During the summer months of 1905, a new succession of pogroms took place, this time of the military variety. Wrought up over the defeats of the Russian army in Manchuria, and roused by the vile proclamations of the Black Hundred which pictured the Jews as the inner enemy, soldiers and Cossacks began to wreak their vengeance upon this inner enemy, assaulting and killing or wounding Jews on the streets of Minsk (May 26), Brest-Litovsk (May 29-31), Syedletz and Lodz (June 9). In the first three cities, the soldiers plundered and murdered only the Jews. In Lodz, they fired at a mixed Polish-Jewish demonstration of workingmen. A regular butchery was engineered by the soldiery in Bialystok (June 30). During the entire day, the city resounded with the rifle shots of maddened soldiers who were firing into peaceful Jewish crowds. Fifty dead and a still larger number of wounded were the result of these military exploits. During the same time a regularly organized pogrom occurred in the southern outskirts of Russia, in the city of Kerch, in the Crimea. On July 27, a peaceful political demonstration of the kind then generally in vogue took place in that city; among the participants were also the Jewish youth. By way of protest, the city-governor and gendarmerie chief organized a "patriotic" counter-demonstration, which was held a few days later, on July 31. Carrying a banner with the portrait of the Tzar and singing the Russian national hymn, the "patriotic" hordes, with the notorious local thieves and hooligans as the predominating element, sacked Jewish houses and stores, and, in the name of patriotism, looted Jewish property--even the so-called respectable public participating in the latter act. When the armed Jewish self-defence began to oppose the rioters, they were scattered by a volley from the soldiers, ten of them being killed on the spot. The subsequent inquiry established the fact that the pogrom had been fully prepared by the police and gendarmerie authorities, which had been in telegraphic communication in regard to it with the Police Department in St. Petersburg. It was a rehearsal of the monstrous October pogroms which were to take place a few months later. 4. THE JEWISH FRANCHISE