That the Jewish aldermen of the Town Council, as well as the Jewish members of the other municipal bodies, shall voluntarily resign from these honorary posts, “as men deprived of civic honesty” [1]; that the Jewish women shall not dress themselves in silk, velvet, and gold; that the Jews shall refrain from keeping Christian domestics, who are “corrupted” in the Jewish homes religiously and morally; that all Jewish strangers, who have sought refuge in Pereyaslav, shall be immediately banished; that the Jews shall be forbidden to buy provisions in the surrounding villages for reselling them; also, to carry on business on Sundays and Russian festivals, to keep saloons, and so on.

[Footnote 1:  This insolent demand of the unenlightened Russian burghers met with the following dignified rebuttal from the Jewish office-holders:  “What bitter mockery!  The Jews are accused of a lack of honesty by the representatives of those very people who, with clubs and hatchets in their hands, fell in murderous hordes upon their peaceful neighbors and plundered their property.”  The replies to the other demands of the burghers were coached in similar terms.]

Thus, in addition to being ruined, the Jews were presented with an ultimatum, implying the threat of further “military operations.”

As in previous cases, the example of the city of Pereysslav was followed by the townlets and villages in the surrounding region.  The unruliness of the crowd, which had been trained to destroy and plunder with impunity, knew no bounds.  In the neighboring town of Borispol a crowd of rioters, stimulated by alcohol, threatened to pass from pillage to murder.  When checked by the police and Cossacks, they threw themselves with fury upon these untoward defenders of the Jewish population, and began to maltreat them, until a few rifle shots put them to flight.

The same was the case in Nyezhin, [1] where a pogrom was enacted on July 20 and 22.  After several vain attempts to stop the riots, the military was forced to shoot at the infuriated crowd, killing and wounding some of them.  This was followed by the cry:  “Christian blood is flowing—­beat the Jews!”—­and the pogrom was renewed with redoubled vigor.  It was stopped only on the third day.

[Footnote 1:  In the government of Chernigov.]

The energy of the July pogroms had evidently spent itself in these last ferocious attempts.  The murderous hordes realized that the police and military were fully in earnest, and this was enough to sober them from their pogrom intoxication.  Towards the end of July, the epidemic of vandalism came to a stop, though it was followed in many cities by a large number of conflagrations.  The cowardly rioters, deprived of the opportunity of plundering the Jews with impunity, began to set fire to Jewish neighborhoods.  This was particularly the case in the north-western provinces, in Lithuania and White Russia, where the authorities had from the very beginning set their faces firmly against all organized violence.