gendarmes who lodge in his house, he is buried for ever, and neither the entreaties of the Russian press nor the resolutions of the last International Literary Congress could save him from the hands of a suspicious Government. Such will be, too, without doubt, the fate of those who are now kept at Kara. The day they become poselentsy will not be for them a day of liberation: it will be a day of transportation from the milder regions of Transbaikalia to the toundras within the Arctic Circle.

However bitter the condition of the hard-labour convicts in Siberia, the Government has succeeded in punishing as hardly, and perhaps even more so, those of its political foes whom it could not condemn to hard labour, or exile, even by means of packed courts, nominated ad hoc, and pronouncing their sentences in absolute secrecy. This result has been achieved by means of the Administrative exile,' or transportation to more or less remote provinces of the Empire' without judgment, without any kind or even phantom of trial, on a single order of the omnipotent Chief of the Third Section.

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Every year some five or six hundred young men and women are arrested under suspicion of revolutionary agitation. The inquiry lasts for six months, two years, or more, according to the number of persons arrested in connection with, and the importance of, the affair.' One-tenth of them are committed for trial. As to the remainder, all those against whom there is no specific charge, but who were represented as dangerous' by the spies; all those who, on account of their intelligence, energy, and 'radical opinions,' are supposed to be able to become dangerous; and especially those who have shown during the imprisonment a spirit of irreverence' are exiled to some more or less remote spot, between the peninsula of Kola and that of Kamchatka. The open and frank despotism of Nicholas I. could not accommodate itself to such hypocritical means of prosecution; and during the reign of the iron despot' the Administrative exile was rare. But throughout the reign of Alexander II., since 1862, it has been used on so immense a scale, that you hardly will find now a hamlet, or borough, between the fiftyfifth circle of latitude, from the boundary of Norway to the coasts of the Sea of Okhotsk, not containing five, ten, twenty Administrative exiles. In January 1881, there were 29 at Pinega, a hamlet which has but 750 inhabitants, 55 at Mezen (1,800 inhabitants), 11 at Kola (740 inhabitants), 47 at Kholmogory—a village having but 90 houses, 160 at Zaraisk (5,000 inhabitants), 19 at Yeniseisk, and so on.

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The causes of exile were always the same: 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 have spoken ‘against the authorities;' persons who have been 'irreverent' to some governor of province, or ispravnik, and so on, were transported by hundreds every year to people the hamlets of the 'more or less remote

provinces of the Empire.' As to Radical people suspected of 'dangerous tendencies,' the barest denunciation and the most futile suspicions were sufficient for serving as a motive to exile. When girls (like Miss Bardine, Soubbotine, Lubatovich, and so many others) were condemned to six or eight years of hard labour for having given one Socialistic pamphlet to one workman; when others (like Miss Goukovskaya, fourteen years old) were condemned to exile as poselentsy for having shouted in the crowd that it is a shame to condemn people to death for nothing; when hard labour and exile were so easily distributed by the courts, it is obvious that only those were exiled by the Administrative, against whom no palpable charge at all could be produced.3 In short, the Administrative exile became so scandalously extended during the reign of Alexander II. that, as soon as the Provincial Assemblies received some liberty of speech during the dictatorship of Loris-Melikoff, a long series of representations were addressed by the Assemblies to the Emperor, asking for the immediate abolition of this kind of exile, and stigmatising in vigorous expressions this monstrous practice. It is known that nothing has been done, and, after having loudly announced its intention of pardoning the exiles, the Government has merely nominated a commission which examined some of the cases, pardoned a fewvery few-and appointed for the greater number a term of five to six years, when each case will be re-examined.

