VOL. XCVII

No. DLXXIX

SENTRIES GUARDING

CONVICTS.

O write about Siberia and not speak of the convict system would be to present a very incomplete picture, especially to the mind of the American reader, which has been perhaps unduly occupied of late with the sinister side of Siberian life. Yet the convict system, as in operation to-day, is doomed to disappear-fortunately, I think-and I believe that within five years the traveller by the Trans-Siberian across Asia will pass from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific without seeing a convict station or meeting with a convoy of exiles. Whatever its uses may have been, or its abuses, public opinion, both in Russia and in Siberia, demands that the system be abolished in the near future, at least as far as the mainland of Siberia is concerned, and even now there awaits the pleasure of the Czar and his action a memorial from the Governor-General of Eastern Siberia, which, if approved, will change the system materially, and banish the convict settlements from the mainland to the island of Sakhalin. The reasons which Count Duhofskoi adduces in support of his proposal are not strictly humanitarian; he views the question as an administrator, and condemns the system as a policy. The history of the movement for the abolition of the penal colonies in Australia is repeating itself in this distant part of the world, where, however, almost identical conditions prevail. The Siberians are wellnigh unanimously of the opinion that, however advantageous

Copyright, 1898, by Harper and Brothers. All rights reserved.

the steady influx of convicts may have been to the development of the country and its resources in the past, its continuance as a system is fast becoming a danger, and a serious menace to that further development on a grander scale to which they aspire, and upon which the Siberians build their dreams of empire and permanent dominion in the Far East.

Before relating the facts or entering upon the details of the scenes of convict life which came under my immediate observation, it will not be amiss, for the better preparation of the mind of the reader, to point out again some of the popular errors which prevail upon the subject-errors begotten of ignorance and of prejudice-which have laid such strong hold upon the public mind as to make it most difficult to extirpate them altogether.

"But is it not a horrible and an inhuman institution? Think of those men and women, cut off, year in and year out, from the blessed sunlight, down in the gold-mines of Kara!" more than a dozen people have said to me since my return from the land in which they claimed to be interested; and when I told them that the mining for gold in Kara was all surface work, and in the sunlight whenever the sun chose to shine, I have generally noticed an expression of incredulity, and not seldom one of disappointment, come over the face of my listener. It seems to me that a plain statement of the truth in regard to the transportation of those who have been adjudged as owing a debt to society, across Asia or around the world to a new land, is terrible enough, and must always remain so as long as this medieval system of punishment survives in Russia or in any other country, without seeking to invest it with the horrors

which we owe originally to the imaginative genius of Dostoievsky and Gogol; but there are others who have thought differently-others who have borrowed the fine feathers of fiction to cover the baldness of their narrative.

To

"But the quicksilver - mines? Those horrible underground shafts, where, permeated by the poisonous exhalations, the bones of the convicts rot and the flesh wastes away in atrophy! What about this?" Well, to this there is a simple answer; and yet, possibly because of its very simplicity, I have found it not seldom an unsatisfactory one. There are simply no quicksilver-mines in Siberia, and the scenes with which in this connection we have been made familiar by both pen and pencil to a nauseating degree, are simply products of the imagination. Those who for years have suffered sympathetically with the exiles in Siberia may, I think, be reassured. Whatever the system may have been in the past, it is certainly not to-day the terrible, unspeakable thing it is generally believed to be, and particularly in America. some men, of course, exile to Siberia means a banishment from home, with all its ties and associations, and from all that has hitherto made bearable the sharp edge of existence. These men, I am sure, form an infinitely small but never sufficiently to be pitied minority of the exiles. A very much larger class is composed of peasants who, through want of sobriety or steady work, have failed in their efforts to lay by sufficient money to transport them to the land of gold, as they call Siberia, and who, in their disappointment, commit some slight offence, and yet one of sufficient gravity to secure a passage to their El Dorado at the expense of the government. It is a broad statement, and one that will prove a surprise to many, but I am well within the truth, I am sure, when I say that for at least fifty per cent. of the convicts exile simply means that after several months of not over-luxurious travel they are given a fair opportunity, under new and encouraging circumstances, to begin life anew. Should the convict, the unfortunate one," as he is charitably called, prove obedient to the not oppressive penal regulations, he is almost immediately paroled, and very little thought is ever paid to the incident of his life in old Russia for which he was sent to Siberia. There

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are to-day in the larger cities of Siberia very many of the most prominent citizens, leading men in the professions of law and medicine, and even in the civil administration, who would be indeed surprised to read in the police records the reasons why they were banished, as an act of self-defence, from that society into which they were born. In the new land these men have, in a very great majority of cases, begun new lives, and have proved themselves good citizens and most desirable acquisitions to the civilization of the rough frontier life. Indeed, as the happy results were illustrated time and again by the lives of men with whom I came in personal contact, I could not but think that a system which produced such encouraging and altogether satisfactory results was more worthy of unstinted praise than of wholesale condemnation.

