the plan, as far as possible, to put each man to the work which he is most competent to execute; and the exiles belonging to the laboring classes are therefore, in preference, established as agricultural colonists, while those belonging to the higher classes, who are unaccustomed to manual labor, are generally located in the towns, where it is easier for them to find some means of subsistence, which may relieve the government from the burden of their support. Even independently of the political exiles, the number of the latter is great, for exile is the punishment which usually follows the detection of those peculations and abuses of power of which the Russian officials are so frequently guilty. On their first arrival, it seems, the exiles of this class are made to do penance in the churches, under the guardianship of the police, but after a time they are allowed to go about unguarded; and it is said that, when exiled for life, the Russians even of high birth bear the change of fortune with extraordinary equanimity, assimilating in a very short time, and without any apparent struggle, to the Cossacks and peasants among whom they are thrown. When, as is frequently the case, they marry Siberian women, their children in no way differ from the people among whom they live. In the city of Tobolsk, in particular, there are a great many exiles belonging to the class of unfaithful _employés_, the sentence being considered less rigorous the nearer the place of exile to the frontiers of Russia Proper. Political exiles are, on the contrary, sent further north and east, where the nature of the surrounding country is such as to make an attempt at flight impossible, or at least very difficult. The hardships to which these exiles are subjected seem, in by far the greater number of cases, to be exclusively such as are necessarily connected with their being torn away from all they hold dear, and transplanted from the luxurious life of European society (for these exiles mostly belong to the higher classes) to the uncultivated wilds and rigorous climate of a country but very partially redeemed from a state of nature; but the tenderest sympathies of the natives of all races seem, by all accounts, to be readily bestowed upon the exiles, who, whatever be the nature of the offense of which they have been guilty, are never named by a harsher term than that of "unfortunates." In many cases the lot of the political exiles is also mitigated by the kindness of the local authorities, who allow them the use of books and other indulgences, and even receive them as friends in their houses, when this can be done without risk of giving offense at St. Petersburg.