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Interior. If you go to the Ministry of the Interior, you learn that the "project" requires a preliminary appropriation of money, — even although its ultimate effect may be to save money, — and that it cannot be carried into execution without the assent and coöperation of the Minister of Finance. If you follow the "project" to the Ministry of Finance, you are told that it has been sent back through the Minister of the Interior to the chief of the prison department for "modification." If you still persist in your determination to find out why this thing is not done, you may chase the modified "project" through the prison department, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Ministry of Finance to the Council of the Empire. There you discover that, inasmuch as certain cross-and-ribbon-decorated senators and generals, who barely know Siberia by name, have expressed a doubt as to the existence of the evil with which the "project" is intended to deal, a special "commission" [with salaries amounting to twenty thousand rúbles a year and mileage] has been appointed to investigate the subject and make a report. If you pursue the commission to Siberia and back, and search diligently in the proceedings of the Council of the Empire for its report, you ascertain that the document has been sent to the Ministry of the Interior to serve as a basis for a new "project," and then, as ten or fifteen years have elapsed and all the original projectors are dead, everything begins over again. At no stage of this circumrotatory process can you lay your hand on a particular official and say, "Here! You are responsible for this — what do you mean by it?" At no stage, probably, can you find an official who is opposed to the reform or who has any personal interest in defeating it; and yet the general effect of the circumrotatory process is more certainly fatal to your reformatory project than any amount of intelligent and active opposition. The various bureaus of the provincial governor-general's office, the chief prison department, the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Finance, the