Kropotkin ably summarises the objects of exile: “Students and girls suspected of subversive ideas; writers whom it was impossible to prosecute for their writings, but who were known to be imbued with a ‘dangerous spirit;’ workmen who were known to have spoken against the authorities; persons who have been irreverent to some governor of a province or _ispravnik_ were transported by hundreds every year.” The barest denunciation and the most casual suggestion were sufficient to afford a motive. Several young girls were condemned, not merely to exile, but to hard labour for from six to eight years for having given a socialistic pamphlet to one workman. A child of fourteen became a penal colonist for shouting aloud that it was a shame to condemn people to death for nothing. A flagrant case was that of M. Annenkov, a landed proprietor, who proposed the health of the governor at a banquet given him by the nobility of Kursk. At the end he was bold enough to remark that he greatly hoped his excellency would devote more time to the affairs of the province. The following week a _tarantas_ containing two gensdarmes stopped at his door; he was arrested, was forbidden to bid his wife farewell, and was conveyed as a prisoner to a distant part. Only after six months and the most urgent representations of influential friends was he again set free. In the last decade of the reign of Alexander II, between 1870 and 1880, administrative exile was employed with unprecedented recklessness and the most consummate indifference to personal rights. Unlimited discretionary powers were vested in governors of provinces. General Todleben, in Odessa, banished all of the “untrustworthy” class without inquiry or discrimination, and sent into exile every one whose loyalty to the existing government was even doubtful. It was enough to be registered as a “suspect” on the books of the secret police, or to have been accused, even anonymously, of political disaffection. Parents who had the most honourable record of unblemished loyalty were exiled because their children had become revolutionists; schoolboys were exiled because they were acquainted with some of the disaffected and had failed to report the fact to the police; teachers were exiled for circulating copies of a harmless magazine; members of provincial assemblies, who claimed the right to petition the Czar for redress of grievances, were sent across the frontier; and university students, who had been tried and acquitted of a political offence, were re-arrested and exiled by administrative process,—all in violation of the most elementary principles of justice.