what does it imply and forebode? An English philosopher has suggested, as a possibility, that a whole nation may become insane at times, even as individuals do. And there is not a little in history which supports such a conjecture. Yet hardly a whole continent, or even, as it now appears, a still larger mass of the varied population of the globe! But even assuming a well-nigh universal insanity among the human race, as the explanation of the present startling phenomena, at least be it remembered that it is an insanity of war; and one which is only too likely to lead to, and end in, a stern, and surely an appalling reality.-Blackwood's Magazine.

Ir is pretty generally recognized in Europe, that altogether our penal institutions are very far from being what they ought to be, and no better indeed than so many contradictions in action of the modern theory of the treatment of criminals. The principle of the lex talionis -of the right of the community to avenge itself on the criminal-is no longer admissible.

We have come to an understanding that society at large is responsible for the vices that grow in it, even as it has its share in the glory of its heroes; and we generally admit, at least in theory, that when we deprive a criminal of his liberty, it is to purify and improve him. But we know how hideously at variance with the ideal the reality is. The murderer is simply handed over to the hangman; and the man who is shut up in a prison is so far from being bettered by the change, that he comes out more resolutely the foe of society than he was when he went in. Subjection, on disgraceful terms, to a humiliating work gives him an antipathy to all kinds of labor. After suffering every sort of humiliation at the instance of those whose lives are lived in immunity from the peculiar conditions which bring man to crime-or to such sorts of it as are punishable by the operations of the law-he learns to hate

the section of society to which his humiliation belongs, and proves his hatred by new offences against it. And if the penal institutions of Western Europe have failed thus completely to realize the ambition on which they justify their existence, what shall we say of the penal institutions of Russia? The incredible duration of preliminary detention; the horrible circumstances of prison life; the congregation of hundreds of prisoners into dirty and small chambers; the flagrant immorality of a corps of jailers who are practically omnipotent, whose whole function is to terrorize and oppress, and who rob their charges of the few coppers doled out to them by the State; the want of labor and the total absence of all that contributes to the moral welfare of man; the cynical contempt of human dignity, and the physical degradation of prisonersthese are the elements of prison life in Russia. Not that the principles of Russian penal institutions were worse than those applied to the same institutions in Western Europe. I am rather inclined to hold the contrary. Surely, it is less degrading for the convict to be employed in useful work in Siberia, than to spend his life in picking oakum, or in climbing the steps of a wheel; and-to compare two evils-it is more humane to

employ the assassin as a laborer in a gold mine and, after a few years, make a free settler of him, than peaceably to turn him over to a hangman. In Russia, however, principles are always ruined in application. And if we consider the Russian prisons and penal settlements, not as they ought to be according to the law, but as they are in reality, we can do no less than recognize, with all the best Russian explorers of our prisons, that they are an outrage on humanity.

In England and in the United States several attempts have recently been made to represent the Russian prisons under the most smiling aspect. The best known of them are those made by the Reverend Mr. Lansdell in England, and by Mr. Kennan in the United States. Mr. Kennan came to the conclusion that his sojourn as an officer of the Overland Telegraph Company on the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk-a few thousand miles, more or less, from the penal quarters of Siberia-entitles him to speak authoritatively about Siberian prisons and prisoners. Is it surprising that his experience should be flatly contradicted by those Russians who have seriously studied the life of prisoners in Siberia ? Of Mr. Lansdell there is something more to say. He has seen Siberian jails. Outstripping the post in his career, he has crossed a country which has no railways, at a speed of 6300 miles in 75 days; and in the space of fourteen hours, indeed, he breakfast, ed, he dined, he travelled over 40 milesand he visited the three chief jails of Siberia at Tobolsk, at Alexandrovskiy Zavod, and at Kara. Amply furnished with official recommendations, he saw, during this short time, as much as the officials chose to show; and for a country like Siberia that is surely a gread deal. Had he anything of the critical faculty which is the first virtue of a traveller, it would have enabled him to appreciate the relative value of the information he obtained in the course of his official scamper through the Siberian prisons; and his bookespecially if he had taken note of existing Russian literature on the subject might have been a useful one. UnhapUnhappily, he neither saw nor read, and his book-in so far, at least, as it is con

cerned with jails and convicts-can only convey false ideas. This being the case, I think the present paper may prove of interest. Such information as it contains is, at least, authentic, inasmuch as it is derived, not only from books, but from the personal experience of prison lite of myself and certain of my friends.

