Failure of the scheme to utilise Saghalien as a convict settlement—Testimony of an official on the terrible condition of the exiles—Gambling and drunkenness universal—Prevalence of immorality—The prisons hot beds of vice—No classification of the prisoners—Convicts refuse to settle on the island as colonists at the expiration of their sentence—Account of two assassinations at Alexandrovsk—Description of the cemetery there—Female murderers on the island—Sophie Bluffstein, called the “Golden Hand”—Her adventurous career of crime—Sent to Saghalien as a political prisoner—Carried on criminal operations when released—Recaptured and again confined—Finally released and settled on the island until her death—The merchant of Alexandrovsk and his unfaithful wife—The vagrants in Saghalien—Barratasvili—His capture and death—Horrible story of the fate which befell the convict road-makers—Politicals on Saghalien—Their terrible sufferings.

The day will come when Russia, like the rest of the world, will learn that it cannot finally dispose of its worst elements by shooting them down on some distant dust heap. Siberia will act in its own defence as did Australia, and refuse to be forever the dumping ground for criminals. The prosperous development of that vast and richly endowed territory has been too long delayed and already a change is imminent. Enterprise has been stimulated by the construction of the great Trans-Siberian railway. As Siberia grows in wealth and importance it will surely resent and repudiate the exile system, whether enforced by the improved methods of railway travelling or facilitated by sea communications.

The old idea of removal still obtains, although an effort has been made to avoid the horrors of the prolonged pilgrimage on land, by substituting the long sea voyage from Odessa, through the Suez canal and the southern seas to far Saghalien. Banishment to that convict colony, although half the island has passed to the victorious Japanese, will still survive, despite its manifest failure.

After the experience of a quarter of a century, it may be most unhesitatingly asserted that the net result of the deportation to Saghalien has been most disappointing. Failure has met the Russian government on every side. Transportation has fulfilled none of the aims of penal legislation, has been neither reformatory nor deterrent, but merely painful and punitive without any return in benefit to the colony. The island has made no progress; its scanty natural resources have been little utilised, and no return has been obtained from the cultivation of the indifferent soil. At the best period, barely one-tenth of the convicts qualifying for conditional freedom, and labouring to become proprietors of farms with lands cleared and stocked with cattle, were of any value in carrying on the work; of the remaining nine-tenths, half had no heart in it, and the other half were frankly idlers and vagabonds hanging about the settlements, looking for free rations, and when the issue ceased, ranging the country as masterless men depending on theft and depredation for their bare living.

The social atmosphere was vitiated, and noxious evil elements predominated; general depravity had become almost universal. It was the old story of Australian transportation, and the later experience of New Caledonia. Once more, penal exile stands condemned as a secondary punishment, showing the same absence of any redeeming or compensating features in the improvement of these new lands or the amelioration of the individual. The system must be still more barren of results in the future, now that the southern half of the island—the part most favourable to agriculture—has been surrendered to Japan as part of the last war indemnity. This will seriously diminish the amount of land available for the “exile settlers,” as they are called.

The efforts made to colonise have been feeble and fruitless. Convict labourers were set to clear the forests and reclaim waste lands, but in a desultory, half-hearted fashion, without skill or knowledge, and wielding primitive instruments and imperfect tools. Much time was wasted in covering long distances to draw rations, and depending upon the administration for advances to provide seed and stock, both inadequate in quantity and of very inferior quality. As a general rule, the settlers were physically unfit for the work in hand; their health was not robust; they soon aged and broke down under the rough conditions of daily life. All were crushed with indebtedness to the government for advances, and also to private usurers who supplied means for self-indulgence. A fierce passion for gambling consumed them, and drunkenness was universal. Vodka was smuggled in freely from Japan, and numbers of illicit stills manufactured it secretly upon the island. One of the principal officials spoke as follows of the deplorable state of things:—