One will easily realise the conditions of these exiles if he imagines a student, or a girl from a well-to-do family, or a skilled workman, taken by two gendarmes to a borough numbering a hundred houses and inhabited by a few Laponians or Russian hunters, by one or two fur-traders, by the priest, and by the police official. Bread is at famine prices; each manufactured article costs its weight in silver, and, of course, there is absolutely no means of earning even a shilling. The Government gives to such exiles only four to eight roubles (8 to 10 shillings) per month, and immediately refuses this poor pittance if the exile receives from his parents or friends the smallest sum of money, be it even ten roubles (17.) during twelve months. To give lessons is strictly forbidden, even if there were lessons to give, for instance to the stanovoy's chil

3 One of the most characteristic cases out of those which became known by scores in 1881, is the following:-In 1872, the Kursk nobility treated the Governor of the province to a dinner. A big proprietor, M. Annenkoff, was entrusted with proposing a toast for the Governor. He proposed it, but added in conclusion:- Your Excellence, I drink your health, but I heartily wish that you would devote some more time to the affairs of your province.'

Next week a post-car with two gendarmes stopped at the door of his house; and without allowing him to see his friends, or even to bid a farewell to his wife, he was transported to Vyatka. It took six months of the most active applications to powerful persons at St. Petersburg, on behalf of his wife and the marshals of the Fatesh and Kursk nobility, to liberate him from this exile (Golos, Poryador &c. for February 20 and 21, 1881).

As to

dren. Most of the exiles do not know manual trades. finding employment in some private office--in those boroughs where there are offices-it is quite impossible :

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We are afraid of giving them employment (wrote the Yeniseisk correspondent of the Russkiy Kurier), as we are afraid of being ourselves submitted to the supervision of the police. . It is sufficient to meet with an Administrative exile, or to exchange a few words with him, to be inscribed under the head of suspects. . . The chief of a commercial undertaking has recently compelled his clerks to sign an engagement stating that they will not be acquainted with 'politicals,' nor greet them in the streets.

More than that, we read in 1880 in our papers that the Ministry of Finance brought forward a scheme for a law 'to allow the common-law and political Administrative exiles to carry on all kinds of trades, with the permission of the Governor-General, which permission is to be asked in each special case.' I do not know if this scheme has become law, but I know that formerly nearly all kinds of trade were prohibited to exiles, not to speak of the circumstance that to carry on many trades was quite impossible, the exiles being severely prohibited from leaving the town even for a few hours. Shall I describe, after this, the horrible, unimaginable misery of the exiles ?- Without dress, without shoes, living in the nastiest huts, without any occupation, they are mostly dying from consumption,' was written to the Golos of February 2, 1881. 'Our Administrative exiles are absolutely starving. Several of them, having no lodgings, were discovered living in an excavation under the bell-tower,' wrote another correspondent. · Administrative exile simply means killing people by starvation ’—such was the cry of our press when it was permitted to discuss this subject. It is a slow, but sure execution,' wrote the Golos.

And yet, misery is not the worst of the condition of the exiles. They are as a rule submitted to the most disgraceful treatment by the local authorities. For the smallest complaint addressed to newspapers, they are transferred to the remotest parts of Eastern Siberia. Young girls, confined at Kargopol, are compelled to receive during the night the visits of drunken officials, who enter their rooms by violence, under the pretext of having the right of visiting the exiles at any time. At another place, the police officer compels the exiles to come every week to the police station, and submits them to a visitation, together with street-girls.' And so on, and so on!

Such being the situation of the exiles in the less remote parts of Russia and Siberia, it is easy to conceive what it is in such places as Olekminsk, Verkhoyansk, or Nijne-kolymsk, in a hamlet situated at the mouth of the Kolyma, beyond the 68th degree of latitude, and having but 190 inhabitants. For all these hamlets, consisting of a few houses each, have their exiles, their sufferers, buried there for

