in the sky on a hot summer day. Part of them have run away and have joined the human current, twenty thousand men strong, that silently flows through the transported every year under the head of ssylno-poselentsy, that is, to be settled in Siberia, also for life, and with a total or partial loss of their civil and personal rights. To these ssylno-poselentsy-or forest lands of Siberia, from east to west, simply poselentsy in the current language - must be added the 23.383 exiled during the same ten years na vodvorenie, that is, to be settled with a partial loss of their civil rights; 2,551 exiled na jitie (" to live in Siberia") without loss of their personal rights; and the 76,686 exiled during the same time by simple orders of the administrative, making thus a total of nearly one hundred and thirty thousand exiles for ten years. During the last five years this figure has still increased, reaching from sixteen to seventeen thousand exiles every year. I have already said what are the "crimes" of this mass of human beings cast out from Russia; let us see now what is their situation in the land of exile. A whole literature on this subject has grown up during the last ten years. Official inquiries have been made, and scores of papers have been published on the conse quences of the transportation to Siberia, all being agreed as to the following conclusion: Leaving aside some isolated cases, such as the excellent influence of the Polish and Russian political exiles on the development of manufactures in Siberia, as well as that of the nonconformists and Little Russians (who have been transported by whole communes at once) on agriculture leaving aside these few exceptions, the great mass of exiles, far from supplying Siberia with useful colonists and skilled working-men, supplies it with a floating population, mostly starving and quite unable to do any useful work (see the works and papers by MM. Maximoff, Lvoff, Zavalishin, Rovinsky, Yadrintseff, Peysen, Dr. Sperch, and many others, and the extracts from official inquiries they have published). It appears from these investigations that, whilst more than half a million of people have been transported to Siberia during the last sixty years, only two hundred thousand are now on the lists of the local administration'; the remainder have died without leaving any posterity, or have disappeared. Even of these two hundred thousand who figure on the official lists, no less than one-third, that is, seventy thousand (or even much more, according to other valuations), have disappeared during the last few years without anybody knowing what has become of them. They have vanished like a cloud towards the Ural. Others and these are the great number - already have dotted with their bones the "runaway paths" of the forests and marshes, as also the paths that lead to and from the gold mines. And the remainder constitute the floating population of the larger towns, trying to escape an obnoxious supervision by assuming false names. As to the one hundred and thirty thousand (or much less, according to other statisticians) who have remained under the control of the administration, the unanimous testimony of all inquiries, official or private, is that they are in such a wretched state of misery as to be a real burden on the country." Even in the most fertile provinces of Siberia - Toursk and the southern part of Tobolsk - only one-quarter of them have their own houses, and only one out of nine have become agriculturists. In the eastern provinces the proportion is still less favorable. Those who are not agriculturists - and they are some hundred thousand men and women throughout Siberia are wandering from town to town without any permanent occupation, or going to and from the gold washings, or living in villages from hand to mouth, in the worst imaginable misery, with all the vices that never fail to follow misery. Several causes contribute to the achievement of this result. The chief one — all agree in that — is the demoralization the convicts undergo in the prisons, and during their peregrinations on the étapes. Long before having reached their destination in Siberia, they are demoralized. The laziness enforced for years on the inmates of the lock-ups; the development of the passion for games of hazard; the systematic suppression of the will of the prisoner, and the development of passive qualities, quite opposite to the moral strength required for colonizing a young country; the prostration of the strength of character and the development of low passions, of shallow and futile desires, and of anti-social conceptions generated by the prison - all this ought to be kept in mind to realize the depth of moral corruption that is spread by our gaols, and to understand how an inmate of these in. stitutions never can be the man to endure the hard struggle for life in the sub-arctic Russian colony. But