“Convict life on Saghalien is a frightful nightmare. It is a compound of debauchery, insolence and bravado, mixed with real suffering from hardship and privation, and tainted indelibly with crime and corruption.” Children born on or brought to the island are educated in the worst vices, and when still of tender years are already profligate or depraved. Modesty does not exist; young girls of twelve and thirteen are invariably seduced and abandoned to prostitution; men enter into the civil marriage so as to profit by the immorality of their temporary wives; many female convicts are retained in government hands, simply to purvey concubines for the colonial officials. The unsavoury and shameless relations of the sexes are among the principal reasons why colonisation has absolutely failed. There is no virtue among the female residents of Saghalien, whether they are “free” women who have come out voluntarily to join husbands or parents, or those condemned to deportation. The latter are in many respects better placed than the former, for they receive government shelter and allowances in food.

The prisons on the island are hot-beds of vice; all classes of offenders are herded together, with no system of classification but the one based upon the length of sentence. An attempt has been made to separate the uncondemned awaiting trial from the recidivist and hardened offender, but the division is not carried far, and too often the association is indiscriminate, and the wholly bad habitual criminals mix freely with the less hardened wrongdoers, who are rapidly corrupted and debased by their evil surroundings. The worst elements are concentrated in the “testing” prison of Alexandrovsk, including those who have graduated and grown gray in crime on the mainland. Prison discipline is generally slack and ineffective, and from ill-judged economy the staff of warders is too weak for supervision and control. The officers themselves are often of inferior stamp, drunken, untrustworthy, overbearing, given to “trafficking” with the prisoners, accepting bribes for the clandestine introduction of strong drink, or to assist in escapes, quick to oppress and misuse their charges.

Another impediment to colonisation is the noted and invincible dislike to the place constantly present in the minds of the enforced colonists or exiled class at large. No ex-convict would willingly remain on Saghalien. When their terms of detention are ended, all want to turn their backs on the island forever. Nothing would reconcile one to continued residence, not even the acquisition of comparative wealth and the possession of lands and herds, a house to shelter him, and domestic ties. Anyone who can happily scrape together the necessary means hungers to spend it in paying his passage home. He must possess his soul in patience for a long time. Six years must be spent as an exile settler after release from his prison probation; six more as a peasant, and then only permission is granted to cross to the mainland, but never to return to St. Petersburg or Moscow. Now and again a fugitive—and there is a large percentage of escapes as we shall see—may reach home, but he is in constant danger of rearrest. One political prisoner actually succeeded in reaching the capital, but had the bad luck to meet in the streets of St. Petersburg a gendarme officer who knew him. He was recognised and sharply interrogated. “How did you manage to come so far, and what brings you here?” asked the officer. “This brought me,” replied the exile, as he promptly drew his revolver and shot his inconvenient questioner down. Arrest followed immediately, and trial, with a fresh sentence of fifteen years. Once more he was sent to Saghalien, where he is still living as an exile settler with small hope of a second enlargement.

There are occasional, but very rare, exceptions among ex-convicts who elect to remain and settle down in the colony. Mr. Hawes tells us of one, a Cossack from the Caucasus, probably an old insurgent, who, with tireless industry, had made himself a home at the village of Uskovo on the upper waters of river Tim, some fifty miles from Alexandrovsk. This man with infinite labour had cleared enough of the primeval forest to sow a respectable crop of corn, some 150 puds or upwards of 5,000 English pounds, which returned him a twelvefold crop. He was a careful farmer, and sowed his seed with judgment, unlike most of the peasants who scattered it at one place insufficiently and at another in excess. Yet good harvests might be secured by steady industry, were the peasants only willing to give agriculture a fair trial. Another similar case was that of a free-command convict, whose wife had followed him out from Europe. He was permitted to live with her outside the prison on condition that he performed his allotted task of hard labour, which was to haul tree trunks into Alexandrovsk to the number of one hundred and twenty. He was energetic and thrifty, and by the aid of a loan from the crown purchased a number of draught ponies to help him in hauling, by which means he contrived to get a certain amount of spare time to work on his own account. He had struck a new idea, inspired by the fact that a steady traffic in oxen and ponies, bound to the town bazaar or market, constantly passed his door. He established a sort of livery stable in a little courtyard adjoining his cottage, where he provided shelter for the cattle and sleeping places for the drovers on beds of hay. He soon did a large business and prospered greatly.

