All Russia was stirred at that time by the sensational story of a young Jewess, who had come to St.Petersburg or Moscow to enter the college courses for women, and in order to obtain the right of residence found herself compelled to register fictitiously as a prostitute and take out "a yellow ticket." When the police discovered that the young woman was engaged in studying, instead of plying her official "trade," she was banished from the capital.

In 1886, England was shocked by the expulsion from Moscow of the well-known English Member of Parliament, the banker Sir Samuel Montagu (later Lord Swaythling).

Despite his influential position, Montagu was ordered out of the Russian capital "within twenty-four hours," like an itinerant vagrant.
None of these tragedies, however, was able to produce any effect upon the ringleaders and henchmen of the Russian inquisition.

The energy of the authorities spent itself primarily in the fight against the natural, yet, according to the Russian code, "illegal" struggle of the Jews for their existence and against the sacred right of man to move about freely.

The merciless Russian law, trampling upon this inviolable right, drove human beings from village to town and from one town to another.