ABOLITION OF EXILE TO SIBERIA.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3492, 15 September 1882, Page 4

ABOLITION OF EXILE TO SIBERIA.

It is stated that the Russian Government is actively engaged discussing a project for abolishing exile to Siberia. Of course a place must still be found for the 30,000 exiles who are deported from European Russia every year, and here the recent annexation of J?aghalien comee in handy to play in the North Pacific the role that New Caledonia plays on behalf of the French in the South Pacific Ocean. Should the island become overcrowded, as it would very likely be in the course of time, unless the stream of exiles diminished, a second penal settlement could be formed in the inhospitable wilds of Novoe Zemlia, where a Russian geographer has recently demonstrated the winters to be not so bad as usually represented. Whether this be so or not, or whether Novoe Zemlia will ever succeed Saghalien, it seems to be tolerably oertain that before long the indiscriminate distribution of exiles over the length and breadth of Siberia will undergo a thorough overhauling. At present the exiles are shot over the Urals into Asia in a most promiscuous manner, scarcely a third remaining in the districts assigned to them, and a large proportion wandering about the country like vagrants. In a word, in most essentials the deportation of nonpolitical convicts is simply a sort of enforced colonisation, with a sufficient grant from the State to keep the exiles from actual starvation .