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English citizens-mutual respect, co-operation, public spirit, generosity, punctuality, fidelity, truthfulness; some sense, too, of the value of human life as entrusted to them and to their less favoured brethren by our Heavenly Father, and as ennobled by the life and teaching of Him who went about doing good, and bade His disciples strive to be as their Master. GEORGE GRANVILLE BRADLEY.

THE EXILE IN SIBERIA.

It is not in vain that the word katorga (hard labour) has received so horrible a meaning in the Russian language, and has become synonymous with the most awful pains and sufferings. I cannot bear any longer this katorjnaya life,' this life of moral and physical sufferings, of infamous insults and pitiless persecutions, of pains beyond man's strength, say those who are brought to despair before attempting to put an end to their life by suicide. It is not in vain that the word katorga has received this meaning, and all those who have seriously inquired into the aspects of hard labour in Siberia have come to the conclusion that it really corresponds to a popular conception. I have already described the journey which leads to the katorga. Let us see now what are the conditions of the convicts in the hard-labour colonies and prisons of Siberia.

Some fifteen years ago, nearly all those 1,500 people who were condemned every year to hard labour were sent to Eastern Siberia. One part of them was employed at the silver, lead, and gold mines of the Nertchinsk district, or at the iron works of Petrovsk (not far from Kiakhta) and Irkutsk, or at the salt works of Usolie and UstKut; a few were employed at a drapery in the neighbourhood of Irkutsk, and the remainder were sent to the gold mines, or rather gold washings, of Kara, where they were bound to dig out the traditional hundred poods' (3,200 lbs.) of gold for the Cabinet of his Majesty,' that is, for the personal purse of the Emperor. The horrible tales of subterranean work in the silver and lead mines, under the most abominable conditions, under the whips of overseers who compelled each ten men to accomplish a work that would be hard. even for double this number; of convicts working in the darkness, charged with heavy chains and riveted to barrows; of people dying from the poisonous emanations of the mines; of prisoners flogged to death, or dying under five and six thousand strokes of the rod, by order of traditional monsters like Rozguildéeff—all these tales, well known everywhere, are not tales due to the fancy of imaginative writers, they are true historical records of a sad reality.

And they are not tales of a remote past, for such were the con

ditions of hard labour in the Nertchinsk mining district no farther back than twenty-five years ago. They might be told by men still in life.

More than that, many, very many, features of this horrible past have been maintained until our own times.' Everyone in Eastern Siberia knows of the terrible scurvy epidemics which broke out at the Kara gold mines in 1857, when-according to official reports perused by M. Maximoff-no less than 1,000 convicts out of some 17,000 died in the course of one summer, and the cause of the epidemics is a secret to nobody; it is well known that the authorities, having perceived that they would be unable to dig out the traditional hundred poods of gold, caused the convicts to work without rest, above their strength, until some fell dead in the mines. And much later on, in 1873, have we not seen again a similar epidemic, due to similar causes, breaking out in the Yeniseisk district, and sweeping away hundreds of lives at once? The places of torture, the proceedings were slowly modified, but the very essence of hard labour has remained the same, and the word katorga has still maintained its horrible meaning.

During the last twenty years the system of hard labour has undergone some modification. The richer silver mines of the Nertchinsk mining district have been worked out; instead of enriching every year the Cabinet of the Emperor' with 220 to 280 poods of silver (7,000 to 9,000 lbs.), as it was before, they yielded but five to seven poods (150 to 210 lbs.) in 1860 to 1863, and they were abandoned. As to the gold washings, the mining authorities succeeded about the same time in convincing the Cabinet that there were no more gold washings worth being worked in the district; and the Cabinet abandoned the district to private enterprise, reserving for the Crown only the mines on the Kara river, a tributary of the Shilka (of course rich mines, well known before, were 'discovered' by private persons immediately after the promulgation of the law). The Government was thus compelled to find some other kind of employment for the convicts, and to modify to a certain extent the whole system of hard labour. The central prisons in Russia, of which I have given a description in a preceding paper, were invented; and, before being

The Kutomara and Alexandrovsk silver mines have always been renowned for their insalubrity, on account of the arsenical emanations from the ore; not only men, but also cattle, suffered from them, and it is well known that the inhabitants of these villages were compelled, for this reason, to raise their young cattle in neighbouring villages. As to the quicksilver emanations, everyone who has consulted any serious work on the Nertchinsk mining district knows that the silver ore of these mines is usually accompanied with cinnabar especially in the mines of Shakhtama and Kultuma, both worked out by convic's who were poisoned by mercurial emanations--and that attempts to get mercury from these mines have been made several times by the Government. The Akatuy silver mines of the same district have always had the most dreadful reputation for their unhealthiness.

sent to Siberia, the hard-labour convicts remain now in these prisons for about one-third of the duration of their sentence. I have described the horrible treatment to which they are submitted. The number of these sufferers, for whom even the horrible katorga in Siberia appears as a relief, is about 5,000.

