outside the operation of the general laws of Russia opened up a wide field for the grossest forms of arbitrariness and lawlessness.  At one stroke, all the exits from the overcrowded cities into the villages within the Pale of Settlement were tightly closed.  All branches of industry connected with Jewish land ownership outside the cities were curtailed and in some places entirely cut off.  In many villages the right bestowed on the rural communes of ostracising “vicious members” by a special verdict [1] was used as a weapon to expel those Jews who had long been settled there.

[Footnote 1:  The official term applied to the resolutions passed by the village communes.  Compare p. 310.]

It will be remembered that Ignatyev had proposed to encourage the peasants officially in the use of this weapon against the Jews, and that the Committee of Ministers had rejected his proposal.  There were now administrators who did the same thing unofficially.  Prompted by selfish motives, the local Kulaks [1] or “bosses,” from among the Russian tradesmen, acting in conjunction with the rural elders, would convene peasant assemblies which were treated to liberal doses of alcohol.  The intoxicated, half-illiterate moujiks would sign a “verdict” demanding the expulsion of the Jews from their village; the verdict would be promptly confirmed by the governors and would immediately become law.  Such expulsions were particularly frequent in the governments under the jurisdiction of Drenteln, governor-general of Kiev, and no one doubted but that this ferocious Jew-baiter had passed the word to that effect throughout his dominions.

[Footnote 1:  Literally “Fists.”]

The economic misery within the Pale drove a number of Jews into the Russian interior, but here they were met by the whip of the law, made doubly painful by the scorpions of administrative caprice.  Wholesale expulsions of Jews took place in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, Kharkov, and other forbidden centers.  The effect of these expulsions upon the commercial life of the country was so disastrous that the big Russian merchants of Moscow and Kharkov appealed to the Government to relax the restrictions surrounding the visits of Jews to these cities.

The civil authorities were now joined by the military powers in hounding the Jews.  There were in the Russian army a large number of Jewish physicians, many of whom had distinguished themselves during the preceding Russo-Turkish war.  The reactionary Government at the helm of Russian affairs could not tolerate the sight of a Jewish physician exercising the rights of an army officer which were otherwise utterly utterly unattainable for a Jewish soldier.  Accordingly, the Minister of War, Vannovski, issued a rescript dated April 10, 1882, to the following effect: 

  First, to limit the number of Jewish physicians and feldshers[1]
  in the Military Department to five per cent of the general number of
  medical men.