bureaucracy, where, at the expense of the Jews, it
could stow away anyone who had proved a failure or was no longer useful.
The Government also undertook to provide the graduates with positions,
patronage which rendered the students insolently independent of their
coreligionists, and encouraged some of them to indulge in a _modus
vivendi_ distasteful to their future flocks. The graduates, therefore,
proved failures as rabbis, and the Government was forced to provide for
them by appointing them as teachers.[16]

If this was the case with the rabbinical seminaries, we can easily
imagine the state of the subordinate schools. The Christian principals
were coarse and uneducated as a rule, and did their best to prejudice
the children against their religion. Scattered all over the Pale were to
be found Jews competent to fill positions not only as teachers in
inferior grades but as professors in the universities. Yet Lilienthal
was advised (1841) to advertise for three hundred teachers in Germany.
Finally the Government decided to employ Jews as teachers of Hebrew
only, the least important subject in the curriculum; for instruction in
the secular branches none but Christians were eligible. No Jews were
allowed to become rectors in their own schools, and their salaries were
so small that they could not support themselves without teaching an
additional class, which was prohibited. A Jew might, indeed, become an
"honorable overseer" (pochotny blyustityel), to mediate between pupils
and parents, but the title was the only pay attached to the office.
Respectable parents, therefore, kept their children at home, or rather
in the heder, and many a child's name was on the roll of attendance who
was not even aware of the existence of the school. "Every year in the
autumn," relates a writer a quarter of a century later, "there was a
kind of compulsory recruiting of Jewish children for the Government
school, accompanied sometimes by struggles between the victims and their
enemies,--scenes without a parallel, in some respects, in the civilized
world. I remember how poor mothers and sisters wept with despair when
some boy of the family was carried off or enlisted by the officers to be
a pupil of a Government school." Like the poimaniki, the poor and the
orphaned were compelled, or induced, to fill the class-rooms shunned by
the rich and respectable, and though the Government not only condemned
the ancient Hebrew institutions, but declared th