IT is pretty generally recognized in Europe that altogether our penal institutions are very far from being what they ought, and no better indeed than so many contradictions in action of the modern theory of the treatment o: criminals. The principle of the lex talionis— of the right of the community to avenge itself on the criminal — is no longer admissible. We have come to an understanding that society at large is responsible for the vices that grow in it, as well as it has its share in the glory of its heroes; and we generally admit, at least in theory, that when we deprive a criminal of his liberty, it is to purify and improve him. But we know how hideously at variance with the ideal the reality is. The murderer is simply handed over to the hangman; and the man who is shut up in a prison is so far from being bettered by the change, that he comes out more Russian Prisons. 25 Russian Prisons. 25 resolutely the foe of society than he was when he went in. Subjection, on disgraceful terms, to humiliating work gives him an antipathy to all kinds of labour. After suffering every sort of humiliation at the instance of those whose lives are lived in immunity from the peculiar conditions which bring man to crime — or to such sorts of it as are punishable by the opera- tions of the law — he learns to hate the section of society to which his humiliation belongs, and proves his hatred by new offences against it.
If the penal institutions of Western Europe have failed thus completely to realize the ambi- tious aim on which they justify their existence, what shall we say of the penal institutions of Russia? The incredible duration of prelimi- nary detention; the disgusting circumstances of prison life; the congregation of hundreds of prisoners into small and dirty chambers; the flagrant immorality of a corps of jailers who are practically omnipotent, whose whole function is to terrorize and oppress, and who rob their charges of the few coppers doled out to them by the State; the want of labour and the total absence of all that contributes to the moral welfare of man; the cynical contempt for human dignity, and the physical degrada- 26 In Russian and French Prisons.
tion of prisoners — these are the elements of prison life in Russia. Not that the principles of Russian penal institutions are worse than those applied to the same institutions in Western Europe. I am rather inclined to hold the con- trary. Surely, it is less degrading for the con- vict to be employed in useful work in Siberia, than to spend his life in picking oakum, or in climbing the steps of a wheel; and — to com- pare two evils — it is more humane to employ the assassin as a labourer in a gold-mine and, after a few years, make a free settler of him, than quietly to turn him over to a hangman. In Russia, however, principles are always ruined in application. And if we consider the Russian prisons and penal settlements, not as they ought to be according to the law, but as they are in reality, we can do no less than recognize, with all efficient Russian explorers of our prisons, that they are an outrage on humanity.
One of the best results of the Liberal move- ment of 1859 — 1862 was the judicial reform. The old law-courts, in which the procedure was in writing, and which were real sinks of cor- ruption and bribery, were done away with. Trial by jury, which was an institution of old Russian Prisons. 27 Russian Prisons. 27 Russia, but had disappeared under the Tsars of Moscow, was reintroduced. Peasant-courts, to judge small offences and disputes in villages according to the unwritten customary law, had already been established by the Emancipation Act of 1861. The new law of Judicial Pro- cedure, promulgated in 1864, introduced the institution of justices of peace, elected in Russia, but nominated by Government in the Lithuanian provinces and in Poland. They had to dispose of smaller criminal offences, and of all civil disputes about matters not ex- ceeding 30/. in value. Appeal against their decisions could be made to the District Gather- ing of Justices of the Peace, and eventually to the Senate.
All cases implying a privation of civil rights were placed under the jurisdiction of Courts of Justice, sitting with open doors, and supported by a jury. Their decisions could be carried to Courts of Appeal, and cases decided by verdicts of jurors could be brought before Courts of Cassation. The preliminary investi- gation, however, still remained private, that is (in conformity with the French system, as opposed to the English), no counsel was admitted to the prisoner during the preliminary 28 In Russian and French Prisons.
examination; but provisions were made to guarantee the independence of the examining magistrates. Such were, in a few words, the leading features of the new organization of justice under the law of 1864. As to its general spirit it is only fair to say that — apart from the preliminary inquiry — it was conceived in accordance with the most Liberal ideas now current in the judicial world of Europe.
