‘Yes, there are some. Here is one of them. One night we were at the first representation of a new play. I was in a box with Flaubert, Daudet, Zola. [I am not quite sure whether he named both Daudet and Zola, but he certainly named one of the two.] All were men of ad- -vanced opinions. The subject of the play was this: A woman had separated from her husband. She had loved again, and now lived with another man. This man was represented in the play as an excellent person. For years they had been quite happy. Her two children —a girl and a boy — were babies at the time of the separation; now they had grown, and throughout all these years they had supposed the man to be their real father. The girl was about eighteen and the boy about seventeen. ‘The man treated them quite as a father; they loved him, and he loved them. The scene represented the family meeting at breakfast. The girl comes in and approaches her supposed father, and he is going to kiss her, when the boy, who has learned in some way the true state of affairs, rushes forward and shouts, ‘Don’t dare!’ (N’osez pas!)
‘This exclamation brought down the house. There was 410 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST an outburst of frantic applause. Flaubert and the others joined in it. I was disgusted. 4 “* Why,’ I said, ‘this family was happy; the man was a better father to these children than their real father,...their mother loved him and was happy with him...This mischievous, perverted boy ought simply to be whipped for what he has said.’...It was of no use. I discussed for hours with them afterwards; none of them could under- stand me! ” I was, of course, fully in accordance with Turguéneff’s point of view. I remarked, however, that his acquaint- ances were chiefly amongst the middle classes. There, the difference between nation and nation is immense indeed. But my acquaintances were exclusively amongst the work- ers, and there is an immense resemblance between the workers, and especially amongst the peasants, of all nations.
In so saying, I was quite wrong, however. After I had had the opportunity of making a closer acquaintance with French workers, I often thought of the truth of Turgué- nefi’s remark. There is a real chasm indeed between Russian conceptions of marriage relations and those which prevail in France, amongst the workers as well as in the middle classes; and in many other things there is a similar difference between the Russian point of view and that of other nations. | It was said somewhere, after Turguéneff’s death, that he had intended to write a novel upon this subject. If he had begun it, the above-mentioned scene must be in his manu-_ script. What a pity that he did not write it! He, a thorough ‘ Occidental” in his ways of thinking, could have said very deep things upon a subject which must have so. profoundly affected him personally throughout his life.
Of all novel-writers of our century, Turguéneff has cer- | tainly attained the greatest perfection as an artist, and his | prose sounds to the Russian ear like music, — music as deep | TURGUENEFF — 411 as that of Beethoven. His principal novels — the series of “Dmitri Rudin,” ‘A Nobleman’s Retreat,” ‘‘ On the Eve,” ‘Fathers and Sons,” ‘‘ Smoke,” and “ Virgin Soil’? — re- present the leading “ history-making” types of the edu- cated classes of Russia, which evolved in rapid succession after 1848; all sketched with a fullness of philosophical conception and humanitarian understanding and an artistic beauty which have no parallel in any other literature. Yet ‘Fathers and Sons’? —a novel which he rightly considered his profoundest work — was received by the young people of Russia with a loud protest. Our youth declared that ‘the nihilist Bazdroff was by no means a true representation of his class; many described him even as a caricature of ‘nihilism. This misunderstanding deeply affected Turgue- ‘neff, and, although a reconciliation between him and the ‘young generation took place later on at St. Petersburg, after he had written “ Virgin Soil,” the wound inflicted upon him by these attacks was never healed.
_ He knew from Lavréff that I was an enthusiastic admirer of his writings; and one day, as we were returning in a -earriage from a visit to Antokdlsky’s studio, he asked me what I thought of Bazéroff. I frankly replied, “ Bazéroff is an admirable painting of the nihilist, but one feels that you did not love him as much as you did your other heroes.”; “On the contrary, I loved him, intensely loved him,” -Turguéneff replied, with an unexpected vigor. ‘When we get home I will show you my diary, in which I have noted how I wept when I had ended the novel with Bazéroff’s death.”
