d degree, the Government rendered it nugatory by
depriving him of the right of enjoying the fruit of his labor and
self-sacrifice. He could not practice as an army physician or jurist,
nor obtain a position as an engineer or a Government or municipal clerk.
In the army, he was not allowed to hold any office, and, though he might
be an expert chemist, he could never fill the post of a dispenser (March
1, 1888). He was excluded from the schools for the training of officers,
and if he passed the examination on the subjects taught there, his
certificate could not contain the usual statement that there "was no
objection to admitting him to the military schools."[1]

These restrictive measures were not relaxed when Alexander III was
succeeded by his son Nicholas II (1894). If anything, they were more
rigorously executed, and the mob was encouraged to multiply its outrages
upon the defenceless Jews. The closing years of the nineteenth century
wiped out the promises of its opening years. Blood accusations followed
by riots became of frequent occurrence. Irkutsk (1896), Shpola, and Kiev
(1897), Kantakuzov (Kherson), Vladimir, and Nikolayev (1899) gave the
Jews a foretaste of what they had to expect when the Black Hundreds,
encouraged by the Government and incited by Kruzhevan and Pronin, would
be let loose to enact the scenes that took place in Kishinev and Homel
before the Russo-Japanese war, and in hundreds of towns after it. The
difficulties in the way of securing an education were increased. Russia
did not believe in an "irreducible minimum" where the rights of her Jews
were concerned. Under Nicholas II the number of Jewish women admitted to
medical schools was put at three per cent of the total number of
students; the newly-established School for Engineers in Moscow was
closed to Jewish young men altogether; and the students of both sexes in
the schools were constantly harassed by the police because of the harsh
laws concerning the rights of residence. Some splendidly equipped
institutions of learning were allowed to remain almost empty rather than
admit Jewish students.[2]

This was the worst punishment of all, the most relentless vengeance
wreaked on a helpless victim. "Of all the laws which swept down upon
them from St. Petersburg and Moscow," says Leroy-Beaulieu with
characteristic insight into the soul of Israel, "those which they [the
Jews] find hardest to bear are the regulations that block their entrance
to the Rus