in the form of
"Temporary Rules" to be sanctioned in an extra-legal way by the Tzar,
with the end in view "to do away with the aggravated relations between
the Jews and the original population."

However, even the members of the reactionary Committee of Ministers were
embarrassed by Ignatyev's project. The Committee felt that it was
impossible to carry out the expropriation of personal and property
rights on so extensive a scale without the due process of law and that
the permission to be granted to rural communes of expelling the Jews
from the villages was tantamount to leaving the latter to the tender
mercies of the benighted Russian masses, which would thus more than ever
be strengthened, in their conviction that the Jews might be expelled and
assaulted with impunity, so that the relations between the two elements
of the population, instead of improving, would only become more
aggravated. On the other hand, the Committee of Ministers went on record
that it considered it necessary to adopt rigorous measures against the
Jews in order that the peasants should not think "that the Tzar's will
in ridding them of Jewish exploitation was not put into execution."

As a result of these contentions, several concessions were made by
Ignatyev, and the following compromise was reached: The clause ordering
the expulsion of the hundreds of thousands of Jews already settled in
the villages was eliminated, and the prohibition was restricted to the
Jews who wished to settle outside of the towns and townlets _anew_. In
turn, the Committee of Ministers yielded to Ignatyev's demand that the
project should be enacted with every possible dispatch, without
preliminary submission to the Council of State.

Such was the genesis of the famous "Temporary Rules" which were
sanctioned by the Tzar on May 3, 1882. Shorn of all bureaucratic
rhetoric, the new laws may be reduced to the following laconic
provisions:

_First_, to forbid the Jews henceforth to settle anew outside of the
towns and townlets.

_Second_, to suspend the completion of instruments of purchase of
real property and merchandise in the name of Jews outside of the
towns and townlets.

_Third_, to forbid the Jews to carry on business on Sundays and
Christian holidays.

The first two "Rules" contained in their harmless wording a cruel
punitive law which dislodged the Jews from nine-tenths of the territory
hitherto accessible to them, and tended to coop up millio