e Pale, whereas the Jewish population
of the Pale formed but eleven per cent of the total population. The
Government further refused to consider the fact that, owing to
inaccurate registration, the conscription lists often carried the names
of persons who had long since died, or who had left the country to
emigrate abroad. In fact, the annual emigration of Jews from Russia, the
result of uninterrupted persecutions, reduced the number of young men of
conscription age. But the Russian authorities were of the opinion that
the Jews who remained behind should serve in the Russian army instead of
those of their brethren who had become citizens of the free American
Republic. The "evasion of military duty" and the annual shortage of a
few hundred recruits, as against the many thousands of those enlisted,
was charged as a grave crime against that very people towards which the
Government on its part failed to fulfil even its most elementary
obligations. Reams of paper were covered with all kinds of official
devices to "cut short" this evasion of military duty by the Jews. On one
beautiful April morning of 1886, the Government came out with the
following enactment:

The family of a Jew guilty of evading military service is liable to
a fine of three hundred rubles ($150). The collection of the fine
shall be decreed by the respective recruiting station and carried
out by the police. It shall not be substituted by imprisonment in
the case of destitute persons liable to that fine.

In addition, a military reward was promised for the seizure of a Jew who
had failed to present himself to the recruiting authorities.

By virtue of this barbarous principle of collective responsibility, new
hardships were inflicted upon the Jews of Russia. Since the law provided
that the fine for evading military service be imposed upon the _family_
of the culprit, the police interpreted that term "liberally," taking it
to include parents, brothers, and near relatives. The following
procedure gradually came into vogue. In the autumn of every year, the
Russian conscription season, the names of the young Jews who have
completed their twenty-first year are called out at the recruiting
station from a prepared list. When a Jew whose name has been called has
failed to present himself on the same day, the recruiting authorities
issue an order on the spot imposing a fine on his family. The police
then appear in the house of his parents to collect the su