_ Turguéneff certainly loved the intellectual aspect of Ba- _garoff. He so identified himself with the nihilist philoso- phy of his hero that he even kept a diary in his name, appreciating the current events from Bazdroff’s point of view. But I think that he admired him more than he 412 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST loved him. In a brilliant lecture on Hamlet and Don Quixote, he divided the history makers of mankind into two classes, represented by one or the other of these char- acters. “ Analysis first of all, and then egotism, and there- fore no faith, —an egotist cannot even believe in himself: ” so he characterized Hamlet. “Therefore he is a skeptic, and never will achieve anything; while Don Quixote, who fights against windmills, and takes a barber’s plate for the magic helmet of Mambrino (who of us has never made the same mistake?), is a leader of the masses, because the masses always follow those who, taking no heed of the sarcasms of the majority, or even of persecutions, march straight for- ward, keeping their eyes fixed upon a goal which is seen, perhaps, by no one but themselves. They search, they fall, but they rise again, and find it, — and by right, too. Yet, although Hamlet is a skeptic, and disbelieves in Good, he does not disbelieve in Evil. He hates it; Evil and Deceit are his enemies; and his skepticism is not indifferentism, but only negation and doubt, which finally consume his will.”
These thoughts of Turguéneff give, I think, the true key for understanding his relations to his heroes. He himself and several of his best friends belonged more or less to the Hamlets. He loved Hamlet, and admired Don Quixote. So he admired ‘also Bazdroff. He represented his superi- ority admirably well, he understood the tragic character of his isolated position, but he could not surround him with that tender, poetical love which he bestowed as on a sick friend, when his heroes approached the Hamlet type. It would have been out of place. | ‘Did you know Myshkin?”’ he once ee me, in 1878. At the trial of our circles Myshkin revealed hiranete as the | most powerful personality. “I should like to know all about him,” he continued.. “That is a man; not the slightest trace of Hamletism.” And in so saying he was TURGUENEFF 413 obviously meditating on this new type in the Russian move- “ment, which did not exist in the phase that Turguéneff described in “ Virgin Soil,” but was to appear two years later.
I saw him for the last time in the autumn of 1881. He was very ill, and worried by the thought that it was his duty to write to Alexander ITI.,—who had just come to the throne, and hesitated as to the policy he should follow, _—asking him to give Russia a constitution, and proving to him by solid arguments the necessity of that step. With evident grief he said to me: “TI feel that I must do it, but I feel that I shall not be able to do it.” In fact, he was already suffering awful pains occasioned by a cancer in the spinal cord, and had the greatest difficulty even in sitting up and talking for a few moments. He did not write then, and a few weeks later it would have been useless. Alex- ander III. had announced in a manifesto his intention ta remain the absolute ruler of Russia.
VII In the meantime affairs in Russia took quite a new turn The war which Russia began against Turkey in 1877 hac ended in general disappointment. There was in the coun try, before the war broke out, a great deal of enthusiasn in favor of the Slavonians. Many believed, also, that ¢ war of liberation in the Balkans would result in a move i the progressive direction in Russia itself. But the libera tion of the Slavonian populations was only partly accom: plished. The tremendous sacrifices which had been made by the Russians were rendered ineffectual by the blunders of the higher military authorities. Hundreds of thousands of men had been slaughtered in battles which were only half victories, and the concessions wrested from Turkey were brought to naught at the Berlin congress. It was alse widely known that the embezzlement of state money went on during this war on almost as large a scale as during the Crimean war.