not only is the moral force of the convict broken by the prison; his physical force, too, is mostly broken forever by the journey and the sojourn at the hard-labor colonies. Many contract incurable diseases; all are weak. As to those who have spent some twenty years in hard labor (an attempt at escape easily brings the seclusion to this length), they are for the most part absolutely unable to perform any work. Even put in the best circumstances, they would still be a burden on the community. But the conditions im posed on the poselenets are very hard. He is sent to some remote village commune, where he receives several acres of land the least fertile in the commune, and he must become a farmer. In reality he knows nothing of the practice of agriculture in Siberia, and, after three or four years' detention, he has lost the taste for it, even if he formerly was an agriculturist. The village commune receives him with hostility and scorn. He is "a Russian" a term of contempt with the Siberyak — and, moreover, a convict! He is also one of those whose transport and accommodation cost the Siberian peasant so heavily. For the most part he is not married and cannot marry, the proportion of exiled women being as one to six men, and the Siberyak will not allow him to marry his daughter, notwithstanding the fifty roubles allowed in this case by the State, but usually melted away on their long journey through the hands of numerous officials. There was no need in Siberia for the official scheme-inventors who ordered the peasants to build houses for the exiles, and who settled the poselentsy, five or six together, dreaming of pastoral exilecommunities. The practical result was invariably the same. The five poselentsy thus associated in their miseries invariably ran away after a useless struggle against starvation, and went under false names to the towns, or to the gold mines, in search of labor. Whole villages with empty houses on the Siberian highway still remind the traveller of the sterility of official Utopias introduced with the help of birch rods. Those who find some employment on the farms of the Siberian peasants are not happier. The whole system of en gaging workmen in Siberia is based on giving them large sums of hand-money in advance, in order to put them permanently in debt, and to reduce them to a kind of perpetual serfdom; and the Siberian peasants largely use this custom. As to those exiles and they are the great proportion who earn their livelihood by work on the gold washings, they are deprived of all their savings as soon as they have reached the first village and public-house, after the four or five months of labor of hard labor, in fact, with all its privations at the mines. The villages on the Lena, the Yenissei, the Kan, etc., where the parties of gold-miners arrive in the autumn, are widely famed for this peculiarity. And who does not know in Siberia the two wretched, miserable hamlets on the Lena, which have received the names of Paris and London from the admirable skill of their inhabitants in depriv ing the miners of their very last copper? When the miner has left in the publichouse his last hat and shirt, he is immedi ately re-engaged by the agents of the gold-mining company for the next summer, and receives, in exchange for his passport, some hand-money for returning home. He comes to his village with empty hands, and the long winter months he will spend - perhaps, in the next lockup! In short, the final conclusion of all official inquiries which have been made up to this time is, that the few housekeepers among the exiles are in a wretched state of misery; and that the paupers are either serfs to the farmers and mine proprietors, or - to use the words of an official report - "are dying from hunger and cold." The taiga- the forest land which cov ers thousands of square miles in Siberia is thickly peopled with runaways, who slowly advance, like a continuous human stream, towards the west, moved by the hope of finally reaching their native villages on the other slope of the Ural. As soon as the cuckoo cries, announcing to the prisoners that the woods are free from their snow covering, that they can shelter a man without the risk of his becoming during the night a motionless block of ice, and that they will soon provide the wan derer with mushrooms and berries, thousands of convicts make their escape from the gold mines and salt works, from the villages where they starved, and from the towns where they concealed themselves. Guided by the polar star, or by the mosses on the trees, or by old runaways who have acquired in the prisons the precious knowl edge of the "runaway paths" and "runaway stations," they undertake the long and perilous backward journey. They pass around Lake Baikal, climbing the high and wild mountains on its shores, or they cross it on a raft, or even as the popular song says