EXILES IN THE SIBERIAN MINES.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XIII, Issue 104, 2 May 1878, Page 4

EXILES IN THE SIBERIAN MINES.

The exiles who live in the Siberian mines (writes the "Pall Mall Gazette") are convicts of the worst kind, and political offenders of the best. The murderer for bis villainy) the intelligent and bone&t polish rebel For his patriot'.stn, are deemed equally* worthy of the punishment of slow death. They never see the light of day, but work and sleep nil the year round in the depths of the earth, extracting silver or quicksilver : un 3 er the eyes of taskmasters, who have orders not to spare them. Iron gates guarded by sentries, close the lodes or streets at the bottom $f the shafts, and the miners are railed off from one another in gangs of twenty. They sleep within recesses hewn out of the rook— very kennels—into which they must creep on all fours. Prince Joseph Lubomirski, who was authorised to visit one of the mines of the Oara! at a time when it. was not suspected he 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 j men whose hair nnd eyebrows had dropped off, and who were gauat as skeletons, were kept to hard labor under the lash. They have .only two holidays in the year*— Christmas and Easter — and all other days, Sundays included, they must toil until exhausted nature robs them of the use of thoir limbs, when they ere hauled up to die in the infirmary. Five yeßrs in the quicksilver pits are enough to turn a man of thirty into an apparent sexagenarian, but some have b ! een known to struggle on for ten years. No man who has ever served in the mines is ever allowed to return home ; the moat he can ever, obtain in the way of graoe is leave to come up and wiork in the road gangs, and it is the promise of this favor as a reward for industry, which operates even more than the lash to maintain discipline. Women are employed in the mine as sifters, and get no better treatment than the men. Polish ladies by the dozen have Keen sent down to rot and die, while the 1 St. Petersburg journals were declaring that they were living as free colonists ; and, more recently, ladies connected with Nihilist conspiracies have been consigued to the miues in pursuaace of 'a sentence of hard labor. It must always be understood that a sentence of Siberian hard labor means death. The R^us. sian Government well knows that to live for years in the atrocious tortures of the mines is humanly impossible, aod consequently the use of a euphemism to replace the term capital punishment is merely of a piece with ;the hypocrißy of all official statements in Russia, What must be the 'plight ot professors, journalists, 'and 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? Perlißps;those English Liberals who feel kindly towards Russian humanitariaiQism wo'ulcLpick 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 priesi to whine them homilies. ;