This suggestion was carried out on February 4, 1883, on which day an imperial ukase was issued calling for the formation of a “High Commission for the Revision of the Current Laws concerning the Jews.”  The chairmanship of the Commission was first entrusted to Makov, a former Minister of the Interior, and after his untimely death, to Count Pahlen, a former Minister of Justice, who guided the work of the Commission during the five years of its existence—­hence its popular designation as the “Pahlen Commission,” The membership of the Commission was made up of six officials representing the various departments of the Ministry of the Interior, and of one official for each of the Ministries of Finance, Justice, Public Instruction, Crown Domains, and Foreign Affairs, and, lastly, of a few experts who were consulted casually.

The new bureaucratic body received no definite instructions as to the period of time within which it was expected to complete its labors.  It was evidently given to understand that the work entrusted to it could well afford to wait.  The first session of the High Commission was held fully ten months after its official appointment by the Tzar, and its business proceeded at a snail’s pace, surrounded by the mysterious air characteristic of Russian officialdom.  For several years the High Commission had to work its way through the sad inheritance of the defunct “gubernatorial commissions,” represented by mounds of paper with the most fantastic projects of solving the Jewish question, endeavoring to bring these materials into some kind of system.  It also received a number of memoranda on the Jewish question from outsiders, among them from public-minded Jews, who in most cases used Baron Horace Guenzburg as their go-between—­memoranda which sought to put the various aspects of the question in their right perspective.  After four years spent on the examination of the material, the Commission undertook to formulate its own conclusions, but, for reasons which will become patent later on, these conclusions were never crystallized in the form of legal provisions.

While the High Commission was assiduously engaged in the “revision of the current laws concerning the Jews,” in other words, was repeating the Sisyphus task abandoned by scores of similar bureaucratic creations in the past, the Government pursued with unabated vigor its old-time policy of making the life of the Jews unbearable by turning out endless varieties of new legal restrictions.  These restrictions were generally passed “outside the law,” i.e., without their being previously submitted to the Council of State; they were simply brought up as suggestions before the Council of Ministers, and, after adoption by the latter, received legal sanction through ratification by the Tzar.  Without awaiting the results of the revision of Jewish legislation which it had itself undertaken, the Russian Government embarked enthusiastically upon the task of forging new chains