NEW CONSCRIPTION HORRORS There was yet one domain in which the squeezing and pressing power of Tzardom could fully employ its destructive energy.

We refer to military conscription.

This genuine creation of the imperial brain became more and more intolerable, serving in Jewish life as a penal and correctional agency, with its "capture" of old and young, its inquisitorial regime of cantonists, its deportation for a quarter of a century and longer into far-off regions.

Even the Russian peasants were stricken with terror at the thought of Nicholas' conscription, which in the reminiscences of the portrayers of that period is pictured as life-long deportation, and they frequently shirked military duty by fleeing from the land-owners and hiding themselves in the woods.

How much more terrible must then conscription have been for the Jew, whose family was robbed both of a young father and a tender son.