The recruiting inquisition of Nicholas inflicted upon the Jews the utmost limit of martyrdom.

It set Jew against Jew, called forth "a war of all against all," threw the tortured and the torturers into one heap, and sullied the Jewish soul.
All this took place while the Crimean War was going on.

The Russian army, on the altar of which so many human sacrifices had been offered in the course of thirty years, marched to save "the honor of Russia," in truth, to save the old regime.

Squadron upon squadron issued from the inner recesses of Russia, and marched towards the battlefields of the South, marched to the slaughter, into the mouths of the cannons of the English and French, who knew how to conquer without penal conscriptions and without inflicting tortures upon tender-aged cantonists.

The "gendarme of Europe," who, armed to his teeth, had contemptuously threatened to "finish the enemy with his soldier caps," could not hold out against the army of the "rotten West." Hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers fell beneath the walls of Sevastopol, upon the heights of Inkerman.