Sometimes there was a sad slip between the cup and the lip. It is on record that an exile settler by unremitting diligence had put by enough to pay for his passage home at the expiration of his term of exile. On his way to Alexandrovsk, he was resting on a bridge when another villager of the free command came and seated himself alongside. Suddenly, as they chatted pleasantly together, the newcomer knocked the other senseless with a heavy blow on the head, and having rifled his body, dropped it into the stream running below. He thus became possessed of his victim’s pocket-book containing his money and the certificate of the expiration of his sentence. Fate was adverse, however, and when he proceeded to make use of his ill-gotten gains, the certificate was recognised as the property of the deceased. Arrest and detention were followed by full discovery of the crime and its punishment.

At Saghalien there was no security to life and property in the towns and still less safety in the interior, which was ravaged and harassed by the vagrant convicts, continually moving to and fro. Murder was committed daringly and unblushingly on the smallest temptation, such as the possession of even a small sum of money. When Mr. Hawes was at Alexandrovsk, he met when on his way to church a couple of men just out of hospital who had evidently been drinking. One of them reeled a little in his walk and was manifestly drunk. Within a few hours this luckless creature lay, a corpse, in the market place. He had been murdered by his companion for the six or seven rubles he carried in his pocket. Three days later, a man living near the market place imprudently sat near the lamp at an open window, and was shot through it. Hawes describes the cemetery he visited on a hill to the north of the town; it was filled with wooden crosses, black, brown and green, clustering thickly, and much the same epitaph was inscribed on all, “Here lies —— murdered —— 18—.” No mention was made of the assassin; that was quite unnecessary. The victims were buried both singly and in groups of three, four or five. The theatre of the crime was usually the market place or bazaar near-by, where quarrels were frequent and weapons such as knives, daggers and revolvers were constantly employed. Murderous assaults and hand-to-hand fights were repeated almost daily, and the police seldom took notice of the disturbance. Men were often pointed out in the open road who had half a dozen or more murders to their credit. Mr. Hawes saw one hovering near his hut who had slain eight victims, and it seemed inexplicable that such a miscreant should be suffered to be still at liberty. His immunity was due to his prompt escape into the taiga or wild, wooded interior. Convicts who did so might be captured some day, but were seldom identified or there was insufficient evidence to secure their conviction. The authorities, too, were generally callous when one villain murdered another, philosophically saying, “After all the brutal crowd has been well diminished by one.” Of course if an official was murdered, more serious steps were taken to bring the offender to justice. A Saghalien murderer was known to have committed the capital offence nineteen times, and still evaded punishment.

Female murderers were plentiful enough on Saghalien, and one of the most remarkable was a certain Sophie Bluffstein, commonly called the “Golden Hand.” As a criminal, she had few equals among wrong-doers in any land. She was a Jewess, who, as a girl of rare beauty, had married a man of her own race, a financial agent, but she left him when his affairs became entangled. She developed into a cosmopolitan adventuress who made the capitals of Europe her stage, and was well known in London, Paris, Vienna and St. Petersburg. Her business was to victimise tradesmen and attract lovers over whom she gained extraordinary influence. Her frauds were extensive and on the well-known lines. She lived in great style in a smart house, in the most fashionable part of the city, and drove in her carriage to the best shops where she made large purchases of jewelry and valuables, for which, of course, she never paid. Her depredations were on a colossal scale and she was “wanted” by the entire police of Europe.

