurrection, the Government undertook to Russify the Western region, and both Poles and Jews were strictly barred from acquiring estates in the nine governments forming the jurisdiction of the governors-general of Vilna and Kiev.

[Footnote 1:  On the medieval privilege de non tolerandis Judaeis see Vol.  I, pp. 85 and 95.]