Such was the lot of the juvenile cantonists. As for the adult recruits,
who were drafted into the army at the normal age of conscription
(18-25), their conversion to Christianity was not pursued by the same
direct methods, but their fate was not a whit less tragic from the
moment of their capture till the end of their grievous twenty-five
years' service. Youths, who had no knowledge of the Russian language,
were torn away from the heder or yeshibah, often from wife and children.

In consequence of the early marriages then in vogue, most youths at the
age of eighteen were married. The impending separation for a quarter of
a century, added to the danger of the soldier's apostasy or death in
far-off regions, often disrupted the family ties. Many recruits, before
entering upon their military career, gave their wives a divorce so as
not to doom them to perpetual widowhood.

At the end of 1834 rumors began to spread among the Jewish masses
concerning a law which was about to be issued forbidding early marriages
but exempting from conscription those married prior to the promulgation
of the law. A panic ensued. Everywhere feverish haste was displayed in
marrying off boys from ten to fifteen years old to girls of an equally
tender age. Within a few months there appeared in every city hundreds
and thousands of such couples, whose marital relations were often
confined to playing with nuts or bones. The misunderstanding which had
caused this senseless matrimonial panic or _beholoh,_[1] as it was
afterwards popularly called, was cleared up by the publication, on April
13, 1835, of the new "Statute on the Jews." To be sure, the new law
contained a clause forbidding marriages before the age of eighteen, but
it offered no privileges for those already married, so that the only
result of the _beholoh_ was to increase the number of families robbed by