Accordingly, the undisciplined fury of the populace in 1881 was supplemented by a systematic and carefully reasoned-out persecution on the part of the Government. Instead of endeavouring to raise the Russian masses to a level of mental and moral strength sufficiently high to enable them to compete with the Jew, the Czar’s ministers devoted their ingenuity to the invention of new means for lowering the Jew to the level of the Russian masses. The disabilities of the hated race were increased. Jewish property in the open country was confiscated, and the owners were driven into ghettos. It was enacted that henceforth no Jew should be allowed to live in a village or to acquire property therein. The whole of the Russian Empire was, with reference to the Jews, divided into three distinct sections. The bulk of the race were confined to the fifteen provinces known as the “Pale of Jewish Settlement.” Those Jews who belonged to a merchants’ guild of the first class for ten years, University graduates, and skilled artisans were permitted to move freely and to settle in any part of European Russia they chose, except the departments of Moscow and Taurien, in which no Jewish workman was allowed to reside. The third section comprised Siberia, and that was closed to all Jews, except convicts. The result of these enactments was that the few towns within the “pale” were overcrowded with Jewish residents, herded together and forced to carry on a fierce competition for existence with each other. At the same time, laws were passed rendering the admittance of Jewish youths to the high schools and Universities prohibitive, and the Jews were forbidden to act as State or municipal officers, or teachers, or to practise at the bar without a special license from the Minister of Justice. These and many other measures of restriction were adopted with the ostensible object of saving the Russian peasant from the clutches of the Jewish harpy. The joint effect of persecution and legislation on the Jews was misery. But these crimes proved the reverse of beneficial to the very peasants on whose behalf they were avowedly committed. In every village and township the departure of the Jewish traders and artisans was immediately marked by a rise in the prices of commodities, and was soon followed by commercial and industrial stagnation.