However, the “Statute of Conscription and Military Service,” subjoined to the ukase, was a lurid illustration of a tendency utterly at variance with the desire “to equalize military duty.”  Had the Russian Government been genuinely desirous of rendering military duty uniform for all estates, there would have been no need of issuing separately for the Jews a huge enactment of ninety-five clauses, with supplementary “instructions,” consisting of sixty-two clauses, for the guidance of the civil and military authorities.  All that was necessary was to declare that the general military statute applied also to the Jews.  Instead, the reverse stipulation is made:  “The general laws and institutions are not valid in the case of the Jews” when at variance with the special statute (Clause 3).

The discriminating character of Jewish conscription looms particularly large in the central portion of the statute.  Jewish families were stricken with terror on reading the eighth clause of the statute prescribing that “the Jewish conscripts presented by the [Jewish] communes shall be between the ages of twelve and twenty-five.”  This provision was supplemented by Clause 74:  “Jewish minors, i.e., below the age of eighteen, shall be placed in preparatory establishments for military training.”

True, the institution of minor recruits, called cantonists, [1] existed also for Christians.  But in their case it was confined to the children of soldiers in active service, by virtue of the principle laid down by Arakcheyev [2] that children born of soldiers were the property of the Military Department, whereas the conscription of Jewish minors was to be absolute and to apply to all Jewish families without discrimination.  To make things worse, the law demanded that the years of preparatory training should not be included in the term of active service, the latter to start only with the age of eighteen (Clause 90); in other words, the Jewish cantonists were compelled to serve an additional term of six years over and above the obligatory twenty-five years.  Moreover, at the examination of Jewish conscripts, all that was demanded for their enlistment was “that they be free from any disease or defect incompatible with military service, but the other qualifications required by the general rules shall be left out of consideration” (Clause 10).

[Footnote 1:  From Canton, a word applied in Prussia in the eighteenth century to a recruiting district.  In Russia, beginning with 1805, the term “cantonists” is applied to children born of soldiers and therefore liable to conscription.]

[Footnote 2:  See Vol.  I, p. 395, n. 1.]