Hunger strikes were more especially the weapon of the weaker sex, although there was no weakness among the women revolutionists, and the movement owed much of its vigour and vitality to their indomitable courage and unconquerable strength of character. In the days to come, when the great, patient people of a cruelly oppressed and misgoverned land have achieved its emancipation, ample justice must be done to the feminine champions, who entered boldly into the fray and fought strenuously for the vindication of the rights of their fellow countrymen to freedom and independence. Many of their names will then be honoured and revered with the greatest of those known to history. Russian women of all stations, and some of them of the highest rank, have won the admiration of the whole world, for their disregard of self, the sacrifice of all ease and comfort, and the braving of the worst dangers and the most poignant sufferings in their constant efforts to oppose political slavery. We may be inclined to quarrel with their methods, overlooking the greatness of their provocation, and believing that nothing could justify the violent means adopted, but we cannot withhold our sympathy for the ardent souls who have dared employ them. Some of the most remarkable female revolutionists were concerned with the hunger strikes in Eastern Siberia and were victims of the methods inflicted in retaliation of outraged discipline. There were those who emulated the crime of Vera Zassulich, who in 1878 tried, but failed, to shoot General Trepov, the chief of the St. Petersburg police, for ordering the corporal punishment of a political prisoner. Madame Kutitonskaya fired at General Ilyashevich, the governor of the Trans-Baikal, to avenge the intolerable ill-usage of the political prisoners on the 11th of May, 1882. Madame Hope Sigida struck Colonel Masyukov in the face, to shame him into withdrawing from Kara, where he was commandant of the political prisons, and where his indignant female charges had boycotted him, insisting upon his removal. Madame Elizabeth Kovalskaya deliberately showed her contempt for the governor-general of the Amur, Baron Korv, by refusing to rise in his presence, and was in consequence removed to the central prison in Verkhni-Udinsk.