The spirit of protest, the striving for rejuvenation, which asserted itself in some youthful souls, was crushed in the vise of a time-honored discipline, the product of long ages.

The slightest deviation from a custom, a rite, or old habits of thought met with severe punishment.

A short jacket or a trimmed beard was looked upon as a token of dangerous free-thinking.

The reading of books written in foreign languages, or even written in Hebrew, when treating of secular subjects, brought upon the culprit untold hardships.

The scholastic education resulted in producing men entirely unfit for the battle of life, so that in many families energetic women took charge of the business and became the wage earners, [2] while their husbands were losing themselves in the mazes of speculation, somewhere in the recesses of the rabbinic _Betha-Midrash_ or the hasidic _Klaus_.
[Footnote 1: See on the latter term, Vol.