the central Government to hold
the heads of the administration to account for their connivance at
pogroms had the desired effect. All that the snarling dogs could do was
to bark.

3. DISABILITIES AND EMIGRATION

The pogrom machinery was thus stopped by a word of command from St.
Petersburg. As a counterbalance, the machinery for the manufacture of
Jewish disabilities continued in full operation. The "Temporary Rules"
of May third established a system of legal persecutions which were
directed against the Jews on the ground of their "economic
injuriousness," The fact that the Jewish population was in many regards
outside the operation of the general laws of Russia opened up a wide
field for the grossest forms of arbitrariness and lawlessness. At one
stroke, all the exits from the overcrowded cities into the villages
within the Pale of Settlement were tightly closed. All branches of
industry connected with Jewish land ownership outside the cities were
curtailed and in some places entirely cut off. In many villages the
right bestowed on the rural communes of ostracising "vicious members" by
a special verdict [1] was used as a weapon to expel those Jews who had
long been settled there.

[Footnote 1: The official term applied to the resolutions passed by the
village communes. Compare p. 310.]

It will be remembered that Ignatyev had proposed to encourage the
peasants officially in the use of this weapon against the Jews, and that
the Committee of Ministers had rejected his proposal. There were now
administrators who did the same thing unofficially. Prompted by selfish
motives, the local _Kulaks_ [1] or "bosses," from among the Russian
tradesmen, acting in conjunction with the rural elders, would convene
peasant assemblies which were treated to liberal doses of alcohol. The
intoxicated, half-illiterate _moujiks_ would sign a "verdict" demanding
the expulsion of the Jews from their village; the verdict would be
promptly confirmed by the governors and would immediately become law.
Such expulsions were particularly frequent in the governments under the
jurisdiction of Drenteln, governor-general of Kiev, and no one doubted
but that this ferocious Jew-baiter had passed the word to that effect
throughout his dominions.

[Footnote 1: Literally "Fists."]

The economic misery within the Pale drove a number of Jews into the
Russian interior, but here they were met by the whip of the law, made
doubly painful by the scorpions of