ulation, the so-called burgher estate, [1] consisting of petty
artisans and those impoverished tradesmen who could not afford to enrol
in the mercantile guilds, though there are cases on record where poor
Jews begged from door to door to collect a sufficient sum of money for a
guild certificate in order to save their children from military service.
The more or less well-to-do were exempted from conscription either by
virtue of their mercantile status or because of their connections with
the Kahal leaders who had the power of selecting the victims.

[Footnote 1: See above, p. 23, n. 1.]

4. THE POLICY OF EXPULSIONS

In all lands of Western Europe the introduction of personal military
service for the Jews was either accompanied or preceded by their
emancipation. At all events, it was followed by some mitigation of their
disabilities, serving, so to speak, as an earnest of the grant of equal
rights. Even in clerical Austria, the imposition of military duty upon
the Jews was preceded by the _Toleranz Patent_, this would-be Act of
Emancipation. [1]

[Footnote 1: Military service was imposed upon the Jews of Austria by
the law of 1787. Several years previously, on January 2, 1782, Emperor
Joseph II. had issued his famous Toleration Act, removing a number of
Jewish disabilities and opening the way to their assimilation with the
environment. Nevertheless, most of the former restrictions remained in
force.]

In Russia the very reverse took place. The introduction of military
conscription of a most aggravating kind and the unspeakable cruelties
attending its practical execution were followed, in the case of the
Jews, by an unprecedented recrudescence of legislative discrimination
and a monstrous increase of their disabilities. The Jews were lashed
with a double knout, a military and a civil. In the same ill-fated year
which saw the promulgation of the conscription statute, barely three
months after it had received the imperial sanction, while the moans of
the Jews, fasting and praying to God to deliver them from the calamity,
were still echoing in the synagogues, two new ukases were issued, both
signed on December 2, 1827--the one decreeing the transfer of the Jews
from all villages and village inns in the government of Grodno into the
towns and townlets, the other ordering the banishment of all Jewish
residents from the city of Kiev.

The expulsion from the Grodno villages was the continuation of the
policy of the _rura