There are of course several classes or categories among the convicts banished across the Urals; in the first and most numerous class are the idle and dissolute ne'er-do-wells of their communities, who, having become a nuisance and an expense to the Mir, or, as we would say, a charge to the parish, are sent to Siberia, not as convicts, but as colonists, upon whom the police is expected to keep an eye. This class is over forty per cent. of the whole number of exiles. Then in point of numbers come the purely criminal prisoners, who must be divided into two divisions-first, those who have forfeited all civil rights, and secondly, those who, though condemned and undergoing long sentence, are allowed to retain the hope of paying their debt to society and of regaining their lost position in the world at some future time. The convict of the first category is indeed dead to the world: his property goes to his heirs; his wife can remarry without going through the formality even of a divorce. The passage across the Urals severs all ties. He has no name, consequently his signature is legally worthless. The second class, those who are not deprived of their civil rights by sentence of court, however heavy the sentence may be that is imposed upon them, have really nothing to complain of except the lot of a colonist in a new land. If they behave well, they too are almost immediately paroled; they become free colonists in every respect save one: they cannot return to Russia until the expiration of the sentence

to which they were originally condemned. In this way many of them are probably saved from renewing the degrading associations into which they had fallen. Such a convict-colonist is given a piece of land, an outfit, and some money. The veil of charity is drawn over his past, for the great majority of his neighbors are men with unfortunate antecedents similar to his own. They shift for themselves, and generally make good citizens. Wives are permitted to accompany their husbands when exiled to Siberia, and are treated with great kindness. They avail themselves of this permission in very many instances. They have only to submit to the prison regulations. Husbands are also allowed to accompany their wives when the latter are exiled to Siberia, but I never saw a husband doing so; I never met a prison official who had seen an instance of this faithful attachment, though several told me they had heard of it being done.

But the most conclusive evidence as to what the life of the average convict really is is furnished upon the best of evidence by the convicts themselves, who certainly ought to know when and where they are well off. Not more than one-fourth of the exiles, when their time has expired, elect to return to Russia, whither they are attracted by that love and attachment to home so strong in every human breast, so particularly strong in the Slav. The fact is that they have found life in Siberia pleasanter, the road to ease, a competency, and even to wealth less rugged, less crowded with competitors; so they become colonists, and of their own free will and choice remain in Siberia, throwing their fortunes in with the destiny of the new land; and I, knowing something of the conditions of life which obtain in Russia, think they do well.

During my stay in Siberia I personally saw no political prisoners while they were in confinement. I met many and saw much of those political prisoners who were at liberty, having undergone the period of probation to the satisfaction of the penal authorities. They were follow ing their various professions in perfect liberty, and were apparently exempt from even the loosest kind of surveillance. The short period of close confinement before the ticket of leave is granted to the "politicals" is generally spent in the prison at Nertschinsk. So far from the political prisoners being worked to death,

as is generally represented, they neither work in mines nor perform manual labor anywhere else; that is to say, they are not compelled to work; but in the case where the prisoners of this category are without the means to purchase the luxuries which they are permitted to enjoy, the prison authorities endeavor to procure for them remunerative work of one kind or another, so that they may with their savings eke out the rude fare of the prison table. When I went to Siberia I believed, and I think the belief is still quite common in America, that the political prisoners, of whom a large percentage are men of gentle birth, were compelled to walk a greater part of the way, if not the whole distance, from the Urals to their prison in Siberia. Owing to the fact that the greater number of the convicts, whether of the criminal or political class, are now transported by sea, this question is of less importance than formerly, but I feel it my duty to say that every 'political" to whom I spoke upon this subject stated frankly that he had never taken a step of the journey on foot, except now and again for exercise, and that telegas and tarantasses are always provided in sufficient numbers.

