The situation at the beginning of the eighties presented but little hope of improvement in the political condition of the Jews. Eight hundred and eighty-three Jews who had fought in the war for independence had been naturalized _en masse_. With the exception of this small number, the Jews were legally classed as foreigners.[43] Shortly after, owing to the fact that Austria-Hungary had withdrawn its protection from several thousands of its Jewish citizens resident in Roumania, the entire body of Jews received a new legal status, that of "foreigners not subject to any foreign Power". In other words, they were stateless, though subject to all the obligations of Roumanian citizens, including military service and the payment of taxes. This legal status of the Jews has received the attention of the world and marks a condition of things which according to Bluntschli is "a denial of the entire development of European states".[44] Freed from the control of the Powers, Roumania now entered on a new campaign of discrimination against the Jews. The first decade of the eighties saw this begun in a series of laws which for completeness finds no parallel even in Russia. At the very beginning, a law giving the police the right of domiciliary visitation and of expelling under the vagabond law anyone in the rural districts, was employed against the Jews, resulting in their frequent expulsions into the towns. The enforcement of the law against rural residence was so strict as to create practically the same situation as exists in the Russian Pale. The law of 1883, prohibiting lotteries, and in the following year the law prohibiting hawking or any form of sale from house to house or on the streets deprived several thousands of Jewish families of their livelihood.