Theopompus, judging from the dialect used, ascribed to a later date. Of the three thousand tables of bronze collected by Vespasian when he rebuilt the Capitol, not a single original remains. This collection, styled by Suetonius "instrumentum imperii pulcherrimum," was a record of the public life of the Roman State from the year 390 B.C., and must have contained documents which would have thrown much light upon questions of diplomacy and International Law.

Failing such means of knowledge, we are relegated for information on these subjects to incidental statements and allusions of the historians and orators-many of them, especially in the case of the Romans, not to be trusted implicitly. Our knowledge of the language of Roman diplomacy is particularly scanty. Not one treaty made by the Romans with a foreign State has been preserved in Latin; all that remain are known through Greek translations. Of the fecial diction but a few formulæ and fragmentary sentences have survived, preserved by Livy, Aulus Gellius, Varro, and—where one might least expect it-in the "Satyricon" of Petronius Arbiter. It is, however, some compensation for these losses, that the discovery of the Greek inscriptions has shed a flood of light upon such matters, and that the treasury of knowledge thus opened is, in all probability, still far from being exhausted. I hope to examine in a further paper a few of the more striking of these inscriptions.

H. BROUGHAM LEECH.

A RUSSIAN PRISON.

WHE

HEN passing last summer through St. Petersburg on my way to Central Asia, there was accorded to me a permission, very rarely given, to visit the Fortress Prison. After doing so, I found my experience so contradictory to current opinion on the subject, that with a view to publication I wrote a short paper, and read it to several Russians, including a judge who had officially visited the fortress, and to two other persons, both of whom had been there immured on political charges. It was then my intention to offer to the public such information as I had acquired respecting this special political prison, as complementary to what I have published regarding Russian prisons in general. My attention however has been called to an article on this subject in the Nineteenth Century for January last-signed "P. Krapotkine"-in which it is said that my book, "Through Siberia," in so far as it is concerned with gaols and convicts, "can only convey false ideas." It may therefore be of interest to those who have honoured me by reading the work, if I examine some of the statements in the Nineteenth Century which seem to throw doubt upon my credibility, before proceeding to state what I saw in the fortress.

Three charges are brought against me as an author to justify the statements respecting my work. The first is, that I travelled through Siberia rapidly; which is most true, though I am greatly shocked at the speed given to my horses: thus—

"In the space of fourteen hours indeed (sic) he breakfasted, he dined, he travelled over forty miles, and he visited the three chief gaols of Siberia-at Tobolsk, at Alexandrovsky Zavod, and at Kara."

Now Tobolsk is more than 2,000 miles from Kara, and I beg

solemnly to deny that I was ever guilty of such "furious driving" as to cover this distance in fourteen hours! What can the author mean?

Another charge is, that "if I had taken note of existing Russian literature on the subject," my book might have been a useful one. Yet there is a fair sprinkling on my list of 120 "works consulted or referred to," of Russian authors, and of those whom I have called the "vindictive class of writers (some of them escaped or released convicts), who, trading upon the credulity and ignorance of the public, have retailed and garnished accounts of horrible severities, which they neither profess to have witnessed, nor attempt to support by adequate testimony." One of these was Alexander Hertzen, who wrote "My Exile in Siberia," though he never went there, but only as far as Perm, where one of the prisons is situated of which Prince Krapotkine complains so bitterly. He says: "It is a pity that Mr. Lansdell, when arrested in August last under suspicion of Nihilism, in the neighbourhood of Perm, did not make acquaintance with this prison !" But I did not; for, although through the telegram of an officious gendarme, I was brought back some few stations to the terminus whence I had started, yet, upon showing my credentials, I was at once released, without being kept for my accuser to appear, and an apology was twice offered that I had been detained. I cannot therefore measure swords with my critic respecting the prison at Perm, where he so kindly wished me a lodging; but there are other statements in his article which I venture to call in question. He says for instance: "In single gaols, built for the detention of 200 to 250 persons, the number of prisoners is commonly 700 and 800 at a time," and he has just before stated, as the report of a committee of inquiry into the state of the prisons in Russia and Siberia, that "the number of prisoners in each was commonly twice and thrice in excess of the maximum allowed by law." I wonder what are the localities of these thrice crowded gaols. Out of the 600 Russian gaols enumerated by the critic can he mention six-one in a hundred-thus over-crammed? During six different years I have gone to Russia and Siberia, largely with the object of visiting the prisons and hospitals, travelling to a different part each time, yet I cannot call to mind a single instance of a prison crowded with thrice its proper number of inmates. That they have often been overcrowded I candidly allow; but this does not imply that nothing is done to accommodate the overplus. The prison at Tashkend, for instance, is built for 200 persons, and I found there, last summer, 379. The authorities, however, had erected in the spacious yard, under numerous poplar trees, a number of yourts or tents; and since nine-tenths of the prisoners were Asiatics, they were only too thankful to be lodged in the yourts in preference to the rooms, which, however airy, would, to their nomad

ideas, be stuffy and close. I am not defending, of course, the overcrowding of prisoners; I am merely showing that the article in the Nineteenth Century is exaggerated.