4 Golos, February 12, 1881.

ever for the simple reason that there was no charge brought against them sufficient to procure a condemnation, even from a packed court. After having walked for months and months across snowcovered mountains, on the ice of the rivers, and in the toundras, they are now confined in these hamlets where but a few hunters are vegetating, always under the apprehension of dying from starvation. And not only in the hamlets: it will be hardly believed, but it is so : a number of them have been confined to the ulusses, or encampments of the Yakuts, and they are living there under felt tents, with the Yakuts, side by side with people covered with the most disgusting skin diseases. 'We live in the darkness,' wrote one of them to his friends, taking advantage of some hunter going to Verkhoyansk, whence his letter takes ten months to reach Olekminsk; 6 we live in the darkness, and burn candles only for one hour and a half every day; they cost too dear. We have no bread, and eat only fish. Meat can be had at no price. Another says: I write to you in a violent pain, due to periostosis. . . . I have asked to be transferred to a hospital, but without success. I do not know how long this torture will last; my only wish is to be freed from this pain. We are not allowed to see one another, although we are separated only by the distance of three miles. The Crown allows us four roubles and fifty kopeks— nine shillings per month.' A third exile wrote about the same time : 'Thank you, dear friends, for the papers; but I cannot read them: I have no candles, and there are none to buy. My scurvy is rapidly progressing, and having no hope of being transferred, I hope to die in the course of this winter.'

'I hope to die in the course of this winter!' That is the only hope that an exile confined to a Yakut encampment under the 68th degree of latitude can cherish!

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When reading these lines we are transported back at once to the seventeenth century, and seem to hear again the words of the protopope Avvakum :- And I remained there, in the cold block-house, and afterwards with the dirty Tunguses, as a good dog lying on the straw; sometimes they nourished me, sometimes they forgot.' And, like the wife of Avvakum, we ask now again: Ah, dear, how long, then, will these sufferings go on?' Centuries have elapsed since, and a whole hundred years of pathetic declamations about progress and humanitarian principles, all to bring us back to the same point where we were when the Tsars of Moscow sent their adversaries to die in the toundras on the simple denunciation of a favourite.

And to the question of Avvakum's wife, repeated now again throughout Siberia, we have but one possible reply: No partial reform, no change of men can ameliorate this horrible state of things; nothing short of a complete transformation of the fundamental conditions of Russian life.

P. KRAPOTKINE.

IN the January number of this Review is to be found an article on Religion which has justly awakened a profound and sustained interest. The creed of Agnosticism was there formulated anew by the acknowledged head of the Evolution philosophy, with a definiteness such as perhaps it never wore before. To my mind there is nothing in the whole range of modern religious discussion more cogent and more suggestive than the array of conclusions the final outcome of which is marshalled in those twelve pages. It is the last word of the Agnostic philosophy in its long controversy with Theology. That word is decisive, and it is hard to conceive how Theology can rally for another bout from such a sorites of dilemma as is there presented. My own humble purpose is not to criticise this paper, but to point its practical moral, and, if I may, to add to it a rider of my own. As a summary of philosophical conclusions on the theological problem, it seems to me frankly unanswerable. Speaking generally, I shall now dispute no part of it but one word, and that is the title. It is entitled 'Religion.' To me it is rather the Ghost of Religion. Religion as a living force lies in a different sphere.

The essay, which is packed with thought to a degree unusual even with Mr. Herbert Spencer, contains evidently three parts. The first (pp. 1-5) deals with the historical Evolution of Religion, of which Mr. Spencer traces the germs in the primitive belief in ghosts. The second (pp. 6-8) arrays the moral and intellectual dilemmas involved in all anthropomorphic theology into one long catena of difficulty, out of which it is hard to conceive any free mind emerging with success. The third part (pp. 8-12) deals with the evolution of Religion in the future, and formulates, more precisely than has ever yet been effected, the positive creed of Agnostic philosophy.

Has, then, the Agnostic a positive creed? It would seem so; for Mr. Spencer brings us at last to the one absolute certainty, the presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed.' But let no one suppose that this is merely a new name for the Great First Cause of so many theologies and metaphysics. In spite of the capital letters, and the use of theological terms as old ast