As to the eighteen to nineteen hundred hard-labour convicts who are transported every year to Siberia, they are submitted to different kinds of treatment. A certain number of them (2,700 to 3,000) are locked up in the hard-labour prisons of Western and Eastern Siberia ; whilst the remainder are transported, either to the Kara gold washings, or to the salt works of Usolie and Ust-Kut, or to the coal mines on the Sakhalin Island. The few mines and works of the Crown in Siberia being, however, unable to employ the nearly 10,000 convicts condemned to hard labour, a novel expedient was invented, in renting the convicts to private owners of gold washings. It is easy to perceive that the punishment of convicts belonging to the same hard-labour category can be thus varied to an immense degree, depending on the caprice of the authorities, and a good deal on the length of the purse of the convict. He may be killed under the plètes at Kara or Ust-Kut, as also he may comfortably live at the private gold mine of some friend, as overseer of works,' and be aware of his removal to Siberia only by the long delay in receiving news from his Russian friends.

Leaving aside, however, these exceptional favours and a variety of subdivisions of less importance, the hard-labour convicts in Siberia can be classified under three great categories: those who are kept in prison; those who are employed at the gold mines of the Imperial Cabinet or of private persons; and those who are employed at the salt works.

The fate of the first is very much like the fate of those who are locked up in central prisons in Russia. The Siberian gaoler may smoke a pipe, instead of a cigar, when flogging his inmates; he may make use of lashes, instead of birch rods, and flog the convicts. when his soup is spoiled, whilst the Russian gaoler's bad temper depends upon an unsuccessful hunting: the results for the convicts. are the same. In Siberia, as in Russia, a gaoler who pitilessly flogs is substituted by a gaoler 'who gives free play to his own fists and steals the last coppers of the prisoners;' and an honest man, if he is occasionally nominated as the head of a hard-labour prison, will soon be dismissed, or expelled from an administration where honest men are a nuisance.

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The fate of those 2,000 convicts who are employed at the Kara gold mines is not better. Twenty years ago the official reports represented the prison at Upper Kara as an old, weather-worn logwood building, erected on a swampy ground, and impregnated with the filthiness accumulated by long generations of overcrowded convicts.

They concluded that it ought to be pulled down at once; but the same foul and rotten building continues to shelter the convicts until now; and, even during M. Kononovitch's reasonable rule, it was said to be whitewashed only four times each year. It is always filled up to double its cubical capacity, and the inmates sleep on two storeys of platforms, as also on the floor that is covered with a thick sheet of sticky filth, their wet and nasty clothes being mattresses and coverings at once. So it was twenty years ago; so it is now. The chief prison of the Kara gold washings, the Lower Kara, was described by M. Maximoff in 1863, and by the official documents I perused, as a rotten nasty building where wind and snow freely penetrate. So it is described again by my friends. The Middle Kara prison was restored a few years ago, but it soon became as filthy as the two others. For six to eight months, out of twelve, the convicts remain in these prisons without any occupation; and it is quite sufficient, I imagine, to mention this circumstance to suggest what vices are taught in these prisons, and all the demoralisation of character that results from this confinement. Let those who wish to study the moral influence of Russian prisons on their inmates peruse the remarkable psychological studies by Dostoevsky, MM. Maximoff, Lvoff, and so many others.

The work at the gold washings is altogether very hard. True, it is carried on aboveground; deep excavations being made in the alluvium of the valley, to extract the gold-bearing mud and sands, which are transported in cars to the gold-washing machine. But it is most unhealthy and difficult work. The bottom of the excavation is always below the level of the river, which flows at a certain height in an artificial channel to the machine; and therefore it is always covered to a certain depth with the water which is leaking through its walls, not to speak of the icy water which flows everywhere down the walls, as the frozen mud thaws under the hot rays of the sun. The pumps are usually insufficient, and so (I write from my own experience) people are working throughout the day in an icy water that covers their feet to the knees, and sometimes to the stomach; and, when returned to the prison, the convict obviously has nothing to change his wet dress for: he sleeps on it. It is true that the same work is done under the same conditions, by thousands of free working-men, on the private gold washings. But it is well known that the owners of gold washings in Siberia would have no hands for their mines if the enlistment of workmen were not practised in the same way as were the enlistments for the armies in the seventeenth century. The engagements are always made in a drunken state and in exchange for large sums of hand-money, which pass immediately to the pockets of the publicans. As to the settled exiles-the poselentsy-whose starving army furnishes the largest contingent of workmen for the

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