out suffering terrible hardships. The physical exposure alone is enough to break down the health and strength of all except the most hardy, and when to such inevitable exposure are added insufficient clothing, bad food, the polluted air of overcrowded étapes, and the almost complete absence of medical care and attention, one is surprised, not that so many die, but that so many get through alive. The exile parties that leave Tomsk in July and August are overtaken by the frosts and the cold rains of autumn long before they reach Irkutsk. They have not yet been supplied with winter clothing, and most of them have no better protection from rain, sleet, or cold wind than that afforded by a coarse linen shirt, a pair of linen drawers, and a gray frieze overcoat. Imagine such a party marching in a cold north-east storm along the road over which we passed between Achinsk and Krasnoyarsk. Every individual is wet to the skin by the drenching rain, and the nursing women, the small children, and the sick lie shivering on water-soaked straw in small rude telegas, without even a pretense of shelter from the storm. In places the mud is almost knee-deep, and the wagons wallow through it at the rate of about two miles an hour. The bodies of the marching convicts, kept warm by the exertion of walking in heavy leg-fetters, steam a little in the raw, chilly air, but a large number of the men have lost or removed their shoes, and are wading through the freezing mud with bare feet. The Government, influenced, I presume, by considerations of economy, furnishes its exiles in summer and fall with low shoes or slippers called "kottee," instead of with boots. These kottee are made by contract and by the thousand, of the cheapest materials, and by the Government itself are expected to last only six weeks.1 As a matter of fact they frequently do not last one week. A high officer of the exile administration told me that it was a common thing to see exiles leave Tomsk or Krasnoyarsk with new kottee and come into the second étape barefooted-their shoes having gone to pieces in less than two days. Even when the kottee hold out for their nominal period of service, they are not fitted to the feet of the wearers; they cannot be secured, because they have no laces; they are so low that they fill with mire and water and are constantly sticking fast or coming off in mud-holes; and on such a road as that between Achinsk and Krasnoyarsk scores of convicts either remove their shoes and hang them around their necks, or throw them away altogether, and walk for days at a time with bare feet, through mud whose temperature is little above the freezing point. 1 Circular Letter of the Prison Department, No. 180. As the party, wet, tired, and hungry, approaches one of the little log villages that lie along its route, the "starosta," or head man appointed by the exiles to conduct their negotiations with the authorities, asks the convoy officer to allow them to sing the "begging song" as they pass through the settlement. The desired permission is granted; certain prisoners are designated to receive the expected alms; the convicts all remove their gray caps; and entering the village with a slow, dragging step, as if they hardly had strength enough to crawl along, they begin their mournful appeal for pity. I shall never forget the emotions roused in me by this song when I heard it for the first time. We were sitting, one cold, raw, autumnal day, in a dirty post station on the great Siberian road, waiting for horses. Suddenly my attention was attracted by a peculiar, lowpitched, quavering sound which came to us from a distance, and which, although made apparently by human voices, did not resemble anything that I had ever before heard. It was not singing, nor chanting, nor wailing for the dead, but a strange blending of all three. It suggested vaguely the confused and commingled sobs, moans, and entreaties of human beings who were being subjected to torture, but whose sufferings were not acute enough to seek expression in shrieks or high-pitched cries. As the sound came nearer we went out into the street in front of the station-house and saw approaching a chained party of about a hundred bare-headed convicts, who, surrounded by a cordon of soldiers, were marching slowly through the settlement, singing the "exiles' begging song." No attempt was made by the singers to pitch their voices in harmony, or to pronounce the words in unison; there were no pauses or rests at the ends of the lines; and I could not make out any distinctly marked rhythm. The singers seemed to be constantly breaking in upon one another with slightly modulated variations of the same slow, melan choly air, and the effect produced was that of a rude fugue, or of a funeral chant, so arranged as to be sung like a round or catch by a hundred male voices, each independent of the others in time and melody, but all following a certain scheme of vocalization, and taking up by turns the same dreary, wailing theme. The words were as follows: Have pity on us, O our fathers! for pity was, I