Two years after the promulgation of this law, the most shameful feature of the old Kussian penal code — punishment by the Icnut and branding-iron — was abolished. It was higli time. Public opinion was revolted by the use of these relics of a barbarous past, and it was so powerful at that time that governors of provinces refused to confirm sentences that enjoined the use of the Imut; while others — as I have known in Siberia — would intimate to the executioner that unless he merely cracked the terrible instrument of torture in the air, barely touching his victim (an art well known and very profitable to executioners), " his own skin should be torn to pieces." Corporal punish- ment was thus abolished, but not completely. It remained in the villages (the peasant-courts being still empowered to administer flogging), Russian Prisons. 29 Russian Prisons. 29 iu the army, and in the convict-prisons. Only women could no longer be submitted to flogging as long as not deprived of their civil rights.
But, like all other reforms of that period, the benefits of these two great changes were to a great extent paralyzed by subsequent modi- fications, or by leaving them uncomplete. The old penal code, containing a scale of punish- ments in flagrant disagreement with the state of prisons, was still maintained. Twenty, years have elapsed since a thorough revision of the code was promised; committee has succeeded committee; last year again the newspapers reported that the revision of the code had been terminated, that the sentences would be short- ened, and that the barbarous provisions intro- duced in 1845 would be abolished. But the code remains still what it was when it issued from the hands of Nicholas I.'s committees; and we may still read in the revised edition of 1857, § 799, that convicts can be punished by five to six thousand strokes of the whip, and by being riveted to a wheel-barrow for terms varying from one to three years.
As to the judicial reform, it had hardly become law ere it was ruined by ministerial circulars. First of all, years passed and in 3O In Russian and French Prisons.
thirty-nine provinces out of seventy-two the old courts were maintained, and progress in any suit, as well as the final decision, could be obtained only by vzyatki, that is, by bribery. Until 1885, the old system remained in opera- tion over the whole of Siberia. And when the law of 1864 was extended to three Siberian provinces, it was so mutilated as to lose precisely its best features. A jury is still a desideratum beyond the Urals. The Lithuanian provinces, Poland, and the Baltic provinces, as also several provinces in the north and in the south-east (Arkhangelsk included) remain still under the old jurisdiction; while Wilno and Minsk received the new law quite mutilated by the reactionary proclivities of the present rulers.
As to the Russian provinces where the law has been in force since 1864, all that could be devised to attenuate its good effects — short of actual repeal, has been done. The exa- mining magistrates (juges d' instruction) have never enjoyed the independence bestowed on them by the new law; and this was managed by means of a very simple stratagem: no examining magistrates were nominated, and those to whom their work was entrusted were Russian Prisons. 31 nominated merely ad interim. So the Ministry could displace and discharge them at will. The judges have been made more and more dependent upon the Minister of Justice, whose nominees they are, and who has the right to transfer them from one province to another — from St. Petersburg, for instance, to Siberia. The institution of sworn advocates, uncon- trolled by criticism, has degenerated; and the peasant whose case is not likely to become a cause celelre, has not the benefits of a counsel, and is completely in the hands of a creature like the procureur-imperial in Zola's novel. Freedom of defence was trampled under foot, and the few advocates, like Urusoff, who have indulged in anything approaching to free speech in the trial of political prisoners, have been exiled merely by order of the Third Section.
Independent jurors are, of course, impossible in a country where the peasant-juror knows that he may be beaten by anything in uniform at the very doors of the court. As for the verdicts of the juries, they are not respected at all if they are in contradiction with the opinions of the governor of the province; and the acquitted may be seized as they leave f 32 In Russian and French Prisons.
the dock, and imprisoned anew, on a simple order of the Administrative. Such, for in- stance, was the case of the peasant Borunoff. He came to St. Petersburg on behalf of his fellow-villagers to bring a complaint to the Tsar against the authorities, and he was tried as a " rebel." He was acquitted by the court; but he was re-arrested on the very flight of steps outside, and exiled to the peninsula of Kola. Such, too, was the case of the raskol- nik (nonconformist) Tetenoff, and several more. As to Vera Zassoulitch, who also was acquitted by the jury, the Government ordered her re-arrest at the very doors of the court, and re-arrested she would have been if her com- rades had not rescued her, leaving one dead in the riot which ensued.
