Jews a huge enactment of ninety-five clauses, with supplementary
"instructions," consisting of sixty-two clauses, for the guidance of the
civil and military authorities. All that was necessary was to declare
that the general military statute applied also to the Jews. Instead, the
reverse stipulation is made: "The general laws and institutions are not
valid in the case of the Jews" when at variance with the special statute
(Clause 3).

The discriminating character of Jewish conscription looms particularly
large in the central portion of the statute. 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