It was amidst the general dissatisfaction which prevailed in Russia at the end of 1877 that one hundred and ninety- three persons, arrested since 1873, in connection with our agitation, were brought before a high court. The accused, supported by a number of lawyers of talent, won at once the sympathies of the great public. They produced a very favorable impression upon St. Petersburg society; and when it became known that most of them had spent three or four years in prison, waiting for this trial, and that no less than twenty-one of them had either put an end to their lives by suicide or become insane, the feeling grew still stronger in their favor, even among the judges themselves. The court’ VERA ZASULICH 415 pronounced very heavy sentences upon a few, and relatively lenient ones upon the remainder, saying that the prelimi- nary detention had lasted so long, and was so hard a punishment in itself, that nothing could justly be added to it, It was confidently expected that the Emperor would still further mitigate the sentences. It happened, however, ‘to the astonishment of all, that he revised the sentences only to increase them. Those whom the court had acquitted ‘were sent into exile in remote parts of Russia and Siberia, and from five to twelve years of hard labor were inflicted upon those whom the court had condemned to short terms ‘of imprisonment. ‘This was the work of the chief of the ‘Third Section, General Mézentsoff.
At the same time, the chief of the St. Petersburg police, ‘General Trépoff, noticing, during a visit to the house of detention, that one of the political prisoners, Bogoluboff, did not take off his hat to greet the omnipotent satrap, rushed upon him, gave him a blow, and, when the prisoner resisted, ordered him to be flogged. The other prisoners, learning the fact in their cells, loudly expressed their in- -dignation, and were in consequence fearfully beaten by the -warders and the police. The Russian political prisoners ‘bore without murmuring all hardships inflicted upon them in Siberia or through hard labor, but they were firmly de- ‘cided not to tolerate corporal punishment. A young girl, Véra Zastilich, who did not even personally know Bogoluhoff, took a revolver. went to the chief of police, and shot at him. Trépoff was only wounded. Alexander II. came ‘to look at the heroic girl, who must have impressed him by her extremely sweet face and her modesty. Trépoff had so many enemies at St. Petersburg that they managed to bring the affair before a common-law jury, and Véra Zasilich declared in court that she had resorted to arms only when all means for bringing the affair to public know- ledge apd obtaining some sort of redress had been exe 416 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST hausted. Even the St. Petersburg correspondent of tl London “Times ”’ had been asked to mention the affair in h paper, but had not done so, perhaps thinking it improbabl Then, without telling any one her intentions, she went shoot Trépoff. Now that the affair had become public, sl was quite happy to know that he was but slightly wounde The jury acquitted her unanimously; and when the poli tried to rearrest her, as she was leaving the court hous the young men of St. Petersburg, who stood in crowds; the gates, saved her from their clutches. She went abroa and soon was among us in Switzerland.
This affair produced quite a sensation throughout Europ I was at Paris when the news of the acquittal came, an had to call that day on business at the offices of sever: newspapers. J found the editors fired with enthusiasn and writing powerful articles to glorify the girl. Eve the serious ‘ Revue des Deux Mondes” wrote, in its revier of the year, that the two persons who had most impresse public opinion in Europe during 1878 were Prince Gortche koff at the Berlin congress and Véra Zastilich. Thei portraits were given side by side in several almanacs. Upo the workers in Europe the devotion of Véra Zastlich pre duced a tremendous impression.
A few months after that, without any plot having bea formed, four attempts were made against crowned head in close succession. The worker Hoedel and Dr. Nobilin shot at the German Emperor; a few weeks later, a Spanis worker, Oliva Moncasi, followed with an attempt to shoo the King of Spain, and the cook Passanante rushed with hi knife upon the King of Italy. The governments of Europ could not believe that such attempts upon the lives of thre kings should have occurred without there being at the bot tom some international conspiracy, and they jumped to th conclusion that the Jura Federation and the Internationa Workingmen’s Association were responsible.