The Third Section, the courtiers, and the governors of provinces look on the new courts as mere nuisances, and act accordingly. A great many cases are disposed of by the Executive a Tiuis clos, away from examining magistrates, judges, and jurors alike. The pre- liminary inquiry, in all cases in which a " poli- tical meaning " is discovered, is simply made by gendarmerie-officers, sometimes in the pre- sence of a procureur who accompanies them in Russian Prisons. 33 Russian Prisons. 33 their raids. This procureur — an official in civil dress, attached to the blue uniforms of the gendarmes — is a black sheep to his colleagues; his function is to assist, or appear to assist, at the examination of those arrested by the secret police, and thus give an aspect of law- fulness to its proceedings. Sentence and pun- ishment are often awarded by the Department of States' Police (which is but another name for the Third Section) or the Executive; and a punishment as terrible aa exile — may be for life — within the Arctic circle in Siberia is pro- nounced on mere reports of the gendarmerie officers. In fact, Administrative Exile is re- sorted to in all cases when there is not the slightest indication which could lead to con- demnation, even by a packed court. " You are exiled to Siberia, because it is impossible to commit you for trial, there being no proofs against you," — such is the cynical form in which the announcement is made to the pri- soner. " Be happy that you have escaped so cheap " — they add; and people are sent for five, ten, fifteen years to some small borough of 500 inhabitants within or in the vicinity of the Arctic circle. In this category are included not only the cases of political offenders who D D 34 In Russian and French Prisons.
are supposed to belong to some secret society, but also those of religious dissenters; of people who frankly speak out their opinions on Government; writers whose romances are considered " dangerous;" almost all persons accused of " disobedience " and " turbulent character;" workmen who have been most active in strikes; those accused of verbal " offences against the Sacred Person of his Majesty the Emperor," under which head 2500 people were arrested in 1881 in the course of six months; in short, all those cases which might tend — to use the official language — " to the production of excitement in the public mind " were they brought before a court.
As to political trials, only the early revolu- tionary societies were tried under the law of 1864. Afterwards, when the Government perceived that the judges would not send to hard labour those political offenders who were brought before them, merely because they were suspected of being acquainted with revolu- tionists, the political cases were tried by packed courts, that is, by judges nominated especially for that purpose. To this rule the case of Vera Zassoulitch was a memorable exception. She was tried by a jury, and acquitted. But, Russian Prisons. 35 Russian Prisons. 35 to quote Professor Gradovsky's words in the Golos (suppressed since) — " It is an open secret in St. Petersburg that the case would never have been brought before a jury but for certain ' quarrels ' between the Prefect of the Police on the one side, and the Third Section and the Ministers of Justice and the Interior on the other, — but for certain of those jalousies de metier without which, in our disordered state of existence, it would often be impossible for us so much as to breathe." In plain words, the courtiers quarrelled, some of them con- sidered that it would be advantageous to dis- credit Trepoff, who was then omnipotent in the counsels of Alexander II., and the Minister of Justice succeeded in obtaining permission from the Emperor that Yera Zassoulitch should be sent before a jury: he surely did not expect that she would be acquitted, but he knew that the trial would render it impossible for Trepoff to remain Prefect of the Police at St. Petersburg.
It is, again, to a Yike jalousie de metier, that we were indebted for a public trial on the most scandalous affair of Privy Councillor Tokareff, General-Lieutenant Loshkareff, and their accomplices: Sevastianoff, chief of the Ad- D 2 36 In Russian and French Prisons.
ministration of Domains in Minsk, and Kapger, chief of Police in the same province. These personages, of whom TokarefF was Governor of Minsk, and Loshkareff was a member of the Ministry of the Interior " for peasants' affairs," had contrived to simply steal an estate of 8000 acres belonging to the peasants of Logishino, a small town in Minsk. They managed to buy it from the Crown for the nominal sum of 14,000 roubles (1400/.) pay- able in twenty yearly instalments of 700 roubles each. The peasants, robbed of land that belonged to them, applied to the Senate, and the Senate recognized their rights. It ordered the restoration of the land; but the ulcaze of the Senate was " lost," and the chief of the Administration of Domains feigned ignorance of the decision of the Senate. In the meantime the governor of the province exacted from the peasants 5474 roubles as a year's rent, (for the estate which he had bought for twenty yearly payments of 700 roubles each). The peasants refused to pay, and sent their delegates to St. Petersburg. But as these delegates applied to the Ministry, where General Loshkareff was powerful, they were directly exiled as " rebels." The peasants Russian Prisons. 37 Russian Prisons. 37 still refused to pay, and then Governor Tokareff asked for troops to exact the money. General Loshkareff, his friend, was immediately sent by the Ministry at the head of a military expe- dition, in order to "restore order" at Logi- shino. Supported by a battalion of infantry and 200 Cossacks, he flogged all the inhabi- tants of the village until they had paid, and then reported to St. Petersburg that he had crushed an outbreak in the Western provinces. He did better. He obtained the military cross of Vladimir to decorate his friend Tokareff and the Ispravnik Kapger.
