part, the private property of the Tsar. In the nine years from 1870 to 1879 they produced 6984 pounds of gold, 206,964 pounds of silver, 9,639,620 pounds of copper, and 13,221,396 pounds of lead. A large part of the gold and silver ore is smelted in Barnaul.

Mr. Frost, with an amount of enterprise which was in the highest degree creditable to him, explored the city with sketch-book and camera, and took photographs of the bazar, of peasant women carrying stones on hand-barrows near the mining "works," and of a curious building, not far from our hotel, which seemed to have been intended for a Russo-Doric temple but which afterward had apparently been transformed into a jail, in order to bring it more nearly into harmony with the needs of the place. I should have accompanied him upon some of these excursions, but I was nearly sick from sleeplessness. The dirty hotel in Barnaul was alive with bed-bugs, and I was compelled to sleep every night on a table, or rather stand, about four feet long by three wide, set out in the middle of the room. Owing to the fact that I generally rolled off or capsized the table as soon as I lost consciousness, my sleep was neither prolonged nor refreshing, and before we left Barnaul I was reduced to a state

bordering on frenzy. Almost the only pleasant recollection that I have of the city is the memory of receiving there eighteen letters from home-the first I had had since our departure from Tiumen.

Tuesday afternoon, August 18, we left Barnaul for Tomsk. The part of Western Siberia that lies between these two cities is a fertile rolling country, diversified by birch groves and wide stretches of cultivated land,and suggestive a little of the southern part of New England. Mr. Frost, whose home is in Massachusetts, said he could easily imagine that he was "up Berkshire way." The scenery, although never wild, is everywhere pleasing and picturesque; the meadows, even in August, are carpeted with flowers; and the greenness and freshness of the vegetation, to a traveler who comes from the desert-like steppes of the upper Irtish, are a source of surprise and gratification. Near the first station we passed the small lake of Kolivan, which is celebrated in all that part of Siberia for the picturesque beauty of its scenery, and Mr. Frost made a sketch of some fantastic rocks by the roadside. It is a favorite place of resort in summer for the wealthy citizens of Barnaul and Tomsk. It had been our intention to spend a day or two in exploring this picturesque sheet of water, but we

finally decided that we could not spare the time. We crossed the river Ob on a curious "parom," or ferry-boat, consisting of a large platform supported upon two open hulks and propelled by a paddle-wheel at one end, the crank of which was turned by two raggedbearded old muzhiks. Most of the Siberian rivers are crossed by means of what are known as "pendulum ferries," in which the boat is anchored by a long cable made fast in the middle of the stream, and is swung from shore to shore pendulum-wise by the force of the current. The Ob ferry-boat, of which Mr. Frost made a sketch, was the first one we had seen propelled by a paddle-wheel.

So far as I can remember, there was little on the route between Barnaul and Tomsk to attract a traveler's attention. I was terribly jaded and exhausted from lack of sleep,

and spent a large part of the time in a state which was little more than one of semi-consciousness.

At 4 o'clock on the afternoon of Thursday, August 20, we rode at last into the city of Tomsk. We had made, with horses, in the 51 days which had elapsed since our departure from Tiumen, a journey of more than 1500 miles, in the course of which we had inspected two large prisons, made the acquaintance of three colonies of political exiles, and visited the wildest part of the Russian Altai. We drove at once to the European Hotel, which is the building shown at the extreme right of the illustration on page 865, secured a fairly comfortable room, and as soon as possible after dinner removed our clothing and stretched our weary bodies out in civilized beds for the first time in nearly two months.

Tomsk, which is the capital of the province of the same name, is a city of 31,000 inhabitants, and is situated partly on a bluff, and partly on low land adjoining the river Tom, a short distance above its junction with the Ob. In point of size and importance it is the second city in Siberia, and in enterprise, intelligence, and prosperity it seemed to me to be the first. It contains about 8000 dwellinghouses and other buildings, 250 of which are brick; 33 churches, including a Roman Catholic church, a Mohammedan mosque, and 3 Jewish synagogues; 26 schools, attended by about 2500 scholars; a very good public library; 2 tri-weekly newspapers, which, how ever, the Minister of the Interior keeps closed a large part of the time on account of their "pernicious tendency "; and a splendid new university building, which has been completed three years, but which the Government will not allow to be opened for fear that it too will have a "pernicious tendency" and become a center of liberal thought. The streets of the city are not paved and are very imperfectly lighted, but at the time of our visit they seemed to be reasonably clean and well cared for, and the town, as a whole, impressed me much more favorably than many towns of its class in European Russia.