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It

One of the greatest results of the Liberal movement of 1857-1862 was the judicial reform. The old lawcourts, in which the procedure was all in writing, were done away with, and trial by jury, which had disappeared under the despotism of the Czars of Moscow, was reintroduced. The new law of judicial procedure, promulgated in 1864, was considered as decidedly the most liberal and humane in Europe. About the same time punishment by the knoot and the branding-iron was abolished. was high time. Public opinion was revolted by the existence of these shameful implements, and it was so powerful at that time that governors of provinces refused to confirm the sentences that enjoined their use; others as I have known in Siberia-would give the executioner to understand that, unless he merely played at doing his abominable office (a well-known and highly profitable art), his own skin should be torn to pieces." But, like all other reforms of the last reign, the benefits of the new judicial reform were paralyzed by subsequent modifications. The reform was not made universal, and in thirty-nine provinces out of seventy-two, the old courts are still maintained. They are in operation over the whole of Siberia, for instance; and each of them is a perfect sink of corruption. Again, the old penal code, with a scale of punishments in flagrant disagreement with the present state of our prisons, was maintained; while subsequent regulations have completely altered the sense of the Judiciary Law of 1864. I shall only set down what is continually repeated in the Russian press, if I write that the examining magistrates (juges d'instruction) have never enjoyed the independence bestowed on them by the new law; that the judges have been made more and more dependent upon the Minister of Justice, whose nominees they are, and who has the right of transferring them

from one province to another; that the institution of sworn advocates, uncontrolled by criticism, has degenerated absolutely; and that the peasant whose case is not likely to become a cause cause célèbre does not receive the benefit of counsel, and is completely in the hands. of a creature like the procureur-impérial in Zola's novel. Independent jurors are, of course, impossible in a country where the peasant-juror knows that he may be beaten by anything in uniform at the very doors of the court. As for the verdicts of the juries, they are in poor repute indeed; they are not respected at all if they are in contradiction with the judgment of the governor of the province, and the acquitted may be seized as they leave the dock and imprisoned anew on the simple order of the Administrative. Such, for instance, was the case of the peasant Burounoff. He came to St. Petersburg on behalf of his fellow-villagers to bring a complaint to the Czar against the authorities, and he was tried as a 'rebel." He was acquitted by the court; but he was rearrested on the very flight of steps outside, and sent in exile to the peninsula of Kola. Such, too, were the cases of Vera Zassoulitch, of the raskolnik (nonconformist) Tetenoff, and many more. The Third Section and the governers of provinces look on the new courts as mere nuisances, and act accordingly. Finally, a great many cases are disposed of by the Executive à huis clos-away from judges and juries alike. The preliminary inquiry in all cases in which a "political meaning" is discovered is simply made by gendarmerie officers, sometimes in the presence of a procureur, who accompanies them in their raidsan official in civil dress attached to the corps of gendarmerie, who is a black sheep to his fellows, and whose function is to assist, or appear to assist, at the examination of those arrested by the Third Section. Sentence and punishment (which may be exile for life within the Arctic circle in Siberia) are the wish of the Third Section, or of the Executive. In this category are included, not only the cases of political offenders belonging to secret societies, but also those of religious dissenters; almost all cases of disobedience to authority, both individual and collective; the strikes;

NEW SERIES.-VOL. XXXVII., No. 3

the "offences against His Majesty the Emperor''-under which 2500 people were recently arrested in the course of six months; in short, all those cases which might compromise the authorities, or tend to use the official language"to the production of excitement in the public mind." As to political trials, only the early societies were tried under the law of 1864. Afterward, the government having perceived that the judges are rather well disposed than otherwise toward political offenders, they were tried before packed courts; that is, by judges nominated especially for the purpose. To this rule the case of Vera Zassoulitch was a memorable exception. She was tried by a jury, and acquitted. But-to quote quote Professor Gradovsky's words in a journal suppressed since-" It is an open secret in St. Petersburg that the case would never have been brought before a jury but for certain" quarrels" between the Prefect of Police on the one side, and the Third Section and the Ministers of Justice and the Interior on the other-but for certain of those jalousies de métier, without which, in our disordered state of existence, it would often be impossible for us to so much as breathe.'

