tenants the right of residence and trade in their villages. The Jews began to rush into the cities, where even the long-settled residents could not manage to make a living. True, the Government was luring the persecuted Jews into two new vocations, the establishment of factories and of agricultural colonies. But the impecunious village Jew had neither the capital nor the capacity for opening factories. Moreover, it was of no conceivable use to call industries artificially into being, without having first secured a market for the manufactured products. Several woolen mills had been founded by Jews in Lithuania and Volhynia, but all they could do was to provide work for a few thousand people. It was thus natural that all eyes turned towards agricultural colonization. The Statute of 1804 promised to provide impecunious Jews desirous of engaging in agriculture with free land in several Governments, to grant them loans for their equipment, and exempt them from taxation for a number of years. The exiled village Jews clutched at this promise as an anchor of salvation. In 1806 several Jewish groups in the Government of Moghilev appealed to the governor to transfer them to New Russia, there to engage in corn-growing. The delegate of one of these groups, Nahum Finkelstein, even traveled to St. Petersburg to lay the matter before Minister Kochubay, and was dispatched by the latter to the Government of Kherson for the purpose of inspecting and selecting the land. The Minister, acting in agreement with the Governor of Kherson, Duke Richelieu, decided to set aside separate parcels of land in the steppes of that region and to settle Jews on them under the auspices of the New Russian "Immigration Bureau." Scarcely had the two Moghilev groups completed the arrangements for their emigration, when scores of similar applications began to come in from Jewish groups in other Governments of the Pale. By the end of 1806 the number of applicants mounted up to fifteen hundred families, numbering some seven thousand souls. The Russian authorities found themselves in an awkward position. They were caught unprepared for the transfer of so many persons at the expense of the state. In 1807 four colonies of Jewish agriculturists were established in the Government of Kherson, the first among the Jewish colonies of South Russia. The number of settlers amounted to some three hundred families, consisting of two thousand souls. The number of applicants desirous of settling on the land continued to increase. In the course of 1808, when the expulsion from the villages was in full swing, the White Russian governors bombarded the Minister of the Interior with petitions to allow as many Jewish families as possible to proceed to New Russia. The Governor of Vitebsk reported that the rural Jews