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PRISONS AND EXILES IN IRKÚTSK
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nothing to read,—neither books nor newspapers,—and I know nothing of what is going on in the world.
Beyond this [says Mr. Priklónski in commenting upon the letter] severity cannot go. Beyond this there remains nothing to do but to tie a man to the tail of a wild horse, and drive him into the steppe, or chain him to a corpse and leave him to his fate. One does not wish to believe that a human being can be subjected, without trial and by a mere executive order, to such grievous torment—to a punishment which European civilization has banished from its penal code even for the most desperate class of villains whose inhuman crimes have been proved by trial in a criminal court. And yet we are assured by the correspondent of the Russian Gazette that up to this time none of the exiles in the province of Yakútsk have been granted any alleviating privileges; ten newly arrived administratives have been distributed, — most of them among the ulúses, — and more are expected in the near future.[1]
The statements made in Mr. Priklónski's article are supported by private letters, now in my possession, from ulús exiles, by the concurrent testimony of a large number of politicals who have lived through this experience, and by
- ↑ Since Mr. Priklónski, the fearless and talented author of this article, is now dead, I may say, without fear of injuring him, that he himself gave me the copy of it that I now have, together with a quantity of other manuscript material relating to exile by administrative process. He was a man of high character and more than ordinary ability, and is well and favorably known in Russia as the author of "Sketches of Self-government," published in 1884; "Popular Life in the North," which appeared in 1886; and a large number of articles upon local self-government and the condition of the Russian peasantry, printed from time to time in the journals The Week, Zemstvo, and Russian Thought. Mr. Priklónski was not a revolutionist, and the article from which I have made quotations was not published in a revolutionary sheet. It appeared in the Zemstvo, the unofficial organ of the Russian provincial assemblies, which was at that time under the editorial management of the well-known author and publicist Mr. V. U. Skalon. I mention these facts merely to show that if the Russian Government cared anything about the condition of political exiles in the province of Yakútsk, it had no excuse for inaction. Its attention was called to the subject by persons who did not seek to escape responsibility for their words, and by citizens whose abilities and patriotic services entitled them to a respectful hearing. As the Minister of the Interior has continued to send educated human beings to Yakút ulúses from that time to this, he has made it impossible for the civilized world to draw any other conclusion than that he consciously and deliberately intends to subject men and women, without trial or hearing, to the miseries set forth in the letter from which Mr. Priklónski quotes.
