Still others pleaded for moderation lest excessive restriction in admission to Russian universities should force the Jewish youth to go to foreign universities and make them even "more dangerous," since they were bound to return to Russia with liberal notions concerning the political form of government.
At last, in July, 1887, the Minister of Public Instruction, acting on the above-mentioned imperial "resolution," published his two famous circulars limiting the admission of Jews to the universities and to secondary schools.

The following norm was established: in the Pale of Settlement the Jews were to be admitted to the schools to the extent of ten per cent of the Christian school population; outside the Pale the norm was fixed at five per cent, and in the two capitals, St.Petersburg and Moscow, at three per cent.

Although decreed before the very beginning of the new scholastic year, the percentage norm was nevertheless immediately applied in the case of the _gymnazia,_ the "Real schools," [1] and the universities.

In the higher professional institutions, such as the technological, veterinarian, and agronomical schools, the restrictions had been, practised even before the promulgation of the circular, or were introduced immediately after it.
[Footnote 1: Or _Real Gymnazia_, see above, p.

163, n, 1.] This was the genesis of the educational "percentage norm," the source of sorrow and tears for two generation of Russian Jews--both fathers and sons now having run the gauntlet.