"In England murderers are quietly hanged. According to us, this is going too far. How are you to manifest Christian compassion and love to sinners when they are so quickly and definitely disposed of? "What chance have they to repent? Capital punishment is repellent to public feeling in Russia, and has been used in cases which, thank God! were quite exceptional and extremely rare. With us, only the very worst crimes are punished with imprisonment for life. Even for these it may at all events be said, 'While there is life there is hope.' "Very great improvements have been introduced in our prison system. More are to follow. We see our shortcomings better than ignorant _dilettante_ critics, whose only object is to excite artificial indignation. "These questions are very important and complicated; but, as Thiers used to say, '_Prenez tout au sérieux, rien au tragique_.'" It is difficult to write of Russian prisons without reference to the work of my great friend, Helen Voronoff. It has been said, and nothing could be truer, that her whole existence might have been summed up in the three words, "all for others." She killed herself by her devotion to her self-imposed duty as an angel of light in the gloomy recesses of Russian prisons. [Illustration: MISS HELEN VORONOFF] The first years of her life were devoted to teaching, but in 1906 she turned her attention to another {227} sphere of activity that had long attracted her, and which turned out to be her life's mission: the bringing of comfort and hope and spiritual light into the lives of criminals in prisons, more especially of political offenders. In spite of her weak health, and of the fact that she had already in her early youth been condemned to death by her doctors, she exhibited the most extraordinary physical and moral energy, and looked upon all fatigue in connection with her work simply as an unavoidable and unimportant detail in the carrying out of her divine mission. She never hesitated before those excessively tiring and depressing journeys to the Schlüsselbourg Fortress, and other prisons, before wanderings through cold dark cells, and keeping long vigils at the bedsides of the dying. Her influence among the prisoners was so beneficent, that the authorities, in all cases, allowed her to come and go as she pleased, and to visit even the most dangerous criminals in their solitary confinement cells. On one particular occasion that comes to my mind, two gaolers seriously opposed themselves to her entering a certain cell alone, since the prisoner confined there was a ruffian who literally boasted of having killed twelve persons, and whom it seemed most dangerous for an unprotected woman to approach. Miss Voronoff would not even listen to the gaolers. "I must go to him quite alone," she insisted. "Your presence would show mistrust on my part and would only wound his feelings."