It need hardly be noted that true reports of political trials in the press were never permitted. Formerly the journals were bound to reproduce the "' crooked" report published by the Official Messenger; but now the Government has perceived that even such reports produce a profound impression on the public mind, which is always favorable to the accused; and now its work is done in complete darkness. By the law of September 1881 the governor-general and the governors of provinces are enabled to request that all those cases be heard in camera which might produce a disturbance of minds (sic) or disturb the public peace." For preventing the divulgation of the speeches of the accused, or of such facts as might compromise the Government, nobody is admitted to the court, not even members of the ministry of Justice--" only the wife or the husband of the accused (always in custody also), or the father, mother, or one of the children; but no more than one relative for each person accused." At the last trial of Terror

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ists, when ten people were condemned to death, the mother of Sukhanoff was the one person who enjoyed this privilege. Many cases are despatched in are despatched in such a way that nobody knows when the trials take place. Thus, for instance, we remained in ignorance of the fate of an officer of the army, son of the governor of the jail of the St. Petersburg fortress, who had been condemned to hard labor for connection with revolutionists, until we learned it incidentally from an act of accusation read at a trial a long while posterior to his own. The public learns from the Official Messenger that the Czar has commuted to hard labor for life a sentence of death pronounced on revolutionists; but nothing transpires either of the trial, or of the crimes imputed to the condemned. Nay, even the last consolation of those condemned to death, the consolation of dying publicly, was taken away. Hanging will now be done secretly within the walls of the fortress, in the presence of none from the world without. The reason is, that when Ryssakoff was brought out to the gallows he showed the crowd his mutilated hands, and shouted, louder than the drums, that he had been tortured after trial. His words were heard by a group of "Liberals," who, repudiating any sympathy with the Terrorists, yet held it their duty to publish the facts of the case in a clandestine proclamation, and to call attention to this flagrant offence against the laws of humanity. Now nothing will be known of what happens in the casemates of the fortress of Paul and Peter after the trial and before the execution. At least, the Government think so, after having sent to hard labor the son of a jailer and a dozen soldiers accused of letter-carrying between prisoners and their friends in the town. But we know and I have not the slightest hesitation in asserting the fact that at least two revolutionists, Adrian Mikhailoff and Ryssakoff, were submitted to torture by electricity.

In 1861, our governors of provinces were ordered to institute a general in quiry into the state of the prisons. The Government-that of the early years of Alexander II. was Liberal at that time, and on the whole the inquiry was fairly made. Its results determined

what was generally known: namely, that the prisons in Russia and Siberia were in the worst state imaginable. The number of prisoners in each was commonly twice and thrice in excess of the maximum allowed by law. The buildings were so old and dilapidated, and in such a shocking state of filth, as to be for the most part not only uninhabitable, but beyond the scope of any theory of reform that stopped short of reconstruction.

Within affairs were even worse than without. The system was found corrupt to the core, and the officials were even yet more in need of improvement than the jails. In the Transbaikal province, where, at that time, almost all hard-labor convicts were kept, the committee of inquiry reported (I was secretary to it, and intrusted with the drawing up of its report) that the prison buildings were mostly in ruins, and that the whole of the penal system had followed suit. Throughout the Empire it was recognized that theory and practice stood equally in need of light and air; that everything must be changed, alike in matter and in spirit; and that we must not only rebuild our prisons, but completely reform our prison system, and reconstitute the prison staff from the first man to the last. The Government, however, elected to do nothing. It built a few new prisons which proved insufficient to accommodate the new prisoners (the population having since increased by more than 10,000,000); convicts were farmed out to proprietors of private gold mines; a new penal colony was settled on Saghalien, to colonize an island where nobody was willing to settle freely; and that was all. The old order remained unchanged, the old mischief unrepaired. Year after year the prisons fall further into decay, and year after year the prison staff grows more dishonest and more shameless. Year after year the Ministry of Justice applies for money to spend in repairs, and year after year the Government is content to put it off with the half, or less than the half, of what it asks; and when-as in 1879 to 1881-it calls for over three million roubles, can spare it no more than a paltry twelve hundred thousand. The consequence is that the jails are becoming perma

nent centres of infection, and that, according to the report of a recent committee, at least two thirds of them are urgently in need of being rebuilt from top to bottom. Rightly to accommodate her prisoners, Russia would have to build half as many prisons again as she has. Indeed, in 1879, there were 70,488 cases for trial, and the aggregate maximum capacity of the Russian prisons is only for 54,253 souls. In single jails, built for the detention of 200 to 250 persons, the number of prisoners is commonly 700 and 800 at a time. In the prisons on the route to Siberia, when convict parties are stopped by floods, the over-crowding is still more monstrous.