Again, our author finds a good deal of fault, and perhaps justly, with the chief prison in St. Petersburg, called the "Litovsky Zamok.” Here I can follow him with interest, because this prison was, I think, the first I visited in the Northern capital. He says, "This oldfashioned, damp and dark building should simply be levelled to the ground;" against which proceeding I would not utter a word of protest, though I am unwilling to set my seal to the verdict of the writer's prisoner friends-" heroes," he calls them-who "describe it as one of the worst they know. The cells are very small, very dark, and very damp." It is now nine years since I was there, and on looking through four pages of notes, written on the spot, I find nothing as to the measurement of the cells, but my impression is that they were certainly larger than in English houses of detention. But it was another remark in the article that recalled my visit to this particular prison. Thus :

:

"It is everywhere the same. To devote oneself to any educational work, or to the convict population, is inevitably to incur dismissal and disgrace."

Yet it was in this very "Litovsky Zamok" that my efforts, such as they have been, on behalf of Russian prisoners had their birth. In this prison I met a lady interesting herself in the educational and temporal welfare of the inmates. She said they would gladly accept. some books, and it was for this prison I sent to the authorities my first bundle of books and tracts. Once more. The writer

says:

"Unless the Government is prepared to meet extraordinary expenses, our prisons must remain what they are. But honest and capable men are far more needed than money. They exist in Russia, and they exist in great numbers; but their services are not required. Mr. Lansdell knew one, and has described him-Colonel Kononovitch, chief of the penal settlement at Kara. . . . He has told us how, &c. . . . and all he has told is true. But Mr. Lansdell's praise, together with like praise contained in a letter intercepted on its way from Siberia" (whatever this may mean) were sufficient reasons for rendering M. Kononovitch suspicious to our Government. immediately was dismissed, and his successor received the order to reintroduce the iron rule of years past. Another gentleman, of whom Mr. Lansdell speaks, and justly, in high terms-General Pedashenko-has been dismissed too. . . .

....

66

He

Now this paragraph concerning Colonel Kononovitch and General, or, as I knew him, Colonel, Pedashenko, struck me as the most outrageous of the many questionable statements in the Nineteenth Century. When proceeding last summer to Siberia again, I happened to fall in with an officer who was on his way to Kara, to whom I

spoke, of course, of Colonel Kononovitch, and was told he had been removed to Irkutsk to be on the staff of the new Governor-General. This I suppose he would like, for I remember that in 1879 Madame Kononovitch was pining to return to Irkutsk, and such a change I should think would be highly acceptable on account of the education of their children; whilst as for the Colonel, who had served under a former Governor-General, he would be returning from one of the most savage parts of Eastern Siberia, where he regretted the lack of congenial society, to his old haunts, and to former friends in the capital. As for Colonel Pedashenko, I also inquired for him, and was told that he had been removed from the Governorship of one of the most outlandish provinces-that of the Trans-Baikal-to be Chief of Yeneseisk that is, one of the most important Governments of Siberia. In both these cases I regarded the removal as promotion; yet Prince Krapotkine calls it "dismissal," and traces it to my "praise." A curious kind of dismissal truly, and one that, could I be sure that my praise would bring about like consequences, should be repeated in several places to-morrow!

The readers of the Nineteenth Century are to be congratulated that their writer did not introduce what has so long been for escaped exiles a storehouse of prison horrors-I mean the mythical "quicksilver" mines of Siberia. He mentions another place, however, the supposed horrors and tortures of which have been again and again dressed up for the sympathies of a pitiful public-I mean the political prisons in the Fortress of SS. Peter and Paul. I think it was during my first visit to St. Petersburg in 1874 that I was told how in that dreadful place the prisoners were fed with salt herrings, and given no water to drink, so that they became half mad with thirst; and at this day one of my friends, who moves in high circles in St. Petersburg, for whose intelligence and probity I have the greatest possible respect, firmly believes that this salt-herring business was only stopped by Count Schouvaloff, when he was head of the secret police; and my friend still thinks that drugs are sometimes given to the prisoners to make them frantic, in the hope that during their excitement they may be led to confess. Again, a lady living in St. Petersburg asked me, the day after I came from the fortress, whether I had seen the torture chamber, and she seemed quite disappointed that I had no horrors to relate. When persons have told me of these things lately, I have put to them the simple question: "Out of the hundreds of prisoners who have passed through the fortress, do you know of one who has asserted that he was put to torture?" and an affirmative answer has not yet been forthcoming. The case now brought forward in the Nineteenth Century will hardly carry conviction to a critical mind. For what is it we are asked to believe? That two revolutionists were submitted to torture by electricity, the