The first procedure of the reactionary ministers was to overlook the massacres which took place from the beginning of the rule of Alexander III. Presently, a series of “temporary rules” were issued against them. Even in the Pale of Settlement they were compelled to live in the towns and were forbidden to purchase real estate in the country. In 1888 they were ordered to go back to the place in which they had lived before the year 1882. About a million and a half of the Jews were affected by this rule, and the chaotic abandonment of their several businesses and properties cast large numbers of them into deep and undeserved poverty. Vast aggregations of them, growing at a prodigious rate on account of their high fertility, huddled together in the towns of the Pale, and lived in great privation. In 1891 a new application of the rules exiled and ruined seventeen thousand Jewish artisans of Moscow. [IMAGE: img348.jpg Tauride Palace/Session Chamber of the Duma] Still more stupid, and hardly less cruel, was the restriction upon the development of their ability. The civil service and the professions were closed against them. They might not, without special license, have a Christian servant, and notaries were forbidden to have Jewish clerks. Their zeal for education was similarly repressed. In the universities which were situated in the Pale Jewish students must not number more than a tenth of the whole. At other provincial universities they must not number more than five per cent.; at the metropolitan universities not more than two per cent. By these contemptuous repressive measures the ignorant people were prepared for the pogroms which would disgrace the reign of the last of the Romanoffs. The Poles were the next most conspicuous victims of the Slavophile policy. We saw that Alexander II had ordered the extinction of their nationality, but a people with an acute memory of having been a great civilisation at a time when the Russians were a disorderly mass of semi-barbarians could not easily resign itself to obliteration. The religious tradition here coincided with the national, as in Ireland (the Poland of the west), and the priests generally fostered insurgence. Alexander’s ruthless ministers had but to apply more stringently the laws already in force against the Poles. From the University of Warsaw to the smallest elementary school the teaching was entirely Russianised. Even the Bank of Warsaw was suppressed, and Polish trade forced into a branch of the Russian bank. There was a futile rising in 1885, but four executions and two hundred arrests completed the work of “pacifying” the country, or eliminating from it every man of spirit and courage. Even Finland, which was still autonomous, had to complain to the Tsar of encroachments upon the liberties which his father had sworn to respect. In the other Baltic provinces the Russian roller was used as in Poland.