Well, this abominable affair, widely known ancl spoken of in Russia, would never have been brought before a court but for the Winter Palace intrigues. When Alexander III. surrounded himself with new men, the new courtiers who came to power found it desirable to crush with a single blow the party of Potapoff, which was intriguing for a return to power. It was necessary to discredit this party, and the Loshkareff affair, more than five years old, was brought before the Senate in November, 1881. All publicity was given to it, and we could then read for several days in the St. Petersburg newspapers the horrible tale 38 In Russian and French Prisons.
of spoliation and plunder, of old men flogged nearly to death, of Cossacks exacting money with their whips from the Logishino peasants, who were robbed of their own land by the governor of the province. But, for one Tokareff condemned by the Senate, how many other Tokareffs are still peacefully enjoying the fruits of their thieving in the Western and South-Eastern provinces, — sure that none of their deeds will ever see the light of a law court; that any affair which may arise in such a court in connection with their shameful deeds will be stifled in the same way as the Tokareff affair was stifled for five years by orders emanating from the Ministry of Justice? As to political affairs they have been com- pletely removed from the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts. A few special judges nomi- nated for the purpose, are attached to the Senate for judging political offenders, — if Government does not dispose of them other- wise. Most of them are sent before a court- martial; but, while the law is explicit in ordering full publicity of the proceedings of the military courts, their judgments in political cases are pronounced in absolute secrecy.
Russian Prisons. 39 Russian Prisons. 39 It need hardly be said that true reports of political trials in the press have never been permitted. Formerly the journals were bound to reproduce the " cooked " report published by the Official Messenger; but now the Govern- ment has perceived that even such reports produce a profound impression on the public mind, which is always favourable to the accused; and now the work is done in complete darkness. By the law of September, 1881, the governor- general and the governors of provinces are enabled to request " that all those cases be heard in camera which might produce a ' disturbance of minds' (sic) or disturb the public peace." To prevent the speeches of the accused, or such facts which might compromise the Government, from being divulged, nobody is admitted to the court, not even members of the Ministry of Justice — " only the wife or the husband of the accused (mostly in custody also), or the father, mother, or one of the children; but no more than one relative for each accused person." At the trial of twenty-one Terrorists at St. Peters- burg, when ten people were condemned to death, the mother of Sukhanoff was the one person who enjoyed this privilege. Many cases are got rid of in such a way that nobody knows 4O In Russian and French Prisons.
when the trials take place. Thus, for instance, we remained in ignorance of the fate of an officer of the army, son of the governor of a gaol in the St. Petersburg fortress, who had been condemned to hard labour for connection with revolutionists, until we learned it casually from an accusation read at a trial a long while posterior to his own. The public learns from the Official Messenger that the Tsar has com- muted sentences of death pronounced on revo- lutionists to hard labour for life; but nothing transpires either of the trial, or of the crimes imputed to the condemned. Nay, even the last consolation of those condemned to death, the consolation of dying publicly, was taken away. Hanging will now be done secretly within the walls of the fortress, in the presence of none from the world without. The reason is, that when Bysakoff was brought out to the gallows he showed the crowd his mutilated hands, and shouted, louder than the drums, that he had been tortured after trial. His words were heard by a group of " Liberals," who, repudiating any sympathy with the Terrorists, yet held it their duty to publish the facts of the case in a clan- destine proclamation, and to call attention to this flagrant offence against the laws of humanity.
Russian Prisons. 41 Now nothing will be known of what happens in the casemates of the fortress of Paul and Peter after the trial and before the execution.
The trial of the fourteen Terrorists, amongst whom wereVeraFigner andLudmilaVolkenstein, and which terminated in eight condemnations to death, was conducted in such privacy that — as an English correspondent wrote — nobody knew anything about it, even in the houses close by that in which the court-martial was sitting. Nine persons only — all courtiers anxious to see the reputed beauty of one of the accused heroines — were admitted to the court; and it was again from the correspondent of an English newspaper that the public learned that two of the con- demned, namely Stromberg and R-ogatchoff, were executed in greatest secrecy. The news has been since confirmed from an official source. The Official Messenger announced that out of eight condemnations to death six had been commuted, and that Stromberg and Rogatchoff were hanged. But that was all which transpired of this trial. Nobody could even say where the execution took place. As to those whose sentence was commuted to bard labour, all we can say is, that they have never been sent to hard labour; they have disappeared.
