SIBERIA NO MORE.
IT is six years short of a century since Mine. Cottin published "Elizabeth ; ou, Les Exiles de Siberie," and during all this time children have drawn from its pages their first notions of Russian government and Russian life. Apart from whatever merit the book may have—a point on which the recollections of few people, probably, are clear enough to speak—there was something about the penalty of banishment, and banishment to Siberia, which took an extraordinary hold on the imagination. The enormous distance which the exiles had to travel, the Arctic climate and surroundings in which they were supposed to be doomed to drag out what remained of life, the impossibility of escape except at the cost of untold risk and suffering,—all helped to make a picture of appalling cruelty. The horror was heightened by the circumstance that the whole body of exiles were popularly invested with an interest which really belonged to a single, and that a small, class. No one remembered the crimes of which the majority had been guilty ; they were all assumed to be sufferers for conscience' sake. Siberia, in the imagination, at all events, of Western Europeans, was peopled by political prisoners. It is quite conceivable that the French Judges who sent conspirators against the Second Empire to Cayenne, with a comfortable conviction that they were doing a, service to society, discoursed to their children when they went home on the wickedness of the Russian system of political punishment.
It is possible that if the popular idea of Siberia, and its exiles had been nearer the truth the Czar's latest reform might not have been proclaimed. Had Siberia resembled the North Pole as closely as we thought when we were children, it would have mattered very little by whom it was peopled. Had all the exiles been sent to Siberia for political reasons, they might have gone on living there without 'the Russian Government taking any further thought about them. But the true Siberia and the real exiles brought in a different set of considerations. The Siberia of fact has very little in common with the Siberia of fiction. It has been the fate of many countries to be judged 'entirely by their winter climate, a nd this has been specially the case with Siberia. For many years past geographers and men of science have known the value of soma, at all events, of the vast provinces which go under this general name, and the slow deielopment of Russian policy in the Far East has of late turned the mind of the Government in the same direction. The great Siberian railway has not been constructed merely to carry prisoners. If it has its political end in Manchuria, it has its economic end on the road to Manchuria, The vast plains over which the new line is carried have agricultural possibilities yet to be developed, and in' the combination of farming and mineral industry -the Russian Government sees, or - thinks-it sees, a future of unexampled prosperity. But how is the country to be peopled ? That is a problem which presents no difficulty to a Russian statesman. He is, confronted by the spectacle of poverty nearer home, and the simplest way to remedy this is to move the Russian peasants from land where they are too thick upon the ground to land which is waiting for some one to cultivate it. Russia, like Ireland, has her congested districts—congested in point of proportion of population to means of subsistence, if not in proportion of inhabitants to the square mile—but Russia, unlike Ireland, has ground enough and to spare for her whole population, with no sea to cross in order to get to it, and no change of life or administration to encounter on their arrival.
,A s soon as this state of things came to be realised the Russian authorities could not but reconsider the contribu- tion they have hitherto been making to the settlement of the provinces in question. They have managed to associate Siberia with crime, and with the punish- ment of crime. It has been the empty space into which the criminals of the Empire have been shot like 'so much rubbish. The transportation system may have more advantages than Englishmen are accustomed. to'see in it. It may . give men a chance of making new lives for themselves which no other way of disposing of them can give in the same degree. It may plant a population in regions which, though no one would ever go to them of their own accord, can yet be made habitable, and even profitable, if inhabitants can once be got there. But there is one thing which a transportation system will not do. It will not dovetail into a system of voluntary labour. Emigrants do not care to work side by side with convicts, or to see their. children intermarrying with the children of convicts. Consequently, as the future of Siberia grew in importance, as its possibilities as a field for emigration became better known, as the centre of gravity for the Empire tended to move eastwards, and the %Asiatic provinces played a larger and larger part in the dreams of Russian politicians, the question how to relieve Siberia from the convict taint must often have presented itself to the. Czar and his advisers. The result . of their meditations on it is visible in the news that has come to band this week. The Czar, we learn, has abolished exile to Siberia.
One of the most striking incidents of exile has been abolished at the same time, and nothing perhaps could BO forcibly bring home to us what Siberian exile meant to the sufferers. In future, a criminal sentenced to im- prisonment—the penalty which is to take the place of that which is to be done away with —will lose his freedom for the term of his sentence and nothing more. When he comes out of prison he will resume the ordinary rela- tions of life, which have only been suspended during his detention. But the sentence of banishment to Siberia carried with it civil and social death. The property of the criminal went to his heirs ; the wife or husband of the criminal was free to marry again; whatever provision he bad made for the guardianship of his children came at once into effect. The sense of impassable distance lay at the root of t all these provisions. Family relations imply the possi- bility of physical contact, and Siberia was so far off, and the means of intercourse with its inhabitants so wholly want- ing, that it seemed natural to assume that the criminal had actually passed out of the world.. So long as the conditions of life in. Siberia lent themselves to this view of the criminal's position, the punishment was deterrent in the highest degree. But with railways and population it must have soon come to be regarded in a very different and much less serious light. In that case the objections to using Siberia as a place of punishment would have retained all their force. while the sunposed advantages of this .method of punishment would have disappeared,; There can be no question, therefore,' even in the minds of . the most conservative Russians, as to the wisdom of 'the- step the .Czar has taken. . It must, so to say, have been taken for Win by the" opening of the railway and the growth of population: That it marks an advance in the treatment of prisoners may also, we think, be assumed. The hardshipsef the journey, often very terrible, and the completeness of the .consequent separation from every earthly tie, must have been a great undesigned addition to the severity of the punishment. Though Russian prisons may have terrors of their own, .they are less remote- ai regards situation, and, so far, lees removed from the' possibility of inquiry and improvement.
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