RUBLICATION OF LE REVOLTE 417 ‘More than twenty years have passed since then, and I uy say most positively that there was absolutely no ground jatever for that supposition. However, all the European vernments fell upon Switzerland, reproaching her with thoring revolutionists, who organized such plots. Paul ‘ousse, the editor of our Jura newspaper, the ‘“ Avant- ude,” was arrested and prosecuted. The Swiss judges, sing there was not the slightest foundation for connect- g Brousse or the Jura Federation with the recent attacks, ndemned Brousse to only a couple of months’ imprison- mt, for his articles; but the paper was suppressed, and _ the printing-offices of Switzerland were asked by the Jeral government not to publish this or any similar paper. je Jura Federation thus remained without an organ.
‘Besides, the politicians of Switzerland, who looked with unfavorable eye on the anarchist agitation in their coun- 7, acted privately in such a way as to compel the leading yiss members of the Jura Federation either to retire from iblic life or to starve. Brousse was expelled from Switzer- ad. James Guillaume, who for eight years had main- ined against all obstacles the official organ of the federation, 'd made his living chiefly by teaching, could obtain no aployment, and was compelled to leave Switzerland and move to France. Adhémar Schwitzguébel found no work the watch trade, and, burdened as he was by a large imily, had to retire from the movement. Spichiger was ‘the same condition, and emigrated. It thus happened iat I, a foreigner, had to undertake the editing of the igan of the federation. I hesitated, of course, but there is nothing else to be done, and with two friends, Dumar- leray and Herzig, I started a new fortnightly paper at hneva, in February, 1879, under the title of ‘‘ Le Révolté.” had to write most of it myself. We had only twenty- ‘ree francs (about four dollars) to start the paper, but we- il set to work to get subscriptions, and succeeded in issuing 418 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST our first number. It was moderate in tone, but revolut ary in substance, and I did my best to write it in suc style that complex historical and economical questions shc be comprehensible to every intelligent worker. Six h dred was the utmost limit which the edition of our previ papers had ever attained. We printed two thousand CO} of “ Le Révolté,” and in a few days not one was left. " paper was a success, and still continues, at Paris, under name of “ Temps Nouveaux.”
Socialist papers have often a tendency to become m annals of complaints about existing conditions. The pression of the laborers in the mine, the factory, and | field is related; the misery and sufferings of the work during strikes are told in vivid pictures; their helplessn in the struggle against employers is insisted upon; and t succession of hopeless efforts, related in the paper, exerci a most depressing influence upon the reader. To count balance that effect, the editor has to rely chiefly upon bu ing words by means of which he tries to inspire his re: ers with energy and faith. I thought, on the contra: that a revolutionary paper must be, above all, a record those symptoms which everywhere announce the coming: a new era, the germination of new forms of social life, t growing revolt against antiquated institutions, These sym toms should be watched, brought together in their intime connection, and so grouped as to show to the hesitati minds of the greater number the invisible and often uncc scious support which advanced ideas find everywhere, wh a revival of thought takes place in society. To make o feel sympathy with the throbbing of the human heart é over the world, with its revolt against age-long injustic with its attempts at working out new forms of life, — tk should be the chief duty of a revolutionary paper. It. hope, not despair, which makes successful revolutions.
Historians often tell us how this or that system of phil THE DUTY OF A REVOLUTIONARY PAPER 419 phy has accomplished a certain change in human thought, id subsequently in institutions. But this is not history. he greatest social philosophers have only caught the indi- tions of coming changes, have understood their inner lations, and, aided by induction and intuition, have fore- \ld what was to occur. It may also be easy to draw a lan of social organization, by starting from a few prin- iples and developing them to their necessary consequences, ke a geometrical conclusion from a few axioms; but this snot sociology. A correct social forecast cannot be made nless one keeps an eye on the thousands of signs of the ew life, separating the occasional facts from those which re organically essential, and building the generalization pon that basis.
This was the method of thought with which I endeav- red to familiarize my readers, using plain comprehensible yords, so as to accustom the most modest of them to judge or himself whereunto society is moving, and himself to orrect the thinker if the latter comes to wrong conclusions. \s to the criticism of what exists, I went into it only to lisentangle the roots of the evils, and to show that a deep- eated and carefully-nurtured fetichism with regard to the ntiquated survivals of past phases of human development, nd a widespread cowardice of mind and will, are the main ources of all evils.
