Modern Siberia.

Evening Post, Volume LIV, Issue 21, 24 July 1897, Page 2 (Supplement)

Modern Siberia.

« It looks as if we shall all have to revise our notions of the ' horrors of Siberia.' There has been a great deal of controversy on the point in recent years, and the latest and most important contribution to the discussiou has jußt been made by Colonel Waters, Military Attache to the British Embassy at St. Petersbury, who has just performed a journey across the Siberian great lone land. Says the Colonel : — * I can deny with absolute authority the oft-repeated stories of Siberian horrors and Russian cruelty. . . . I caught up hundreds of convicts on the road, and conversed with them in their own language. In the depth of a Eussian winter, with 90 degrees of frost, I found these exiles travelling in comfort, smoking and singing. In every case they were well clothed and well fed, and, so far from dying on the roadside, any prisoner falling lame or becoming ill was placed in a carriage and driven to the nearest hospital. 1 have not only not seen any case of ill-treatment, but what is more, I have not even heard of one. = . . I am perfectly satisfied that the treatment of all classes of prisoners is remarkably kind, and that the sensational stories current in some quarters are absolutely untrue.' This is definite enough, and it is to be hoped the state of things so described may continue. We are afraid that it was not always thus. — Westminster.