THE SIBERIAN EXILES.

West Coast Times, Issue 2848, 20 May 1878, Page 2

THE SIBERIAN EXILES.

The exiles who live in Siberian mines (writes the Pall Mall Gazette) are convicts of the .worst type and political offenders of the best. The murderer for his villany, the intelligent and honest Poliab. rebel fur his patriotism, are deemed equally worthy of the punishment of slow death. They never see the light of day, but work and sleep all the year round in the depths of the earthy extracting silver and quicksilver under the eyes of taskmakers who have orders not to spare them. Iron gates, guarded by sentries, close the lodes, or streets, at the bottom of the shafts, and the miners are railed off from one another in gangs of twenty. They sleep within recesses hewn out of the rockvery kennels— into which they must creep on all fours. Prince Joseph Lubomirski, who was authorised to visit one of the mines of the Oural at a time when^ it was not suspected he would ever publish an account of hia exploration in French, has given an apalling account of what he saw. Convicts racked with the joint pains which quicksilver produces; men whose hair and eyebrows had dropped off, and who were gaunt as skeletons, were kept to hard labor under the lash. They have only two holidays a year— Christmas and Easter— and all other days, Sundays included, they must toil until exhausted nature robs them of the use of their limos. when they are hauled up to die m we infirmary. Five years in the q««*f™ mines are enough to tarn a man ot do mio an apparent sexagenarian, but .m have been known to straggle on for ten years. No man who has served in the s mines is ever allowed to return home ; the most he can obtain in the way of grace is leave to come up and work in the road gaugs, and it is the promise of this favor as a reward for industry which operates even more than the lash to obtain discipline. Women

are employed in the mines as sifters, and get no better treatment than the men. Polish ladies by the dozen have been sent down to rot and die, while the St. Petersburg journals were declaring that they were living as free colonists ; and more recently, ladies connected with Nihilist conspiracies have been consigned to the mines in pursuance of a sentence of hard labor. It must always be understood that a sentence of Siberian hard labor means death. The Russian Government well knows that to live for years in the atrocious tortures of the mines is humanly impossible, and, confcq icntly, the use of a euphemism to replace the term capital punishment is merely of a piece witb the hypocrisj of all official statements in Russia- What- -mint be the plight of professors, jourm lists, landowners, who have been condemned to die by inches for the crime of emitting Liberal opinions, which in England bring a man to great honor and comfort on every side ? Perhaps those English Liberals who feel kindly towards Russian humanitarianism would pick up a notion or two if they could interview some of their Muscovite colleagues earning the reward for their progressive theories underground, with a drunken priest to whine them homilies.