Sophie Bluffstein’s personal fascination was unrivalled. Her chief charms were her wonderful eyes, which seemed to have had magnetic effect upon her admirers and drew them irresistibly to her feet, tempting them to commit any crime to secure her good graces. One of her greatest triumphs was the beguilement of the governor of Smolensk, where she had been arrested and incarcerated. Her influence over him was such that she induced him to connive at her escape, to desert his wife and family, and to accompany her in her flight. The connection was brief, and she resumed her evil courses, until she was caught in a trap at a gay supper party of young men, some of whom were terrorists, and which was broken up by the police. Arrested as a political offender, she was sent to Siberia, where in due course she escaped, was recaptured and deported to Saghalien.

Here she renewed her criminal activity, and when released from prison to enter the free command, she gathered round her a choice collection of the worst characters, whom she employed as her tools in the crimes she planned and had carried out. In one case, a merchant, carrying on his person a large sum in rubles, was robbed and murdered. The money was so cleverly buried by her that it has not yet been discovered. Her operations were greatly aided by a ship her confederates had seized and openly used as a pirate craft. To check her villainies, she was shut up at last in the testing prison at Alexandrovsk and kept constantly handcuffed. Yet she eventually regained her liberty, and after living more peaceably for a time at Rikovsk, she was allowed to settle at Vladivostok, where she kept an inn until her death.

That life was held cheap at Saghalien will be shown by the following story. A merchant of Alexandrovsk had reason to suspect his wife, a young and beautiful Tartar woman, of infidelity, and when he upbraided her she ran off and left him. She was never seen again, and it came out afterward that he had hired an assassin at the price of twenty-five rubles to kill her, according to the provisions of the Mahometan law. The assassin and his employer quarreled over the ghastly business, and the latter simplified the matter by hiring a second assassin to murder the first. But the second murder was not so successfully accomplished as the first; the victim escaped; the merchant was arrested, and a witness came forward to say she had seen him preparing a noose to hang his wife on his own account. No arrest was made for some time, and even the merchant was let out on bail.

Thefts and highway robbery were of constant occurrence, and burglaries also, both of private houses and government stores. There was a large floating population of desperadoes, which was continually recruited by the fugitives from justice, prison-breakers and vagrants from the free commands, and exile settlers who preferred depredation to industry. The brodyaga was a greater scourge in Saghalien than in Siberia, another and a potential check to the development of the colony on account of the terrorism exercised over the well-disposed settler, whom he robbed and maltreated. They worked generally in organised gangs, armed with stolen rifles which they readily used. The most dangerous gang was that of which the chief and captain was the notorious Barratasvili, the Robin Hood of the island, whose feats are still remembered.

Barratasvili came to Saghalien first as an exiled forger, and he passed through his prison probation with an exemplary character. He was looked upon as a mild and well-disposed man, quite amenable to discipline. When he joined the free command, he became a domestic servant and continued to be well-conducted until suddenly he ran off and escaped to Nicholaevsk on the mainland. He was pursued, taken and brought back to Saghalien, only to give his escort the slip and gain the recess of the forest, where he all but died of starvation. By the murder of a merchant on his way from Dui to Alexandrovsk carrying the price of a horse he had lately sold, Barratasvili obtained funds and became the leader of the band which soon began to ravage the district. He was like the typical brigand, waging war with the rich but in sympathy with the poor, whom he succoured instead of attacking. He was daring and unscrupulous in his robberies, shooting “at sight” all who offered the slightest resistance. As he became more and more reckless and his crimes multiplied, the hue and cry was raised against him, and wide plans were laid to capture him, all of which he successfully evaded, still boldly showing himself where he was most “wanted.”

On one occasion at Alexandrovsk, a strong detachment of soldiers searched the town, house by house, in the small hours of the morning, bent upon taking him, but quite fruitlessly. Yet four hours after the search had begun, he was seen by a friend in the neighbourhood passing along the street with no more disguise than being muffled up in a fur-lined coat. Again, he entered a store in the town and having posted a sentry to keep watch, proceeded to ransack the place, emptying the counter cases of their jewelry, the tills and the safes of their cash. The recklessness of these thieves was so great that they entered the town and had their photographs taken.