42 In Russian and French Prisons.
It is supposed that they are confined in the new State prison at Schliisselburg. But what has become of them there — remains a secret. It transpired that several were shot for supposed, or real, " disciplinary offences." But, what has become of the remainder? None can say, not even their mothers, who make unceasing but useless efforts to discover the fate of their sons and daughters...Like atrocities being possible under the "reformed" Judicial Procedure, it is easy to foresee what may be expected from the " unre- formed" prisons.
In 1861, the governors of our provinces were ordered to institute a general inquiry into the state of prisons. The inquiry was fairly made, and its results determined what was generally known: namely, that the prisons in Russia and Siberia were in the worst state imaginable. The number of prisoners in each was very often twice and thrice in excess of the maximum allowed by law. The buildings were so old and dilapidated, and in such a shocking state of filth, as to be for the most part not only unin- habitable, but beyond the scope of any theory of reform that stopped short of reconstruc- tion.
Russian Prisons. 43 Russian Prisons. 43 Within, affairs were even worse than without. The system was found corrupt to the core, and the officials were yet more in need of improve- ment than the gaols. In the Transbaikal province where, at that time, almost all hard- labour convicts were kept, the committee of inquiry reported that the* prison buildings were mostly in ruins, and that the whole system of exile had followed suit. Throughout the Empire it was recognized that theory and practice stood equally in need of light and air; that everything must be changed, alike in matter and in spirit; and that we must not only rebuild our prisons, but completely reform our prison system, and reconstitute the prison staff from the first man to the last. The Govern- ment, however, elected to do nothing. It built a few new prisons which proved insufficient to accommodate the yearly increasing numbers of prisoners; convicts were farmed out to pro- prietors of private gold-mines in Siberia; a new penal colony was settled on Sakhalin, to colonize an island where nobody was willing to settle freely; a new Central Board of Prisons was nominated; and that vas all. The old order remained unchanged, the old mischief unre- paired. Year after year the prisons fall further 44 In Russian and French Prisons.
into decay, and year after year j^he prison staff of drunken soldiers remains unchanged. Year after year the Ministry of Justice applies for money to spend in repairs, and year after year the Government is content to put it off with the half, or less than the half, of what it asks; and when it calls — during the years 1875 to 1881 — for over six million roubles for the most unavoidable repairs which can no longer be postponed, can spare it no more than a paltry two and a half millions. The consequence is that the gaols are becoming permanent centres of infection, and that, according to the report of a recent committee, at least two-thirds of them are urgently in need of being rebuilt from top to bottom. Rightly to accommodate her prisoners, Russia should have to build half as many prisons again as she has. Indeed, on January 1st, 1884, there were 73,796 prisoners, and the aggregate capacity of the prisons in European Eussia is only for 54,253 souls. In single gaols, built for the detention of 200 to 250 persons, the number of prisoners is com- monly 700 and 800 at a time. In the prisons on the route to Siberia, when convict parties are stopped by floods, the overcrowding is still more monstrous. The Chief Board of Prisons does Russian Prisons. 45 Russian Prisons. 45 not, however, conceal this truth. In its report for 1882, which was published in Russia, and extracts of which have appeared in our reviews, it stated that, whereas the aggregate capacity of all prisons in the empire is only sufficient for 76,000 men, they contained on January 1st, 1882, 95,000 souls. In the prisons of Piotrokow — it reported — the space destinated. for one man was occupied by five persons. In two provinces of Poland and in seven provinces of Russia the real population of the prisons was twice the amount which could nominally be contained by them at the lowest allowable cubic space, and in eleven provinces it exceeded the same at the ratio of 3 to 2.1 In consequence ot" that, typhoid epidemics are constant in several prisons.2 The Russian prison system is thus constituted: First of all we have, in European Russia, 624 prisons or lock-ups, for cases awaiting trial, for a maximum of 54,253 inmates, with four houses of detention for 1134 inmates. If all lock-ups 1 Yearly Keport of the Chief Board of Prisons for 1882 (Russian). — Vyeslnik Europy, 1883, vol. i.
2 V. Nikitin, "Prison and Exile," St. Petersburg, 1880. " Our Penal Institutions," by the same, in Russkiy Vyeatnik, 1881, vol. cliii. — Keport of the Medical Department of the Ministry of Interior for 1883.
