THE MSTISLAVL AFFAIR The ritual murder trials did not exhaust the "extraordinary" afflictions of Nicholas' reign.

There were cases of wholesale chastisements inflicted on more tangible grounds, when misdeeds of a few individuals were puffed up into communal crimes and visited cruelly upon entire communities.

The conscription horrors of that period, when the Kahals were degraded to police agencies for "capturing" recruits, had bred the "informing" disease among the Jewish communities.

They produced the type of professional informer, or _moser_[1], who blackmailed the Kahal authorities of his town by threatening to disclose their "abuses," the absconding of candidates for the army and various irregularities in carrying out the conscription, and in this way extorted "silence money" from them.

These scoundrels made life intolerable, and there were occasions when the people took the law into their own hands and secretly dispatched the most objectionable among them.
[Footnote 1: The Hebrew and Yiddish equivalent for "informer."] A case of this kind came to light in the government of Podolia in 1836.
In the town Novaya Ushitza two _mosers_, named Oxman and Schwartz, who had terrorized the Jews of the whole province, were found dead.