COLONISTS AND EXILES IN SIBERIA. 531 



take anything unjustly away from them is looked upon as a grave 

 offence. Everywhere there reigns the desire to lessen the severity 

 of the punishment if it can be done, to give the convict back to 

 human society, if that be possible. But it is only those who really 

 deserve help that receive it, not those who pretend improvement. 

 For they do not make hypocrites in Siberia as we do in our prisons. 

 The mania for making prisoners canting hypocrites, which is too 

 often seen among us, is unknown among the Russians, for they 

 take it for granted that everyone honours and reveres the Church 

 and the " dear saints ", fasts at the proper season, and generally per- 

 forms what little is demanded by a church which is based wholly 

 upon external forms. On the other hand, they deal with evil in the 

 right way, and they achieve results which we might, nay, must envy. 

 Of the fifteen thousand banished, scarcely one thousand are sent 

 to work in the mines each year; the rest are distributed among 

 the different governments, being, as it is called, exiled to become 

 colonists. In the larger prisons not only are men and women 

 separately confined, but Christians, Mohammedans, and Jews are 

 kept apart, and religion is taken into consideration in distributing 

 the colonists. Whenever the convict sentenced to one of the lighter 

 penalties has reached the place of his destination, he is presented, on 

 behalf of the government, with a certificate of permission to reside 

 there, and is thenceforward free to pursue any lawful calling; but he 

 may not leave his district, or even his village, without the permission 

 of the authorities, and he is under the constant surveillance of the 

 police. About the reason for his banishment, or about his earlier 

 life, he is never questioned, at least never with malevolent inten- 

 tions, for " in the house of the hanged one does not speak of the 

 hangman". The people among whom he lives are, or have been, 

 themselves unfortunates, or are descended from exiles; the few free 

 settlers adopt the manners and customs of the other Siberians. The 

 " unfortunates " are helped in every justifiable way. Even in the 

 prisons on the way there are workshops where industrious prisoners 

 may earn a little ; schools also are established to prevent the ruin of 

 the rising generation, and the orphans of criminals are brought up 

 at such an expenditure of time and money that only the wilfully 