*

The great majority of our prisoners (about 100,000) 'are persons awaiting trial. They may be recognized for innocent; and in Russia, where arrests are made in the most haphazard way,

"

*The Russian prison system is thus constituted: first of all, we have 624 prisons or lockups, for cases awaiting trial, for a maximum of 54,253 inmates, together with four houses of detention for 1134 inmates. The political prisons at the Third Section and in the fortresses are not included in this category. Of convicts depots for prisoners waiting transfer to their final stations-there are 10, with accommodation for 7150; with two for political convicts (at Mtsensk and Vyshniy-Volochok), with accommodation for 140. Then come the arrestantskiya roty, or "convict companies," which are military organizations for the performance of compulsory labor, and which are worse than the hard-labor prisons in Siberia, though they are nominally a lighter punishment. Of these there are 33, with accommodation for 7136 (9609 in 1879). In this category must be included also the 13 "houses of correction : two large ones with accommodation for 1120 (962 in 1879), and II smaller ones for 435. The hard-labor cases are provided for in 13 ** central prisons." Of these, there are seven in Russia, with accommodation for 2745; three in Western Siberia, with accommodation for 1150; two in Eastern Siberia, with accommodation for 1650; and one on Saghalien Island, with accommodation for 600 (1103 in 1879). Other hardlabor convicts-10,424 in number-are distributed among the government mines, gold-washings, and factories in Siberia; namely, at the Kara gold-washings, where there are 2000; at the Troitsk, Ust-kut, and Irkutsk salt works, at the Nikolayevsk and Petrovsk iron-works, and at a prison at the former silver-works of Akatui. Finally, hard-labor convicts are farmed out to private owners of gold-washings in Siberia. The severity of the punishment can thus be varied ad infinitum, according to the wish of the authorities and to that degree of revenge which is deemed appropriate.

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three times out of ten their innocence is patent to everybody. We learn, in fact, from the annual report of the Ministry of Justice for 1876, that of 99,964 arrests made during that year, only 37,159—that is, 37 per cent-could be brought before a court, and that among these were 12,612 acquittals. More than 75,000 persons were thus subjected to arrest and imprisonment without having any serious charge against them; and of the 25,000 or so who were convicted and converted into "criminals, a very large proportion (about 15 per cent) are men and women who have not complied with passport regulations, or with some other vexatory measure of our Administration.

It must be noted that all these prisoners, three quarters of whom are recognized innocent, spend months, and very often years, in the provincial lockups, those famous ostrogs which the traveller sees at the entrance of every Russian town. They lie there idle and hopeless, at the mercy of a set of omnipotent jailers, packed like herrings in a cask, in rooms of inconceivable foulness, in an atmosphere that sickens, even to insensibility, any one entering directly from the open air, and which is charged with the emanations of the horrible parasha-a basket kept in the room to serve the necessities of a hundred human beings.

In this connection I cannot do better than quote a few passages from the prison experiences of my friend Madame C, née Koutouzoff, who has committed them to paper and inserted in a Russian review, the Obscheye Dyelo, published at Geneva. She was found guilty of opening a school for peasants' children, independently of the Ministry of Public Instruction. As her crime was not penal, and as, moreover, she was married to a foreigner, General Gourko merely ordered her to be sent over the frontier. This is how she describes her journey from St. Petersburg to Prussia. I shall print extracts from her narrative without comment, merely premising that its accuracy, even to the minutest details, is absolutely unimpeachable :

I was sent to Vilno with fifty prisoners-men and women. From the railway station we were taken to the town prison and kept there for two hours, late at night, in an open yard, under a drenching rain. At last we were pushed