in a fish-cask. They avoid the highways, the towns, and the settlements of the Buriates, but freely sands have returned of their own accord camp in the woods around the towns; and to the lock-ups when the mercury was each spring you see at Chita the fires of freezing and the frost stopped the circulathe chaldons (runaways) lighted all around tion of the last drop of blood in an emathe little capital of Transbaikalia, on the ciated body. They submitted themselves woody slopes of the surrounding moun- to the unavoidable hundred plètes, retains. They freely enter also the Russian turned again to Transbaikalia, and next villages, where they find, up to the pres- spring tried again the same journey with ent day, bread and milk exposed on the more experience. Other thousands have windows of the peasants' houses "for the been hunted down, seized, or shot by the poor runaways.' Buriates, the Karyms, or some Siberian trapper. Others again were seized a few days after having reached the soil of their themselves at the feet of their old parents, in the village they had left many years ago to satisfy the caprice of the ispravnik, or the jealousy of the local usurer.. What an abyss of suffering is concealed behind those three words: "Escape from Siberia!" I have now to examine the situation of political exiles in Siberia. Of course I shall not venture to tell here the story of political exile since the year 1607, when one of the forefathers of the now reigning dynasty, Vassiliy Nikitich Romanoff, opened the long list of proscriptions, and terminated his life in an underground cell at Nyrdob, loaded with sixty-four pounds' weight of heavy chains. I shall not try to revive the horrible story of the Bar confederates arriving in Siberia with their noses and ears torn away, and so says, at least, the tradition - rolled down the hill of the Kreml at Tobolsk tied to big trees; I shall not tell the infamies of the madman Freskin and his ispravnik Loskutoff; nor dwell upon the execution of March 7, 1837, when the Poles Szokalski, Sieroczynski, and four others were killed under seven thousand strokes of the rod; nor will I describe the sufferings of the "Decembrists" and of the exiles of the first days of Alexander II.'s reign; neither give here the list of our poets and publicists exiled to Siberia since the times of Radischeff until those of Odoevsky, and later on, of Tchernyshevsky and Mikhailoff. I shall speak only of those political exiles who are now in Siberia. As long as nothing is stolen by the ramblers, they may be sure of not being disturbed in their journey by the peas-"mother Russia," after having thrown ants. But, as soon as any of them breaks this tacit mutual engagement, the Siber yaks become pitiless. The hunters and each Siberian village has its trappers spread through the forests, and pitilessly exterminate the runaways, sometimes with an abominable refinement of cruelty. Some thirty years ago, "to hunt the chaldons" was a trade, and the human chase has still remained a trade with a few individuals, especially with the Karyms, or half-breeds. "The antelope gives but one skin," these hunters say, "whilst the chaldon gives two at least, his shirt and his coat." A few runaways find employment on the farms of the peasants, which are spread at great distances from the villages, but these are not very numerous, as the summer is the best season for marching towards the west: the forests feed and conceal the wanderers during the warm season. True, they are filled then with clouds of small mosquitos (the terrible moshka), and the brodyagha (runaway) you meet with in the summer is horrible to see his face is but one swollen wound; his eyes are inflamed and hardly seen from beneath the burning and swollen eyelids; his swollen nostrils and mouth are covered with sores. Men and cattle alike grow mad from this plague, which continues to pursue them even among the clouds of smoke that are spread around the villages. But still the brodyagha pursues his march towards the border-chain of Siberia, and his heart beats stronger as he perceives its bluish hills on the horizon. Twenty, perhaps thirty thousand men are continually living this life, and surely no less than one hundred thousand people have tried to make their escape in this way during these last fifty years. How many have succeeded in entering the Russian provinces? Nobody could tell, even approximately. Thousands have found their graves in the taiga, and happy were they whose eyes were closed by a devoted fellow-traveller. Other thou Kara is the place where those condemned to hard labor were imprisoned, to the number of one hundred and fifty men and women, during the autumn of 1882. After having been kept from two to four years in preliminary detention at the St. Petersburg fortress, at the famous Litovskiy Zamok, at the St. Petersburg House of Detention, and in provincial