had never in my life heard any. thing so mournful and depressing. It seemed to be the half-articulate expression of all the grief, the misery, and the despair that had been felt by generations of human beings in the étapes, the forwarding prisons, and the mines. As the party marched slowly along the muddy street between the lines of gray log houses, children and peasant women appeared at the doors with their hands full of bread, meat, eggs, or other articles of food, which they put into the caps or bags of the three or four shaven-headed convicts who acted as almscollectors. The jingling of chains and the wailing voices of the exiles grew gradually fainter and fainter as the party passed up the street, and when the sounds finally died away in the distance and we turned to reënter the post station, I felt a strange sense of dejection, as if the day had suddenly grown colder, darker, and more dreary, and the cares and sorrows of life more burdensome and oppressive. At the first preeval, or halt, that a party makes after passing through a village, the food that has been collected is distributed and eaten, and the convicts, somewhat refreshed, resume their march. Late in the evening they arrive, wet and weary, at an étape, where, after supper and the "pereklitchka," or rollcall, they are locked up in the close, unventilated kameras for the night. Most of them are in a shiver-or, as they sometimes call it, a gypsy sweat"—from cold and from long exposure to rain; but they have neither dry clothing to put on nor blankets with which to cover themselves, and must lie down upon the hard plank nares, or upon the floor, and seek warmth in close contact with one another. Some of them have, perhaps, a change of clothing in their gray linen bags, but both bags and clothing have been exposed for eight or ten hours to a pouring rain and are completely soaked through. If the Government really cared anything about the comfort or health of exiles on the road, it would furnish convoy officers with tarpaulins or sheets of oilcloth to put over and protect the exiles' baggage in rainy weather. This would add a mere trifle to the cost of exile transportation, and it would make all the difference between life and death to hundreds of weak or half-sick human beings, who come into an étape soaked to the skin after a march of twenty miles in a cold rain, and who have no dry clothing to put on. The very money spent for the burial of the poor wretches who die from croup, pleurisy, or pneumonia, as a result of sleeping in wet clothes on the road, would buy a substantial tarpaulin for every exile baggage wagon in Siberia and yet the tarpaulins are not bought. VOL. XXXVII.—26. If it be asked why, I can only say, because the officials who care have not the power, and the officials who have the power do not care. I went through Siberia with the words "Why so?" and "Why not?" upon my lips, and this, in effect, was the answer that I everywhere received. "I have recommended again and again," said a high officer of the exile administration to me, "that the convicts be taken to their destinations in summer and in wagons, instead of being obliged to walk throughout the whole year. I have shown conclusively, by exact figures and carefully prepared estimates, that the transportation of exiles from Achinsk to Irkutsk in wagons, and in summer, would not only be infinitely more merciful and humane than the present method of forwarding them on foot the year round, but would actually cost fourteen rubles less per man, on account of the saving in time, food, and winter clothing." "Why then is it not done?" I inquired. His only reply was a significant shrug of the shoulders. "I have repeatedly protested," said another exile officer, "against the acceptance, from dishonest contractors, of articles of exile clothing that did not correspond with the specification or the samples; but I have accomplished nothing. Shoes so worthless that they fall to pieces in two days are accepted in place of the good shoes that ought to be furnished, and the exiles go barefooted. All that I can do is to lay before my superiors the facts of the case." While in the city of Irkutsk, I called one day upon Mr. Petroff, the acting-governor of the province, and found in his office Colonel Zagarin, the Inspector of Exile Transportation for Eastern Siberia. The latter had brought to the governor some kottee, or exile shoes, that had just been accepted by the provincial administration, and was exhibiting them side by side with the original samples that had been furnished as models to the contractor. The accepted shoes did not resemble the models, they were perfectly worthless, and might have been made, I think, by the thousand, for ten or fifteen cents a pair. Colonel Zagarin was protesting against the acceptance of such shoes, and was asking for an investigation. The fraud was so manifest and so glaring, and the results of it would be so calamitous to thousands of poor wretches who would wear these kottee for a day or two and then be forced to walk barefooted over