ARBITRARY DEPORTATION.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume III, Issue 156, 28 April 1876, Page 16

ARBITRARY DEPORTATION.

Some attention was excited last week by the news that a Russian gentleman at Odessa had been sent off to Siberia without a trial and a member of the St. Petersburg bar who happened to be in England wrote to the • Times' to say this was impossible, because such sentences were now never passed in Russia without a trial, and because the head of the police department, who was said to have given the order, had no power to do so, such decrees beincr issued only by the Emperor or the Senate. But the story becomes more and more circumstantial. It is a M. Brodsky Communal Councillor and notable of Odessa, aged 62, who received one day an order to prepare for transportation to Perm in Siberia within

twenty-four hours. No reason was assigned, though the telegrams state that M. Brodsky had been furnishing arms to the Turks, and the unfortunate man protested, very much on the same grounds as those alleged by the St. Petersbuvgh barrister, but in vain. Through the intervention of General Strogonoff, formerly Governor ef Odessa, he obtained a respite, which had been at first refused him, of forty-eight hours. But at the expiration of that time he was escorted by the police to the railway station, whither he was accompanied by the principal inhabitants of the town, who had the courage thus to protest against so strangely arbitrary a measure. The ' Neve Preie Presse ' of Vienna says that the pretext about the sale of arms to Turkey — a friendly State — is absurd, and asserts that M. Brodsky was affiliated to that gigantic conspiracy which has spread its web all over Bussia, and which will put an end, sooner than any one believes, to the absolute regime. Such a man, continues the Austrian journal, must disappear noiselessly, for a judicial process directed against such a criminal would reveal to the country and to the whole world the immense danger which is continually threatening official Bussia. What is happening in Eussia could not have occurred in Turkey for the last halfcentury, and the lot of the Rayahs, "whom Russia pities, is enviable when compared with that of this unhappy citizen of Odessa."

But whatever may have been the offence which this Russian has given to his own Government, none whatever is alleged against another gentleman, a British subject, who has, during the last twelve months, been expelled, as he states in a letter to the ' Times,' from Prussia, Saxony, and Bavaria. Mr. Still had an English passport, and everything was en rhgle, but there was a fatal note against him. He was a Catholic priest, and it seems that no foreign Catholic ecclesiastic is to be allowed to set his foot in Germany. Having been hunted from Prussia and Saxony, Mr. Gill appealed for protection to the British Charge d' Affaires at Munich, who sent "an indignant protest " against such treatment of " a fellow-countryman," but though the Bavarian Ministry admitted that there was " not the slightest stain " on Mr. Gill's character, the order for his banishment was not revoked. — ' Tablet.'