_ Dumartheray and Herzig gave me full support in that lirection. Dumartheray was born in one of the poorest yeasant families in Savoy. His schooling had not gone yeyond the first rudiments of a primary school. Yet he vas one of the most intelligent men T ever met. His ap- yreciations of current events and men were so remarkable or their uncommon good sense that they were often pro- shetic. He was also one of the finest critics of the current ocialist literature, and was never taken in by the mere dis- olay of fine words or would-be science. Herzig was a young 420 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST clerk, born at Geneva; a man of suppressed emotions, sh who would blush like a girl when he expressed an origin) thought, and who, after I was arrested, when he becan responsible for the continuance of the journal, by she force of will learned to write very well. Boycotted by a Geneva employers, and fallen with his family into she misery, he nevertheless supported the paper till it becan possible to transfer it to Paris.
To the judgment of these two friends I could trust in plicitly. If Herzig frowned, muttering, “ Yes — well — may go,’ I knew that it would not do. And when Th martherary, who always complained of the bad state of h spectacles when he had to read a not quite legibly writte manuscript, and therefore generally read proofs only, inte: rupted his reading by exclaiming, ‘Non, ca ne va pas!” felt at once that it was not the proper thing, and tried t guess what thought or expression provoked his disapprova. I knew there was no use asking him, “ Why will it nc do?” He would have answered: ‘Ah, that is not m affair; that’s yours. It won’t do; that is all I can say.’ But I felt he was right, and I simply sat down to rewrit the passage, or, taking the composing- -stick, set up in typ a new passage instead. | I must own also that we had hard times with it. Ni sooner had we issued four or five numbers than the printe asked us to find another printing-office. For the worker: and their publications the liberty of the press inscribed ir the constitution has many limitations beside the paragraph: of the law. The printer had no objection to our paper | he liked it; but in Switzerland all printing-offices depen upon the dovdininente which employs them more or les: upon statistical reports and the like; and our printer was plainly told that if he continued to print the paper he nee¢ not expect to have any more orders from the Geneva gov: MEN OF GREATER VALUE THAN MONEY 421 ernment. I made the tour of all the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and saw the heads of all the printing-offices, put everywhere, even from those who did not dislike the tendency of our paper, I received the same reply: “ We could not live without work from the government, and we should have none if we undertook to print ‘Le Révolté.’ ” I returned to Geneva in very low spirits; but Dumarthe- ray was only the more ardent and hopeful. “It ’s all very ' simple,” he said. ‘We buy our own printing-plant on a three months’ credit, and in three months we shall have paid for it.” ‘But we have no money, only a few hun- dred francs,” I objected. ‘‘ Money, nonsense! We shall have it! Let us only order the type at once and immedi- ately issue our next number—and money will come! ea Once more his judgment was is right. When our next number came out from our own “Imprimerie Jurassienne,” and we had told our difficulties and printed a couple of small pamphlets besides, — all of us helping in the print- ing, — the money came in; mostly in coppers and small silver coins, but it came. Over and over again in my life I have heard complaints among the advanced parties about the want of money; but the longer I live, the more I am persuaded that our chief difficulty is not so much a lack of money as of men who will march firmly and steadily to- wards a given aim in the right direction, and inspire others. For twenty-one years our paper has now continued to live from hand to mouth, — appeals for funds appearing on the front page in almost every number; but as long as there is a man who sticks to it and puts all his energy into it, as Herzig and Dumartheray did at Geneva, and as Grave has done for the last sixteen years at Paris, the money comes in, and a yearly debit of about eight hundred pounds is made up,—mainly out of the pennies and small silver coins of the workers, — to cover the yearly expenditure for printing the paper and the pamphlets. or a paper, as for 422 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST everything else, men are of an infinitely greater value than | money.