icy ground or through freezing mud, that I thought something would certainly be done about it. Upon my return from the mines of the Trans-Baikal five months later, I asked Colonel Zagarin what had been the result of I asked no more questions. I could furnish, if there were space, innumerable illustrations of the way in which the life of convicts on the road is made almost intolerable by official indifference or fraud; but it is perhaps unnecessary to do so. The results of that life are shown by the records of the hospitals and lazarets, and by the extraordinarily high rate of mortality in exile parties. Hundreds of prisoners, of both sexes and all ages, fall sick on the road, and after being carried for a week, or perhaps two weeks, in jolting telegas, are finally left to recover or to die in one of the étape lazarets between Achinsk and Irkutsk. It seems barbarous, and of course it is barbarous, to carry forward in a springless telega, regardless of weather, an unfortunate man or woman who has been taken sick with pneumonia or typhus fever on the road; but, under existing circumstances, there is nothing else for a convoy officer to do. He and his soldiers must go on with the exile party, and he cannot leave the sick for five days in a deserted étape wholly without attendance. He is forced, therefore, to carry them along until they either die or reach one of the widely separated lazarets, where they can be left and cared for. Many times, on the great Siberian road, when I had been jolted until my pulse had become imperceptible at the wrist from weakness, sleeplessness, and incessant shocks to the spinal cord and the brain, and when it seemed to me that I could endure no more, I maintained my grip by thinking of the hundreds of exiled men and women who, sick unto death, had been carried over this same road in open telegas; who had endured this same jolting while their heads ached and throbbed with the quick pulses of fever; who had lain for many hours at a time on water-soaked straw in a pitiless storm while suffering from pneumonia; and who had nothing to sustain them except the faint hope of reaching at last some fever-infected lazaret. If men can bear all this, I thought, we ought not to complain of our trivial hardships, nor break down under a little unusual fatigue. The sick who live to reach an étape lazaret 1 A feldsher is a sort of hospital steward, who, in the absence of a regular surgeon, performs the latter's duties. 2 The distances between these étapes are as follows: Achinsk to Birusinskaya, 352 miles; Birusinskaya to Sheragulskaya, 200 miles; Sheragulskaya to Tiretskaya, 90 miles; Tiretskaya to Irkutsk, 139 miles. A marching party of exiles makes, on an average, about 80 miles a week. may hope to die under shelter and in peace; but, if the reports of the exile administration are to be trusted, they can hardly expect to be restored to health. Mr. Galkin-Vrasskoi, the Chief of the Prison and Exile Department, in an official report made recently to the Minister of the Interior, describes the condition of the lazarets between Achinsk and Irkutsk as follows: Up to the year 1885 the lazarets necessary for the accommodation of exiles taken sick on the great exile road had not been built, nor had any provision been made for regular surgeons, or even for feldshers.1 According to paragraph 5 of section 363 of the "Laws relating to Exiles," it is the duty of civil and military surgeons, in places where étape officers are quartered, to examine the sick and give them necessary aid. Civil surgeons, however, do not live in étape villages, and army surgeons are found only at the étapes of Sheragulskaya, Birusinskaya, and Tiretskaya. In these places there are army lazarets with six beds each, for the accommodation of sick soldiers belonging to the convoy commands. All prisoners taken sick on the road between Achinsk at these three étapes 2-not, however, in the army and Irkutsk, up to the year 1885, have been treated lazarets, but in the common cells of the étape buildings. There they have been kept, not only without separation according to age, sex, or nature of disease, but without any of the conveniences and appliances that a lazaret should have. In the cells set apart for sick exiles there were neither nurses, nor hospital linen, nor beds, nor bedding, nor even dishes for food.3 A sick exile who reaches one of the étapes named in this report, and who is put into a common prison cell where there are "neither nurses, nor hospital linen, nor beds, nor bedding, nor even dishes for food," cannot reasonably entertain a very sanguine expectation of recovery. Most of them do recover, but, nevertheless, the death rate in exile parties during their march from Tomsk to Irkutsk, if carried through an entire year, would amount to from 12 to 15 per cent.4 It is not surprising that exiles sometimes endeavor to escape from a life so full of miseries as this by making a break for liberty between étapes. The more experienced brodyags, or recidivists, generally try to get away by exchanging names and identities with some forced colonist who is soon to reach his destination; but now and then two or three daring or desperate convicts attempt to escape "with a hurrah"- that is, by a bold dash through the line of soldiers. They are instantly fired upon, 3 Report of Mr. Galkin-Vrasskoi, Chief of the Prison and Exile Department, for the year 1885. 