Weeping and moaning resounded in the neighborhood of the recruiting stations in the Jewish towns where parents and relatives took leave from their dear ones who were doomed to a perpetual barrack life.  And yet the fury of the Government was not satisfied.  In 1853 new “temporary rules” were issued, “by way of experiment,” whereby not only communities but also individuals among Jews were granted the right of offering as their substitutes any fellow-Jew from another city than his own who was caught without a passport.  Any Jew who happened to absent himself from his place of residence without a passport could be seized and drafted into service as a substitute for a regular recruit due from the family of the captor.  The “captive,” regardless of age, was made a soldier, and the captor was given a receipt for one recruit.

A new ferocious hunt began.  The official “captors” employed by the Kahals were no longer the only ones to prowl after living prey.  The chase was now taken up by every private individual who wished to find a substitute for a member of his family, or who simply wanted to turn a penny by selling his recruiting receipt.  Hordes of Jewish bandits sprang up who infested the roads and the inns, and by trickery or force made the travellers part with their passports and then dragged them to the recruiting stations as “captives” to be sent into the army.  Never before had the Jewish masses, yielding to pressure from above, sunk to such depths of degradation.  The Jew became a beast of prey to his fellow-Jew.  Jews were afraid of budging an inch from their native cities.  Every passer-by was suspected of being a captor or a bandit.  The recruiting inquisition of Nicholas inflicted upon the Jews the utmost limit of martyrdom.  It set Jew against Jew, called forth “a war of all against all,” threw the tortured and the torturers into one heap, and sullied the Jewish soul.

All this took place while the Crimean War was going on.  The Russian army, on the altar of which so many human sacrifices had been offered in the course of thirty years, marched to save “the honor of Russia,” in truth, to save the old regime.  Squadron upon squadron issued from the inner recesses of Russia, and marched towards the battlefields of the South, marched to the slaughter, into the mouths of the cannons of the English and French, who knew how to conquer without penal conscriptions and without inflicting tortures upon tender-aged cantonists.  The “gendarme of Europe,” who, armed to his teeth, had contemptuously threatened to “finish the enemy with his soldier caps,” could not hold out against the army of the “rotten West.”  Hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers fell beneath the walls of Sevastopol, upon the heights of Inkerman.  Thousands of Jewish soldiers were laid among them in “brotherly graves.”  The Jews, enslaved by pre-reformatory Russia, died for a fatherland which treated them as pariahs, which had bestowed upon them a monstrous conscription, the unexampled institutions of cantonists, penal recruits, and “captives.”  However, it soon became clear that those who had fallen under the walls of Sevastopol had sealed by their death not the honor but the dishonor of the old regime of blood and iron.  Beneath the rotting corpse of an obsolete statecraft, built upon serfdom and maintained by soldiery and police, the germ of a new and better Russia began to stir.