46 In Russian and French Prisons.
at the police-stations be added to the above, their number must be raised to 655; and in 1883, no less than 571,093 persons passed through them. In Poland there are 116 lock- ups of the same type. The political prisons at the Third Section and in the fortresses are not included jn this category. Of convict depots — for prisoners waiting transfer to their final stations — there are ten, with accommodation for 71 50; with two for political convicts (at Mtsensk and Vyshniy-Volochok), with accom- modation for 140. No less than 112,638 prisoners passed through these prisons in 1883, and from these figures alone it is easy to conceive the overcrowding. Then come the ispravitelnyia arestantskiya otdeleniya, or houses of correction, which are military organizations for the performance of compulsory labour, and which are worse than the hard-labour prisons in Siberia, though they are nominally a lighter punishment. Of these there are 33, with accom- modation for 7136 (9609 inmates in 1879). In this category must be included also the 13 "houses of correction:" two large ones with accommodation for 1120 (962 in 1879), and 11 smaller ones for 435. These prisons, however, cannot receive all condemned to this kind of Russian Prisons. 47 Russian Prisons. 47 punishment, so that 10,000 men condemned to it remain in the lock-ups. The hard-labour cases are provided for in 17 "central prisons.'' Of these, there are seven in Russia, with accom- modation for 2745; three in Western Siberia, with accommodation for 1150; two in Eastern Siberia, with accommodation for 1650; and one on Sakhalin Island, with accommodation for 600 (1103 inmates in 1879, 802 on January 1st, 1884). No less than 15,444 convicts were kept in these prisons in 1883. Other hard- labour convicts — 10,424 in number — are dis- tributed among the Government mines, gold- washings, and factories in Siberia; namely, at the Kara gold-washings, where there are 2000; at the Troitsk, Ust-Kut, and Irkutsk salt-works, at the Nikolayevs'k and Petrovsk iron-works, at a prison at the former silver-works of Akatui, and on the Sakhalin Island. Finally, hard-labour convicts were farmed out, a few years ago, to private owners of gold- washings in Siberia, but this system has been abandoned of late. The severity of the punishment can thus be varied ad infinitum, according to the wish of the authorities and to that degree of revenge which is deemed appropriate.
The great majority of our prisoners (about 48 In Russian and French Prisons.
100,000) are persons awaiting trial. They may be recognized for innocent; and in Russia, where arrests are made in the most haphazard way, three times out of ten their innocence is patent to everybody. We learn, in fact, from the annual report of the Ministry of Justice for 1881, that of 98,544 arrests made during that year, only 49,814 cases — that is, one half — could be brought before a court, and that among these 16,675 were acquitted. More than 66,000 persons were thus subjected to arrest and imprisonment without having any serious charge brought against them; and of the 33,139 who were convicted and converted into " criminals," a very large proportion (about 15 per cent.) are men and women who have not complied with passport regulations, or with some other vexatious measure of our Adminis- tration. It must be noted that all these prisoners, three-quarters of whom are recog- nized as innocent, spend months, and very often years, in the provincial lock-ups, those famous ostrogs which the traveller sees at the entrance of every Russian town. They lie there idle and hopeless, at the mercy of a set of omnipotent gaolers, packed like herrings in a cask, in rooms of inconceivable foulness, in an atmosphere that Russian Prisons. 49 sickens, even to insensibility, any one entering directly from the open air, and which is charged with the emanations of the horrible parasha — a basket kept in the room to serve the neces- sities of a hundred human beings.
In this connection I cannot do better than quote a few passages from the prison experiences of my friend Madame C, n6e Koutouzoff, who has committed them to paper and inserted them in a Russian review, the Obscheye Dyelo, published at Geneva. She was found guilty of opening a school for peasants' children, inde- pendently of the Ministry of Public Instruction. As her crime was not penal, and as, moreover, she was married to a foreigner, General Gourko merely ordered her to be sent over the frontier. This is how she describes her journey from St. Petersburg to Prussia. I shall give extracts from her narrative without comment, merely premising that its accuracy, even to the minutest detail, is absolutely unimpeachable: — " I was sent to Wilno with fifty prisoners — men and women. From the railway station we were taken to the town prison and kept there for two hours, late at night, in an open yard, under a drenching rain. At last we were pushed into a dark corridor and counted. Two E