But the net was closing round Barratasvili. A combined effort was set on foot to put an end to him and his gang. It was winter time when the end came. Overcome with fatigue, he one day ventured off the road into the forest close to a deserted saw-mill, and with his companions fell asleep. An overseer, trudging along the road, noticed the tracks of his skis, and they aroused his suspicions. Ordinary travellers do not leave the road to plunge into the deep snow of the dense forest. He, too, was tired, but he went back to Derbensk and secured the assistance of a posse of soldiers. Following up the track, step by step, through the forest, they came upon the long-sought robbers resting. The alarm was given. Firing began on both sides. The leader of the gang was hit in the left shoulder, but still continued to fire. The soldiers sought shelter behind tree trunks. Barratasvili, in taking aim, exposed his head and in so doing was shot in the forehead. Their leader killed, his companions threw down their arms, were taken and beaten by the soldiers with the butt ends of their muskets. In encounters of this kind, the soldiers, furious at the loss of their comrades, treat their captives most brutally, and in some cases the latter have died from injuries thus received. Three of the four companions of Barratasvili were hanged at the corners of the testing prison at Alexandrovsk. In theory, capital punishment is supposed to have been abolished in Russia, but the sentence is still passed by court-martial and the island of Saghalien in under martial law. These brodyagi were really strangled, not hanged. A rope with a slip-knot was fixed round the neck of the culprit, the other end being carried up and made taut to a crosspiece supported by two upright poles. The convict stood on a box, which was kicked away from under his feet, and strangulation often tardily ensued.

The brodyagi had little hope of permanent evasion. Now and again a few determined fugitives have seized a boat and attempted a passage across the sea to the mainland. They might win through the dangers of the sea, having evaded the native trackers, half savage men of the Gilyak tribe, more ready to shoot down than to capture, and they might make good their landing at Cape Muraviev or Pogob. But they must face starvation and almost certain death from the terrible winter cold. The alternative is voluntary surrender, with the certainty of flogging and a prolongation of sentence. More frequently, the brodyagi infest the taiga and hang about the sparse settlements on the chance of plunder, or, if in any numbers, combine for a descent upon the villages. In one year, 1896, nine convicts who had escaped from the Alexandrovsk prisons at various times joined forces in the Timovsk district and gave a great deal of trouble. They were pursued by strong parties of soldiers, but often turned to show fight, having become possessed of firearms. Eventually they were captured, the survivors of the gang ending as usual upon the gallows.

When they are Chinese—and in Manchuria, the Russians hunt them down and shoot as many as they can at sight—those wounded and taken alive are decapitated and their heads hung by the way-side, but no real attempt has been made to rid Siberia and Saghalien of this great pest and danger.

Statistics are not helpful, as so few arrests are made, and so few crimes discovered. Garroting is the chief device of the footpad. With a short stick and a noose of twine, he approaches his victim from the rear, slips the cord over his head and strangles the man, woman or child, who is unable to utter a cry; then he strips from the body everything likely to lead to its identification, and decamps. If there is an accomplice, he blocks the stranger’s advance or engages his attention at the correct moment. Nor is there perfect safety in numbers. “Whilst at Khabarovsk,” says a recent traveller, “I paid a visit to one of the lone pioneers of Anglo-Saxondom in that far-off land. There, within a stone’s throw of the governor-general’s house, three citizens were attacked within five minutes of our passing. Their assailants got away, but all three of the merchants succumbed to their injuries. At Blagoveschensk, in broad daylight, between two and three o’clock in the afternoon, and quite close to the main hotel and high street, I heard a series of revolver shots, and turning, saw a man leisurely reloading his revolver. His victim, a woman in this case, never uttered a cry, merely fell. The street was almost deserted, and the people who heard and saw took very little notice, but with the aid of a passing soldier, we arrested that man, and in the rough and ready lock-up to which he was taken were electric lights and telephone. In a few minutes the district superintendent was summoned, but we were scarcely thanked for our part, and we were told that our action was not Siberian, and that the affair was none of ours.

