Jewish families were stricken with terror on reading the eighth clause of the statute prescribing that "the Jewish conscripts presented by the [Jewish] communes shall be between the ages of twelve and twenty-five." This provision was supplemented by Clause 74: "Jewish minors, i.e., below the age of eighteen, shall be placed in preparatory establishments for military training." True, the institution of minor recruits, called _cantonists_, [1] existed also for Christians.

But in their case it was confined to the children of soldiers in active service, by virtue of the principle laid down by Arakcheyev [2] that children born of soldiers were the property of the Military Department, whereas the conscription of Jewish minors was to be absolute and to apply to all Jewish families without discrimination.

To make things worse, the law demanded that the years of preparatory training should not be included in the term of active service, the latter to start only with the age of eighteen (Clause 90); in other words, the Jewish cantonists were compelled to serve an additional term of six years over and above the obligatory twenty-five years.

Moreover, at the examination of Jewish conscripts, all that was demanded for their enlistment was "that they be free from any disease or defect incompatible with military service, but the other qualifications required by the general rules shall be left out of consideration" (Clause 10).
[Footnote 1: From _Canton_, a word applied in Prussia in the eighteenth century to a recruiting district.

In Russia, beginning with 1805, the term "cantonists" is applied to children born of soldiers and therefore liable to conscription.] [Footnote 2: See Vol.