than ever be strengthened, in their conviction that the Jews might be expelled and assaulted with impunity, so that the relations between the two elements of the population, instead of improving, would only become more aggravated.  On the other hand, the Committee of Ministers went on record that it considered it necessary to adopt rigorous measures against the Jews in order that the peasants should not think “that the Tzar’s will in ridding them of Jewish exploitation was not put into execution.”

As a result of these contentions, several concessions were made by Ignatyev, and the following compromise was reached:  The clause ordering the expulsion of the hundreds of thousands of Jews already settled in the villages was eliminated, and the prohibition was restricted to the Jews who wished to settle outside of the towns and townlets anew.  In turn, the Committee of Ministers yielded to Ignatyev’s demand that the project should be enacted with every possible dispatch, without preliminary submission to the Council of State.

Such was the genesis of the famous “Temporary Rules” which were sanctioned by the Tzar on May 3, 1882.  Shorn of all bureaucratic rhetoric, the new laws may be reduced to the following laconic provisions: 

  First, to forbid the Jews henceforth to settle anew outside of the
  towns and townlets.

  Second, to suspend the completion of instruments of purchase of
  real property and merchandise in the name of Jews outside of the
  towns and townlets.

  Third, to forbid the Jews to carry on business on Sundays and
  Christian holidays.

The first two “Rules” contained in their harmless wording a cruel punitive law which dislodged the Jews from nine-tenths of the territory hitherto accessible to them, and tended to coop up millions of human beings within the suffocating confines of the towns and townlets of the Western region.  And yet, notwithstanding its tremendous implications, the law was passed outside the ordinary course of legal procedure—­under the disguise of “Temporary Rules,” which, in spite of their title, have been enforced with merciless cruelty for more than a generation.

2.  ABANDONMENT OF THE POGROM POLICY

After imposing a severe and immediately effective penalty upon Russian Jewry for having been ruined by the pogroms, the Government suddenly remembered its duty, and dangled the threat of future penalties before the prospective instigators of Jewish disorders.  On the same fateful third of May, the Tzar sanctioned the decision of the Committee of Ministers concerning the necessity of declaring solemnly that “the Government is firmly resolved to prosecute invariably any attempt at violence on the person and property of the Jews, who are under the protection of the general laws.”  In accordance with this declaration, a senatorial ukase dated May 10 was sent out to the governors, warning them that “the heads of the