f dress, it was not in obedience to police measures, but in spite
of them. Compulsory assimilation was as little successful now as had
been compulsory isolation in the Middle Ages. The medieval rulers had
imposed upon the Jews a distinct form of garment and a "yellow badge" to
keep them apart from the Christians. Nicholas I. employed forcible means
to make the Jews by their style of dress appear similar to the
Christians. The violence resorted to in both cases, though different in
form, sprang from the same motive.

3. NEW CONSCRIPTION HORRORS

There was yet one domain in which the squeezing and pressing power of
Tzardom could fully employ its destructive energy. We refer to military
conscription. This genuine creation of the imperial brain became more
and more intolerable, serving in Jewish life as a penal and correctional
agency, with its "capture" of old and young, its inquisitorial regime of
cantonists, its deportation for a quarter of a century and longer into
far-off regions. Even the Russian peasants were stricken with terror at
the thought of Nicholas' conscription, which in the reminiscences of the
portrayers of that period is pictured as life-long deportation, and they
frequently shirked military duty by fleeing from the land-owners and
hiding themselves in the woods. How much more terrible must then
conscription have been for the Jew, whose family was robbed both of a
young father and a tender son. No means was left unused to evade this
atrocious obligation. The reports of the governors refer to the
"immeasurable difficulties in carrying out the conscription among the
Jews."

Apart from innumerable cases of self-mutilation--to quote the words
of one of these reports written in 1850--the disappearance, without
exception, of all able-bodied Jews has become so general that in
some communities, outside of those unfit for military service
because of age or physical defects, not a single person can be found
during conscription who might be drafted into the army. Some flee
abroad, whilst others hide in adjacent governments.

Those in hiding were hunted down like wild beasts. Their life, as a
contemporary witness testifies, was worse than that of galley slaves,
for the slightest indiscretion brought ruin upon them. Many resorted to
self-mutilation to render themselves unfit for military service. They
chopped off their fingers or toes, damaged their eyesight, and
perpetrated every possible form of