We started our printing-office in a tiny room, and our compositor was a man from Little Russia, who undertook to put our paper in type for the very modest sum of sixty | francs a month. If he could only have his modest dinner every day, and the possibility of going occasionally to the opera, he cared for nothing more. “ Going to the Turkish bath, John?” I asked him once as I met him at Geneva in the street, with a brown-paper parcel under his arm. | “No, removing to a new lodging,” he replied, in his usual melodious voice, and with his customary smile.
Unfortunately, he knew no French. TI used to write my | manuscript in the best of my handwriting, — often thinking with regret of the time I had wasted in the classes of | our good Ebert at school, — but John could read French | only indifferently well, and instead of “ immédiatement ” | he would read “immidiotermut” or “ inmuidiatmunt,” and | set up in type such wonderful words as these; but as he “kept the space,’’ and the length of the line did not have to be altered in making the corrections, there were only four or five letters to be corrected in such uncouth words as the above, and but one or two in each of the shorter ones; thus we managed pretty well. We were on the best possible terms with him, and I soon learned a little type- setting under his direction. The composition was always finished in time to take the proofs to a Swiss comrade who was the responsible editor, and to whom we submitted them — before going to press, and then one of us carted all the forms _ to a printing-office. Our “Imprimerie Jurassienne”’ soon became widely known for its publications, especially for its pamphlets, which Dumartheray would never allow to be sold at more than one penny. Quite a new style had to be worked out for such pamphlets. I must say that I was often wicked enough to envy those writers who could use THE IMPRIMERIE JURASSIENNE 423 any number of pages for developing their ideas, and were allowed to make the well-known excuse of Talleyrand: “I | have not had the time to be brief.” When I had to con- dense the results of several months’ work — upon, let me say, the origins of law — into a penny pamphlet, I had to take the time to be brief. But we wrote for the workers, and twenty centimes for a pamphlet is often too much for the average worker. The result was that our penny and half-penny pamphlets sold by the scores of thousands, and were reproduced in many other countries in translations. My leaders of that period were published later on, while I was in prison, by Elisée Reclus, under the title of ‘The Words of a Rebel,” — Paroles d’un Révolté.
France was always the chief object of our aims; but ‘“ Le Révolté ” was severely prohibited in France, and the smug- glers had so many good things to import into France from Switzerland that they did not care to meddle with our paper. I went once with them, crossing in their company the French frontier, and found that they were very brave and reliable men, but I could not induce them to undertake the smuggling of our paper. AJl we could do, therefore, was to send it in sealed envelopes to about a hundred persons in France. We charged nothing for postage, counting upon voluntary contributions from our subscribers to cover our extra expenses, — which they always did, — but we often thought that the French police were missing a splendid opportunity for ruining our paper by subscribing to a hundred copies and sending no voluntary contributions.
For the first year we had to rely entirely upon ourselves; but gradually Elisée Reclus took a greater interest in the work, and finally gave more life than ever to the paper after my arrest. Reclus had invited me to aid him in the preparation of the volume of his monumental Geography which dealt with the Russian dominions in Asia. He had 424. MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST learned Russian, but thought that, as I was well acquainted with Siberia, I might be helpful; and as the health of my wife was poor, and the doctor had ordered her to leave Geneva with its cold winds at once, we removed early in the spring of 1880 to Clarens, where Elisée Reclus lived at that time. We settled above Clarens, in a small cottage overlooking the blue waters of Lake Geneva, with the pure snow of the Dent du Midi in the background. A streamlet that thundered like a mighty torrent after rains, carrying away immense rocks and digging for itself a new bed, ran under our windows, and on the slope of the hill opposite rose the old castle of Chatelard, of which the owners, up to the revolution of the burla papet (the burners of the papers) in 1799, levied upon the neighboring peasants ser- vile taxes on the occasion of births, marriages, and deaths, Here, aided by my wife, with whom I used to discuss every event and every proposed paper, and who was a severe literary critic of my writings, I produced the best things that I wrote for “Le Révolté,” among them the address “ To the Young,’’ which was spread in hundreds of thousands of cop- ies in all languages. In fact, I worked out here the foun- dation of nearly all that I wrote later on. Contact with educated men of similar ways of thinking is what we an- archist writers, scattered by proscription all over the world, miss, perhaps, more than anything else. At Clarens I had that contact with Elisée Reclus and Lefrangais, in addition — to permanent contact with the workers, which I continued | to maintain; and although I worked much for the Geogra- — phy, I could produce even more than usual for the anare — chist propaganda.
