Compare p. 201.]

As if the Government intended to make sport of the Jewish soldiers, the
latter were deprived of their right of residence in the localities
outside the Pale where they had been stationed, and as soon as their
term of service had expired, were sent back into the territory of the
Russian-Jewish ghetto. Thus, even Nicholas I, was out-Nicholased. The
discharged Jewish soldiers who had served under the old recruiting law
enjoyed, both for themselves and their families, the right of residence
throughout the Empire. [1] The new military statute of 1874 [2] withdrew
from the retired Jewish soldiers this reward for faithfully performed
duty, and in 1885 the Senate sustained the disfranchisement of these
Jews who had spent years of their life in the service of their
fatherland. A Jew from Berdychev, Vilna, or Odessa, who had served five
or six years somewhere in St. Petersburg, Moscow, or Kazan, was forced
to leave these tabooed cities and return home on the very day on which
he had taken off his soldier's uniform.

[Footnote 1: See above, p. 172.]

[Footnote 2: See p. 199 et seq.]

Yet, despite this curious encouragement of Jewish patriotism, the
Government had the audacity to charge the Jews continually with the
"evasion of their military duty." That a tendency towards such evasion
was in vogue among the Jews admits of no doubt. It would have been
contrary to human nature if people who were subject to assaults from
above and kicks from below, whose right of residence was limited to
one-twentieth of the territory of their fatherland, who were robbed of
shelter, air, and bread, and deprived of the hope to place themselves,
even by means of military service, on an equal footing with the lowest
Russian moujik, should have felt a profound need of sacrificing
themselves for their country, and should not have shirked this heaviest
of civil obligations to a larger extent than the privileged Russian
population, in which cases of evasion were by no means infrequent. In
reality, however, the complaints about the shortage of Jewish recruits
were vastly exaggerated. Subsequent statistical investigations brought
out the fact that, owing to irregular apportionment, the Government
demanded annually from the Jews a larger quota of recruits than was
justified by their numerical relation to the general population in the
Pale of Settlement. On an average, the Jews furnished twelve per cent of
the total number of recruits in th