“Siberia began to be used by Russia as a place of exile about three hundred years ago, but at that time very cruel and terrible punishments were meted out to civil as well as political offenders. The bodies of men were frequently mutilated, their limbs amputated, and hideous tortures applied that left lasting scars. In order to dispose of these maimed and now worthless creatures they were dumped into this remote region of northeastern Asia, which was at that time a recently acquired possession. A hundred years later, that is, just before the beginning of the eighteenth century, bodily mutilation was officially abolished, and simple banishment was introduced on a large scale. Exile soon came to be the usual punishment for a long list of crimes, covering practically the whole criminal list. Men were exiled on every conceivable pretext, or merely to get rid of them. About this time the mineral resources of the country began to be known, and the government conceived the idea of utilizing the labor of exiles for developing these resources. This policy continues in force to-day. From time to time the exile system has sunk into such a condition of disorganization and barbarity that the escape of death was sought by scores and hundreds. Pestilential prisons, incredibly crowded, were allowed to become fairly putrid with filth, while the men and women confined in them grew foul with disease or lost their senses through suffering. “Six years ago the Czar, by imperial ukase, ended the banishment of political prisoners to Siberia, but you see how it is, this edict, like most of the imperial decrees that go out from our Emperor and his government, was meaningless. A flood of politicals pours through Tyumen all of the time now, and most people have forgotten that that edict was ever issued. “Cruelties like those of former times are not employed now. That is to say, prisoners are not mutilated, although they are sometimes beaten and roughly handled, and while the prisons are still foul and bad they are not as they were even a generation ago. What the government does now is to desert its political prisoners to inevitable starvation, and to force many of them into intimate daily contact with loathsome diseases in the settlements of diseased savages in the interior.” I was soon to learn the full truth of these statements from other lips, but I listened to this man’s story with keenest interest. It appears that there are two classes of political prisoners, the so-called privileged, and unprivileged, exiles. The privileged grade includes the graduates of all technical schools and universities, all noblemen, and the sons and daughters of noblemen. The unprivileged are all others: peasants, merchants, workmen, clerks, and the rest of the rank and file.