Second, to stop appointing Jews on the medical service in the
  military districts of Western Russia, and to transfer the surplus
  over and above five per cent into the Eastern districts.

  Third, to appoint Jewish physicians only in those contingents of
  the army in which the budget calls for at least two physicians, with
  the proviso that the second physician must be a Christian.

[Footnote 1:  See p. 167, n. 2.]

The reason for these provisions was stated in a most offensive form: 

It is necessary to stop the constant growth of the number of physicians of the Mosaic persuasion in the Military Department, in view of their deficient conscientiousness in discharging their duties and their unfavorable influence upon the sanitary service in the army.

This revolting affront had the effect that many Jewish physicians handed in their resignations immediately.  The resignation of one of these physicians, the well-known novelist Yaroshevski, was couched in such emphatic terms, and parried the moral blow directed at the Jewish professional men with such dignity that the Minister of War deemed it necessary to put the author on trial.  Among other things, Yaroshevski wrote: 

So long as the aspersions cast upon the Jewish physicians so pitilessly are not removed, every superfluous minute spent by them in serving this Department will merely add to their disgrace.  In the name of their human dignity, they have no right to remain there where they are held in abhorrence.

Under these circumstances it seemed quite natural that the tendency toward emigration, which had called forth a number of emigration societies as far back as the beginning of 1882 [1], took an ever stronger hold upon the Jewish population of Russia.  The disastrous consequences of the resolution adopted by the conference of notables in St. Petersburg [2] were now manifest.  By rejecting the formation of a central agency for regulating the emigration, the conference had abandoned the movement to the blind elemental forces, and a catastrophe was bound to follow.  The pogrom at Balta called forth a new outburst of the emigration panic, and in the summer of 1882 some twenty thousand Jewish refugees were again huddled together in the Galician border-town of Brody.  They were without means for continuing their journey to America, having come to Brody in the hope of receiving help from the Jewish societies of Western Europe.  The relief committees established in the principal cities of Europe were busily engaged in “evacuating” Brody of this destitute mass of fugitives.  In the course of the summer and autumn this task was successfully accomplished.  A large number of emigrants were dispatched to the United States, and the rest were dispersed over the various centers of Western Europe.

[Footnote 1:  See above, p. 297 et seq.]

[Footnote 2:  See above, p. 307.]