The province of which Tomsk is the capital has an area of 330,000 square miles, and is therefore about seven times as large as the State of Pennsylvania. It contains 8 towns, each

of which has on an average 14,000 inhabitants, and 2719 villages, each of which has on an average 366 inhabitants, so that its total population is about 1,100,000. Of this number 90,000 are aborigines, and 30,000 communal exiles, or common criminals banished from European Russia. The southern part of the province is very fertile, is well timbered and watered, and has a fairly good climate. The 3,600,000 acres of land which it has under cultivation yield annually about 30,000,000 bushels of grain and 4,500,000 bushels of potatoes, with smaller quantities of hemp, flax, and tobacco, while the pastures around the villages support about 2,500,000 head of live stock.

From these statistics it will be seen that in spite of bad government, restricted immigration, and the demoralizing influence of criminal exile, the province of Tomsk is not wholly barren or uncivilized. If it were in the hands of Americans, and if free immigration from European Russia to it were allowed, it might soon become as densely populated and as prosperous as any of our North-western states. Its resources are almost illimitable, and all that it needs is good government and freedom for the play of private enterprise. As long, however, as a despotic administration at St. Petersburg can gag its newspapers for months at a time, keep its university closed, choose the teachers and prescribe the courses of study for its schools, prohibit the reading of the

sources of the province by building through it a railroad. It might much better loosen the grasp in which it holds the people by the throat, permit them to exercise some judgment with regard to the management of their own affairs, allow them freely to discuss their needs and plans in their own newspapers, abolish restrictions upon personal liberty of movement, stop the sending there of criminal exiles, and then let the province develop itself. It does not need "development" half as much as it needs to be let alone.*

Our first step in Tomsk was to call upon the political exiles and upon several army officers

The reader will understand, I trust, that consider. ations of space compel me to omit for the present the mass of facts upon which these conclusions rest. The particular object of our journey to Siberia was the investigation of the exile system; and in order to have space for the adequate treatment of that subject, I am forced to neglect, for a time, the government of Siberia and the economic condition of the Siberian provinces.

conveniently could, I called upon Mr. Petukhof, and was received by him with great cordiality. He had read, as I soon learned, my book upon North-eastern Siberia; and since it had made a favorable impression upon him, he was predisposed to treat me with consideration and with more than ordinary courtesy. I, in turn, had heard favorable reports with regard to his character; and under such circumstances we naturally drifted into a frank and pleasant talk about Siberia and Siberian affairs. At the end of half an hour's conversation he asked me if there was any way in which he could be of assistance to me. I replied that I should like very much to have That I have not exaggerated the evils which arise in Siberia from the corrupt and incapable control of a despotic bureaucracy I shall hereafter show by quotations from the official reports of Siberian governors and governors-general and by the statements of hundreds of peasants, merchants, miners, army officers, newspaper men, and chinovniks in all parts of the country.

permission to visit the exile forwarding prison. I fancied that his face showed, for an instant, a trace of embarrassment; but as I proceeded to describe my visits to prisons in two other provinces, he seemed to come to a decision, and, without asking me any questions as to my motives, said, "Yes, I will give you permission; and, if you like, I will go with you." Then, after a moment's hesitation, he determined, apparently, to be frank with me, and added gravely, "I think you will find it the worst prison in Siberia." I expressed a hope that such would not be the case, and said that it could hardly be worse than the forwarding According to the report of the Inspector of Exile Transportation for 1885, this prison would accommodate 1900 prisoners, with an allowance of eight-tenths

prison in Tiumen. He shrugged his shoulders slightly, as if to say, "You don't know yet what a Siberian prison may be," and asked me what could be expected when buildings were crowded with more than twice the number of persons for which they were intended. "The Tomsk forwarding prison," he continued, "was designed to hold 1400 prisoners.* It now contains more than 3000, and the convict barges, as they arrive from Tiumen, increase the number by from 500 to 800 every week, while we are able to forward eastward only 400 a week. The situation is, therefore, becoming worse and worse as the summer advances. The of a cubic fathom of air space per capita. (Page 27 of the manuscript report.) Mr. Petukhof, in his estimate, did not perhaps allow for such close packing as this.