us at once in English, which language he spoke fairly well but with some hesitation. At the first favorable opportunity I expressed my interest in the exile system and ventured to give him the results of some of my observations in the prisons of Tiumén and Tomsk and on the road. He responded without any apparent hesitation, and said frankly that he believed the exile system to be very prejudicial to all the interests of Siberia, and that in many respects it needed modification. He thought that the common criminal exiles ought to be utilized as laborers. There was plenty of useful work to be done in Siberia, and he could see no reason why the convict exiles should not be compelled to do it. A system of enforced labor would be better for them than the present method of keeping them shut up in prisons in idleness or turning them loose as colonists, and it certainly would be better for the country. He was about to take a step in this direction, he said, by setting one hundred convicts to work in the streets of Irkútsk. I spoke of the overcrowding of the prisons and étapes along the great exile road, and he admitted that they were too small and in very bad condition. He said that a plan was under consideration for the transportation of exiles from Tomsk to Irkútsk in summer only and in wagons. This would relieve the Government from the expense of providing them with winter clothing, it would greatly diminish the amount of suffering, and it would perhaps be more economical.[1]
While we were discussing this subject the Governor-general's wife came in to hand him a letter, and we were presented to her. She was a woman perhaps thirty years of age, of medium height, with brown hair, gray eyes, and a good, strong, intelligent, but somewhat impassive face. The appearance of the Countess Ignátief interrupted our discussion of the exile system, and, as we were making a merely formal call upon the Governor-general, we had no opportunity for renewing it.
- ↑ I shall have occasion to refer to this plan in a later chapter.
