The exile route to-day naturally follows the new line of railway. From Moscow the road strikes south to Samara on the Volga, to which point a large passenger traffic is brought by the great water-way to board the trains. From Samara to Ufa on the west slope the Ural Mountains, and after scaling them the line descends to Chelyabinsk on the Siberian frontier. Here the convict travellers are divided into parties according to their destination. Some go north toward Tiumen and Tobolsk, others travel due east in the direction of Lake Baikal, and others start south for Semipalatinsk and the Altai. The route before the railway was built was from Moscow, the centre of the home prison system, thence by train to Nizhni-Novgorod, and on by boat down the Volga through Kazan to Perm, and thence by train across the Ural Mountains to Ekaterinburg and Tiumen. All exiles of whatever class, without distinction or separation, travelled this way, and all halted at Tiumen, where they were made up into parties and forwarded to their several destinations. Overcrowding was the curse of all Russian prisons; the cause of discomforts innumerable, inflicting untold suffering, producing deadly endemic and epidemic diseases. That it was the same everywhere, we are told on incontestable authority, and the futile attempts made by superficial inquirers to vindicate the government which is responsible are contemptible. To begin with St. Petersburg, the official report of the society for prisons stated that in 1880 the show prison, the Litovski Zamok, although built for seven hundred inmates, uniformly contained from nine hundred to a thousand; and the depot prison, supposed to hold two hundred, was always filled with double the number. The first named had 103 rooms nominally for eight hundred persons. These rooms, as described by an eye-witness, were exceedingly dirty, and he further says: “The ‘black holes’ are dreadful; they are absolutely deprived of light; a dark labyrinth leads to them and within all is wet, with rotten floors and dripping walls. A man coming from the outer air staggers away half asphyxiated. Specialists say that the healthiest man will surely die if he is kept there for three or four weeks. After a short stay prisoners went out exhausted; several could hardly stand on their feet.”