A violent controversy was aroused between the enterprising and outspoken American investigator, Mr. George Kennan, and a well-known English explorer, Mr. H. de Windt, who undertook to contest the statements, and, indeed, to deny the facts set forth by Mr. Kennan, plainly condemning them as the phantasy of a disordered imagination and boldly affirming that such a place as the Tomsk forwarding prison “does not exist.” Mr. de Windt’s arguments are based upon the negative evidence of his own experience. He declares that he saw nothing of the horrors described, but then he never saw or closely inspected the prisons incriminated. He was, no doubt, admitted to certain prisons, which he visited under the auspices of the authorities, and he reported upon them hastily and on imperfect knowledge. Mr. Kennan’s painful story is so completely sustained by Russian official reports and the open condemnation of the Siberian press, that it is entitled to full credence and may be relied upon as absolutely trustworthy and conclusive. His account of Tiumen and Tomsk must take a prominent place in the history of penal institutions. The exile system called the _étapes_ or “road prisons” into being. They were very numerous and were planted at intervals of every twenty-five or forty miles, and as this distance was beyond the limit of a single day’s march, half-way houses, or _polu étapes_, were to be met with regularly along the road. Each _étape_ was the headquarters of a detachment of soldiers who formed the convoy or escort of the convicts moving eastward. At the _polu étapes_ there were no troops. The head of each convoy was a commissioned officer styled the _nachalnik_. The marching parties covered 330 miles every month, doing from fifteen to twenty miles on two succeeding days and resting on the third. Thus a party leaving Tomsk on Monday morning reached a _polu étape_ that night, slept there and passed on to another regular _étape_ on Wednesday, where they halted for twenty-four hours. On Thursday the journey was resumed with a fresh escort, a _polu étape_ was reached that night, and a regular _étape_ the next, and so on, day after day and week after week for many months. Until 1883, there was no separation of the sexes on the march, but after that date single men were excluded from the family parties in which women and children were included. Terrible demoralisation was previously the rule in the constantly overcrowded _étapes_, and the grossest offences were commonly committed.