“From Cheliobinsk to Vladivostok crime is equally common. In the latter place, I was told that after each pay-day at the naval fitting yard men were missing and never returned. On one occasion thirty disappeared, and ordinarily eight or ten bodies are found within a few days, stripped of every shred of clothing, their tattooed marks gashed over and the features hacked so that they could not be recognised. Russians suffer more than the Chinese, and Russians are usually the aggressors. Policemen are too few and too wary. Unless the street be crowded, men may shout loud and long before any will venture to their assistance.”

The suburbs and villages in Siberia, says the same authority, suffer from the vagrant bands who raid settlements and houses, exacting all they dare and often not falling short of other crimes. They are the fugitives from justice, escaped criminals, the reckless and daring convicts who have eluded their prison guards. They have nothing but what they have stolen, a wooden staff and a short length of leather or twine. Whoever gets into their power has a short shrift and theirs is not longer if they are captured in the act or traced. For entering and robbing a church in Vladivostok, some were hanged, for in Siberia the death penalty is not in abeyance as in Russia. In Siberia—and in Russia too—lynch law is common among the peaceable, industrious, well-to-do peasants as it is also among the half Russianised natives. One method of dealing with cattle thieves is to bend down two straight young birch trees, tie the hands of the robber to one and his feet to the other, then release the trees and hurry away.

Later records describe the extraordinary career of a convict, Nagorny by name, who is said to have escaped seven times from Saghalien, his last having been effected while he was chained to a wheelbarrow. This man had been guilty of more than fifty murders and several hundred robberies, many of these having been perpetrated in the disguise of a gendarme, when he entered the houses of his victims under the pretext of making an official search. He was tall, strongly built and had a ruffianly expression. When he was arrested, Nagorny pointed a loaded revolver at his custodian, but the lock of the weapon proved damaged and it was useless.

A hideous story is preserved in Saghalien of a tragic event that occurred in the summer of 1892, when a party of a hundred convicts were sent from Alexandrovsk to make a road through the taiga to Rikovsk. It was a terrible task; the road followed the course of the Boroni River, in a wide and swampy valley, rendered impassable by unexpected heavy rains, which cut the workmen off from their base of supplies. Great numbers of the gang perished from starvation, dysentery and fevers. Three of them, maddened by their privations, escaped into the taiga, and when pursued, wandered further and further into the primeval forest. It was strongly suspected, but never proved, that one of the three was killed and eaten by his two comrades, for one of them when caught was found to be carrying a human bone in his pouch, but his mind was unhinged and he could give no coherent account of what happened. He was treated as a lunatic, and his insanity saved him from punishment, but he was ever afterward known as “Vasiliv the Cannibal.” The other fugitive, Kalenik, was sentenced to ninety-nine strokes of the plet, which killed him.

Political exiles have been deported to Saghalien, but not in any great number. They were among the earliest convicts transported by sea, and it is worth noting that the Russian government in 1888 was anxious to make no distinction between them and the common criminals. Mr. Kennan prints a letter concerning some of them from M. Galkin Vrasski, the well-known chief of prison administration, directing that no difference should be made between them and the ordinary criminals. They were to be subjected to the same discipline, but to be kept under stricter surveillance, if anything, and were to be liable to more severe punishments inflicted on Saghalien and in Siberia. Two, indeed, were flogged at Alexandrovsk, after an unhappy collision with the prison authorities caused by the neglect of one of them to raise his hat on meeting a subordinate official. Their sufferings were, of course, greater owing to the remoteness of their domicile and their savage surroundings. They were naturally more in touch with the civilised world at Tobolsk, Tomsk and Irkutsk, and were at a peculiar disadvantage on Saghalien, because of the dearth of educated people among the exiled population. They were in request for more cultured employment as schoolmasters, accountants or in scientific labours. As a rule, they bore their expatriation and the hardships of their daily life with equanimity, and were quiet and well-conducted. Many of them had been victims of Russian despotism and had suffered much in the Russian state prisons. One of them whom Mr. Hawes met on Saghalien was a lady who had at one time belonged to a secret society unknown to her husband. When Alexander II was assassinated she fled the country. On returning later to Russia, she was arrested on suspicion, but her identity could not be proved until her husband was tricked into recognising her when they were suddenly brought face to face. This lady was consigned to the fortress of SchlÜsselburgSchlÜsselburg, and was so entirely lost sight of that her husband, presuming she was dead, married again. Ten years later he heard that she was alive and had been transported to Saghalien. Having somehow settled matters with his second wife, he followed his first to the other end of the world and was eventually allowed to settle with her at Vladivostok.