4 In 1883 seventy exiles died between Tomsk and Achinsk, in the course of a journey that occupies about 21 days. This rate of mortality, if it had been maintained for a year, would have resulted in the death of 1217 exiles out of the whole number of 7865 making the journey. (Vide Report of the Inspector of Exile Transportation in Western Siberia for 1884, pp. 32, 33.) and one or more of them is usually brought to the ground. The soldiers have a saying that "A bullet will find a runaway," and a slug from a Berdan rifle is always the first messenger sent after a fugitive who tries to escape "with a hurrah." Now and then, when the party happens to be passing through a dense forest, the flying convicts get under cover so quickly that the soldiers can only fire into the bushes at random, and in such cases the runaways make good their escape. As soon as they reach a hiding-place they free themselves from their leg-fetters by pounding the circular bands into long ellipses with a stone and slipping them over their heels, and then, while the convict party to which they belonged is making its way slowly eastward towards the mines, they themselves join some detachment of the great army of brodyags which is constantly marching westward through the woods in the direction of the Urals. George Kennan. THE REORGANIZATION OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE. HE development of the Anglo-Saxon race, as we rather loosely call the people which has its home in the British Isles, has become, within the last century, the chief factor and central feature in human history. The flux of population, by which new and great centers of human activity are created, has been so overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon that nearly all minor currents are absorbed and assimilated by it. In the new continents over which the race is spreading, the offshoots of other European families for the most part lose their identity, and tend to disappear in the dominant mass. Since it has found space on which to expand it has increased with great rapidity, and seems destined ultimately to surpass, in mere mass of numbers, any other branch of the human stock, while its comparative influence is indefinitely increased by the singular individual energy of its members and the collective energy of its communities. Add to this the fact that it embodies the most aggressive moral forces and the most progressive political and social forces of the world, and we have sufficient grounds on which to predict for it a future of supreme interest, and infinitely greater than its past. The bifurcation of Anglo-Saxon national life which was caused by the American Revolution is now, after a hundred years, fully recognized as the most important political event in modern history. Hitherto, the fact that it led to the foundation of the American republic has been considered an adequate measure of its vast significance. But immense though that fact is, it is now beginning to be clearly seen that the American Revolution has had another effect of at least equal significance and probable influence upon the world's future. It com pelled Great Britain, by the stern teaching of experience, to master the true principles of colonial government, and, as a consequence, to acquire the art of bringing her colonies into essential harmony with the national life. The folly of so-called statesmen, which reft from Great Britain her first great offshoot, left untouched the nation-building energy of her people, and around her has since grown up, in every quarter of the globe, a vast system of dependencies, occupying an eighth of the earth's surface and embracing even now a considerable portion of the world's population, with a capacity for enormous expansion. National development on such a scale is unparalleled in history, and must be pregnant with results. Already, as the process of expansion goes on, it has become manifest that this aggregation of states is slowly but surely outgrowing the system under which it was created. The question of its reconstruction or adaptation to new conditions is undoubtedly one of the greatest of the worldproblems now coming up for solution. In one of his most striking poems Matthew Arnold speaks of England as The weary Titan, with deaf Of the too vast orb of her fate. It is not the poet's mind alone which is profoundly moved by this fact of Great Britain's vast expansion; by the question of whether she will continue able to bear her enormous burden of empire. Statesmen have to face the fact in all its gravity; nations in every quarter of the globe know that their future history depends, more than on anything else, on the answer given to the question. For the world at large, civi |