prisons, they were sent, after their condemnation, to Kharkoff Central Pris on. There they remained for three to pletely at the mercy of the caprices of five years, again in solitary confinement, men who were nominated by the governwithout any occupation, without any in- ment with the special purpose of "keeptercourse with their parents, literally starving them in urchin-gloves." The chief of ing on the poor allowance of 1d. per day, the garrison openly says he would be and at the mercy of their gaolers. Then happy if some "political" offended him, they were transferred, for a few months, as the offender would be hanged; the to the Mtsensk depot - where they were surgeon doctors by means of his fists; treated much better and thence they and the adjutant of the governor-general, were sent to Transbaikalia. Most of them a Captain Zagarin, loudly said, "I am performed the journey to Kara in the your governor, your minister, your tsar," manner I have already described on when the prisoners threatened him with foot beyond Tomsk, and chained. A few making a complaint to the ministry of were favored with the use of cars, for justice. One must read the story of the slowly moving from one étape to another. "insurrection" at the Krasnoyarsk prison, Even these last describe this journey as or hear N. Lopatin's narrative of it, to be a real torture, and say: "People become convinced that the right place for such an mad from the moral and physical tortures individual would be a lunatic asylum. endured during such a journey. The wife Even ladies did not escape his mad bruof Dr. Bielyi, who accompanied her hus tality, and were submitted by him to a band, and two or three others, have had treatment which revolted the simplest this fate." feelings of decency; and, when the pris oner Schedrin, in defence of his bride, gave him a blow on his face, the military court condemned Schedrin to death. General Pedashenko acted in accordance with the loudly expressed public feeling at Irkutsk, when he commuted the sentence of death into a sentence of incarceration for a fortnight, but few officials have the courage of the then provisional governor-general of eastern Siberia. The blackholes, the chains, the riveting to barrows, are usual punishments, and they are accompanied sometimes with the regula tion “hundred plètes." "I shall kill you under the rods, you will rot in the blackholes," such is the language that continually sounds in the ears of the prisoners. But, happily enough, corporal punishment has not been used with political prisoners. A fifty years' experience has taught the officials that the day it was applied "would be a day of great bloodshed," as the publishers of the Will of the People said when describing the life of their friends in Siberia. The prison where they are kept at middle Kara is one of those rotten buildings I have already mentioned. It was overcrowded when ninety-one men were confined in it, and it is still more overcrowded since the arrival of sixty more prisoners; wind and snow freely enter the interstices between the rotten pieces of logwood of the walls, and from beneath the rotten planks of the floor. The chief food of the prisoners is rye bread and some buckwheat; meat is distributed only when they are at work in the gold mine, that is, during three months out of twelve, and only to fifty men out of one hundred and fifty. Contrary to the law and custom, all were chained in 1881, and went to work loaded with chains. There is no hospital for "the politicals," and the sick, who are numerous, remain on the platforms, side by side with all others, in the same cold rooms, in the same suffocating atmosphere. Even the insane Madame Kovalevskaya is still kept in prison. Happily enough, there are surgeons among them. As to the surgeon of the prison, it is sufficient to say of him that the insane Madame Kovalevskaya was kicked down and beaten under his eyes during an attack of madness. The wives of the prisoners were allowed to stay at lower Kara, and to visit their husbands twice a week, as also to bring them books and newspapers. The greater number are slowly dying from consumption, and the list of deaths rapidly increases. But the most horrible curse of hard labor at Kara is the absolute arbitrariness of the gaolers; the prisoners are com As to the prescriptions of the law with regard to exiles, they are openly trampled upon by the higher and lower authorities. Thus, Uspenskiy, Tcharoushin, Semenovsky, Shishko were liberated from the prison and settled in the Kara village after having reached the term of "proba tion" established by the law. But in 1881, a ministerial decision, taken at St. Petersburg without any reasonable cause, ordered them to be again locked up. The law being thus trampled under foot, and the last hopes of amelioration of the fate of the prisoners having thus van. ished, two of them committed