In spite of restrictions, hardships and almost intolerable conditions, the political exile has been a distinct aid and valuable factor in the settlement and development of Siberia, carrying with him ideals and standards and a degree of intelligence far in advance of the native Siberian settler and peasant. The infusion of such an element is all the more needed because of the low average of intelligence of the great mass of the convicts, many of whom become permanent residents of Siberia. Mr. Henry Norman has said of the prisoners in the prison of Irkutsk, as he found them: “Never has it been my lot, though I have visited prisons, civilised and uncivilised, in many parts of the world, to see human nature at such a low ebb.... From this point of view, Russian criminology has a task unknown in countries where civilisation has reached a higher average of development.” It is the criminal exile who has been a bar to progress in Siberia, and with the cessation of the transportation of this class of convicts, the future is brighter for the great exile territory which is so rich in natural possibilities.

Siberia will no doubt become the granary of the world. Its millions of fertile acres must ere long develop its great food producing qualities. With its great stretches of prairie waiting for the plough, its huge forests and magnificent waters, “it is evident that the Siberia of convicts and prisoners is passing away and the Siberia of the reaping machine, the gold drill, the timber yard, the booming, flourishing new town is awakening into new life.”

The present condition of Russia is appalling. Centuries of autocratic rule, backed by barbarous methods, such as have been set forth at some length in the foregoing pages, have culminated now in a social upheaval that threatens the collapse of a vast empire. The stability of the government is wholly undermined; long continued, merciless repression has failed; resistance to constituted authority becomes daily more daring and embittered. The Czar and his bureaucracy are more and more fiercely and systematically assailed, despite the increased reprisals of despotic power and the temporary triumph of a reactionary policy.

Rulers, with their backs to the wall, plead these outrages are imperative in self-defence. The malcontents, ever increasing in numbers and violence, have openly determined to make government impossible and that terrorism by bomb-throwing and assassination is the only argument left. They will accept no compromise; they distrust all promises, and move steadily on to social revolution. “We cannot call our souls our own,” said a working man in Moscow to an English writer; “we cannot discuss affairs of our country without risk of Siberia; we are taxed down to the last kopeck; we are black-mailed by every petty official; we have no freedom of the press; if anybody in authority does us wrong, we have no redress ... we hate the bomb-throwing as much as you do. But it is the only argument left to us.” This is characteristic of the spirit animating the “great mass of lethargic ignorant Muscovites” goaded at last to action and gaining hourly in strength and recklessness. Meanwhile the government maintains the struggle. Its persistent answer is to refuse reforms until order is restored, and it still finds champions and supporters, especially in the so-called “Black Hundred,” a powerful reactionary organisation based upon an unofficial union of the Russian people.

An examination of any of the recent budgets for yearly expenses of this huge empire will show a most astonishing percentage appropriated to the maintenance of order,—the upkeep of the police and censorship of the press,—and will furnish to the intelligent observer a reason for present conditions, as well as a reason for admiring the fidelity of the educated members of the lower classes to their ideal of liberty.