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A very sudden change had come over my social position in Siberia, and it was all the more painful because it was selfinflicted. In twenty-four hours I had descended in the social scale from being the guest of Admiral A- on board the flagship in Vladivostok Harbor to the condition of an outcast, with no friends, no letters, and trying to get something to eat in the town of Nikolsky, one hundred miles in the interior. It happened in this wise: I had decided that in Vladivostok I had obtained all the information that was available or desirable to receive from official sources, and had decided to make the further investigations which were to prove or disprove the official assertions without the aid of letters from the authorities, which had been promised me so kindly. It was in the service, then, of my readers that I suffered so much discomfort in the interior of Siberia, and it is only fair that they should experience a few sympathetic twinges from the recital of what I went through. I left all my letters and credentials with my heavy luggage and trunks at the Hôtel de Moskowa, and started out upon my voyage of discovery into a new world with little

luggage and a light heart.

I was altogether much lighter in every way when I returned. I was at a loss to know what yarn I should tell as to the purpose of my trip, because it seemed to me that in such a suspicious country as Siberia is supposed to be it would be necessary to have some well-connected story to explain the purpose of my unusual trip; but it was quite unnecessary. Never have I met people, official or unofficial, with as little of that natural curiosity in regard to the pursuits of their fellow-travellers as these Siberians exhibited; nobody seemed to care what I was doing in Siberia, or why I was travelling towards the Amur, and so my invention was never subjected to the strain of narration.

Upon the train I made the acquaintance of a very genial cattle-doctor, who had learned what he knew about physicking horses and dogs-for this latter branch was really his specialty-during a stay of three months at a German university. He was a Siberian by birth, and displayed in this character all the hopefulness of the children of a new country who are as yet untrammelled by routine or convention. "In a year or two, Herr Kollege," he said," when I am a little older" (he must have been forty)" and a little more steady, I am going to Irkutsk to read law; for an ambitious man, one who expects to rise, I think this is better than doctoring dogs and cattle."

As we came into the inn at Nikolskoye, the town some seventy miles from the sea on the Trans-Siberian where we were to rest, or rather spend the night, and gazed about upon all its squalor and poverty-stricken appointments, it was hard indeed to believe that only twenty-four hours before I had dined with admirals and post-captains all glittering in gold braid upon the brilliantly lighted flagship, while an excellent orchestra discoursed music, and dishes were served that would have done credit to the chef of the English Club in St. Petersburg, or, indeed, to the signature of any cook, how ever famous. The innkeeper seemed at first disinclined to entertain us at any price; but after a long parley, during which the amiable dog-doctor went down on his knees in a way that would have melted any but a heart of stone, we were shown to a box stall in the stable. Hav ing washed and shaken down here, we returned to the hotel, as I thought, for din

My

ner, but I counted without allowance for our surly host. When he saw me coming, and read upon my face doubtless an expression of ravenous hunger, he turned on a music box, which this as well as every other rest-house in Siberia possesses, and as its wheezing tones and false notes filled the air with discord, he looked defiantly towards us, as much as to say that if we wanted any further entertainment than this we couldn't have it. colleague was very patient. He told me he had learned this lesson from his dumb patients, who suffer and are still. He said he was grateful for the box-stall, and assured me that when I had been in Siberia a few years I would not think so much about my dinner; but I insisted, pleading my recent arrival as an excuse, and finally the innkeeper consented to serve me in the course of a few hours, when he had more time, with a beefsteak the like of which I had never seen before; and this is probably true, though, as I never succeeded in getting a plain view of this steak, I cannot make the statement positively. About ten o'clock the steak, or rather huge soup-tureen filled to the brim with a mess of axle-grease, was produced. Our host then withdrew in sullen silence to the kitchen, where we heard him complaining of the airs which travellers assume, especially "little people," and their fastidiousness in regard to food, when they should be grateful for what they get; and I for one am sure I would have been, if I had ever found that steak. For twenty minutes we dived and dug in the floating island of grease with our forks, but never found the steak. We concluded it was best to say nothing, and quietly retired to our stalls. The travellers along the Trans-Siberian are hereby warned against the keeper of the inn in Nikolskoye, for I have always thought that his steak was a myth, and that he imposed upon my faith in the existence of things unseen.

I had not been in Khabarovka more than an hour before all doubt vanished as to the nature of the errand that had brought me to the Amur. It was simply a wild goose chase. I knew no one in the town, and no one showed any inclination to know me. By the exhibition of the most engaging and friendly manner I could command I had only secured for myself a one-fifth share of a very small room in Mr. Tai Phoon-Tai's