“Behind the hard-labour convicts march the _poselentzy_, condemned to be settled in Siberia, wearing the same gray clothes and the same kind of shoes.... In the rear you discover a few carts drawn by the small, attenuated, cat-like peasants’ horses. They are loaded with the bags of the convicts, and with the sick or dying who are fastened by ropes on the top of the load. Behind the carts struggle the wives and children of the convicts; a few have found a free corner on a loaded cart, and crouch there when unable to move further, whilst the great number march behind the carts, leading their children by the hand or bearing them in their arms. In the rear comes a second detachment of soldiers, stimulating these weak, feeble creatures to fresh exertions by blows with the butt end of their muskets.” The infant mortality under these conditions almost exceeds belief, and deportation to Siberia has been aptly and truthfully described as a “massacre of the innocents.” In the year 1881, when 2,561 children followed the exile march, very few survived. The majority succumbed to the hardships of the road and died before or immediately after their arrival at their destination. The yearly quota has constantly increased, numbering from five to eight thousand. To the danger to health incurred must be added the moral degradation, especially in the case of the young girls. Before reviewing the conditions and setting forth the actual facts, with the processes that produced them, it will be well to dissect the grand totals and arrive at the relative proportions of the three principal classes composing the whole body of exiles constantly moving across the frontier to fill the prisons and to people Siberia to its uttermost ends. Less than one-half were criminal in the sense that they had committed offences and had been adjudged guilty in open court by duly constituted tribunals. The larger moiety had had no legal trial; they had been punished with banishment by the irresponsible action and simple fiat of minor officials and bodies of ill-educated peasants, wielding the extraordinary powers conferred by “administrative process.” At no time and in no civilised land have people been so ruthlessly sacrificed and subjected to the forfeiture of personal liberty by this utter abnegation of justice and fair play, and the result is a standing disgrace to the government that permitted and encouraged it. The extent to which this most reprehensible system has obtained may be judged by a simple statement of figures. For many years past the average number sentenced to exile by legal verdict in regular courts was 45.6 per cent. of the whole yearly contingent, and those banished by “administrative process” was 54.4 per cent. It must always be borne in mind that, in describing the methods pursued and the painful results attendant on them, more than half the sufferers were either entirely innocent or guilty of offences that could only be deemed criminal by a strained