THE SIBERIAN EXILES.

Globe, Volume IX, Issue 1278, 24 April 1878, Page 3

THE SIBERIAN EXILES.

The exiles whole live in Siberian mines (writes the “Pali Mali Gazette’’) a re convic's of the worst type and political offenders of the best. The murd> rer for his villany, the intelligent and honest Polish rebel for lus 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 earth, extracting silver or quicksilver under the eyes of taskmasters 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 smother in of twenty They

sfficp within recesses hewn out of the rock—very kennels—into which they must creep on all fours. Prince Joseph Luhomirski, who was authorised to visit one of the mines of the Oural at a time when it was not suspected ho would ever publish an account of his exploration in French, has given an appalling account of what he saw. Convicts racked with the joint pains which quicksilver produces ; men whoso hair and eyebrows had dropped off, and who were gaunt as skeletons, were kept to hard labour under the lash, they have only two holidays a year, Christines arid Easter, and all other days, Sundays included. they must toil until exhausted nature robs them of the use of their limbs, when they are hauled up to die in the infirmary. Five years in the quicksilver pita are enough to turn a man of thirty into an apparent sexagenarian, but some have been known to struggle on for ten years. No man who has served in the 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 gangs, and it is the promise of this favor as a reward for industry which operates even more than the last to maintain 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 colonie's; and, more recently, ladies connected with Nihilist conspbacies have been consigned to the mines in pursuance of a sentence of hard labour. It must always ho understood that a sentence of Siberian hard labour means death. The Russian Government will knows that to live for years in the atrocious torturt s of the mines is humanly impossible, and, consequently, the use of a euphemism to replace the term capital punishment is merely of a piece with the hypocrisy of all official statements in Russia. What must be the plight of professors, journalists, 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 hnmanitarianism 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 iiomihes.