suicide. Uspenskiy, who endured horrible sufferings in hard labor since 1867, and whose character could not be broken by these pains, was unable to live more of this hopeless life, and followed the example of his two comrades. If the political convicts at Kara were common murderers, they would still have the hope that, after having performed their seven, ten, or twelve years of hard labor for having spread Socialist pamphlets among work men, they would finally be set at liberty and transferred to some province of southern Siberia, thus becoming settlers, according to the prescriptions of our penal system. But there is no law for political exiles. Tchernyshevsky, the translator of J. S. Mill's Political Economy," terminated ten years ago his seven years of hard labor. If he had murdered his father and mother, and burned a house with a dozen children, he would be settled now in some village of the government of Irkutsk. But he has written economical papers; he has published them with the authorization of the censorship; the gov. ernment considers him as a possible leader of the constitutional party in Russia, and he is buried in the hamlet of Viluisk, amidst marshes and forests, five hundred miles beyond Yakutsk. There, isolated from all the outside world, closely watched by two gendarmes who lodge in his house, he is buried forever, and neither the entreaties of the Russian press nor the resolutions of the last International Literary Congress could save him from the hands of a suspicious government. Such will be, too, without doubt, the fate of those who are now kept at Kara. The day they became poselentsy will not be for them a day of liberation: it will be a day of transportation from the milder regions of Transbaikalia to the toundras within the Arctic Circle. However bitter the condition of the hard labor convicts in Siberia, the government has succeeded in punishing as hardly, and perhaps even more so, those of its political foes whom it could not condemn to hard labor, or exile, even by means of packed courts, nominated ad hoc, and pronouncing their sentences in absolute secrecy. This result has been achieved by means of the "administrative exile," or transportation to "more or less remote provinces of the empire" without judgment, without any kind or even phantom of trial, on a single order of the omnipotent chief of the third sec tion. Every year some five or six hundred young men and women are arrested under suspicion of revolutionary agitation. The inquiry lasts for six months, two years, or more, according to the number of persons arrested in connection with, and the importance of, "the affair." One-tenth of them are committed for trial. As to the remainder, all those against whom there is no specific charge, but who were represented as "dangerous" by the spies; all those who, on account of their intelligence, energy, and "radical opinions," are sup posed to be able to become dangerous; and especially those who have shown during the imprisonment a “spirit of irreverence - are exiled to some more or less remote spot, between the peninsula of Kola and that of Kamchatka. The open and frank despotism of Nicholas I. could not accommodate itself to such hypocritical means of prosecution; and during the reign of the "iron despot" the adminis trative exile was rare. But throughout the reign of Alexander II., since 1862, it has been used on so immense a scale, that you hardly will find now a hamlet, or borough, between the fifty-fifth circle of latitude, from the boundary of Norway to the coasts of the Sea of Okhotsk, not containing five, ten, twenty administrative exiles. In January, 1881, there were 29 at Pinega, a hamlet which has but 750 inhabitants, 55 at Mezen (1,800 inhabitants), II at Kola (740 inhabitants), 47 at Khol mogory, a village having but 90 houses, 160 at Zaraisk (5,000 inhabitants), 19 at Yeniseisk, and so on. The causes of exile were always the same: students and girls suspected of subversive ideas, writers whom it was impossible to prosecute for their writings, but who were known to be imbued with "a dangerous spirit;" workmen who have spoken "against the authorities; " persons who have been "irreverent " to some governor of province, or ispravnik, and so on, were transported by hundreds every year to people the hamlets of the "more or less remote provinces of the empire." As to Radical people suspected of "dangerous tendencies," the barest denunciation and the most futile suspicions were sufficient for serving as a motive to exile. When girls (like Miss Bardine, Soubbotine, Lubatovich, and so many others) were condemned to six or eight years of hard labor for having given one Socialistic pamphlet to one workman; when others (like Miss Goukovskaya, fourteen years old) were condemned to exile as poselentsy for having shouted in the crowd that it is a shame to condemn people to death for |