VIII VIII In Russia the struggle for freedom was taking on a more and more acute character. Several political trials had been brought before high courts, — the trial of ‘the hun- dred and ninety-thrée,”’ of “ the fifty,’ of “‘ the Dolgushin circle,” and so on, —and in all of them the same thing was apparent. The youth had gone to the peasants and the factory workers, preaching socialism to them; socialist pam- phlets, printed abroad, had been distributed; appeals had been made to revolt —in some vague, indeterminate way — against the oppressive economical conditions. In short, nothing was done that does not occur in socialist agitations in every other country of the world. No traces of con- spiracy against the Tsar, or even of preparations for revo- lutionary action, were found; in fact, there were none. The great majority of our youth were at that time hostile to such action. Nay, looking now over that movement of the years 1870-78, I can say in full confidence that most of them would have felt satisfied if they had been simply allowed to live by the side of the peasants and the workers, to teach them, to collaborate in any of the thousand capaci- ties — private or as a part of the local self-government — in which an educated and earnest man or woman can be useful to the masses of the people. I knew the men, and say so with full knowledge of them.
Yet the sentences were ferocious, — stupidly ferocious, because the movement, which had grown out of the previous state of Russia, was too deeply rooted to be crushed down by mere brutality. Hard labor for six, ten, twelve years in the mines, with subsequent exile to Siberia for life, was a 426 MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST common sentence. ‘There were such cases as that of a girl who got nine years’ hard labor and life exile to Siberia, for giving one socialist pamphlet to a worker; that was all her crime. Another girl of fourteen, Miss Guk6vskaya, was transported for life to a remote village of Siberia, for having tried, like Goethe’s Klirchen, to excite an indifferent crowd to deliver Kovalsky and his friends when they were going to be hanged, — an act the more natural in Russia, even from the authorities’ standpoint, as there is no capital punishment in our country for common-law crimes, and the application of the death penalty to “ politicals” was then a novelty, a return to almost forgotten traditions. Thrown into the wilderness, this young girl soon drowned herself in the Yeniséi. Even those who were acquitted by the courts were banished by the gendarmes to little hamlets in Siberia and Northeast Russia, where they had to starve on the government’s monthly allowance, one dollar and fifty cents (three rubles). There are no industries in such hamlets, — and the exiles were strictly prohibited from teaching.
As if to exasperate the youth still more, their con- — demned friends were not sent direct to Siberia. They were ‘ locked up, first, fora number of years, in central prisons, — which made them envy the convict’s life in Siberia. These < prisons were awful indeed. In one of them — “a den of typhoid fever,” as a priest of that particular jail said ina sermon — the mortality reached twenty per cent. in twelve months. In the central prisons, in the hard-labor prisons — of Siberia, in the fortress, the prisoners had to resort to the: strike of death, the famine strike, to protect themselves _ from the brutality of the warders, or to obtain conditions — some sort of work, or reading, in their cells —that would: save them from being driven into insanity in a few months. — The horror of such strikes, during which men and women i refused to take any food for seven or eight days in suc cession, and then lay motionless, their minds wandering, — HORRORS OF RUSSIAN PRISONS 427 eemed not to appeal to the gendarmes. At Kharkoff, the rostrated prisoners were tied up with ropes and fed by orce, artificially.