Page:Morgan Philips Price - Siberia (1912).djvu/122

 86 opinion in Siberia slow. "Am I not right, then," I said, "in assuming that although the Siberian national sentiment, and the demand for local freedom, is becoming more and more pronounced, still the vastness of the country and the isolation of the bulk of its inhabitants, will cause many years to elapse before public spirit and coherent opinion can ever become a real force?" "Yes," he said, "that is true; but come it will, in the inevitable change that comes with everything that is human." And I felt myself that his words will some day come true.

The pleasing conversations which I had with this exile were certainly the most interesting and enlightening that I had while I was in Siberia. Many political exiles are men of the most highly cultivated type. They and their forerunners of previous years have been not so much a disturbing as a progressive element in Siberian social life, introducing, as they do, new ideas from Western Europe and old Russia. They are subject to special laws and are kept administratively apart in a social caste of their own. A traveller is sure to encounter them on his way through Western and Central Siberia. Often drawn from the peasant or the lower urban citizen class, they have been sent out to Siberia for political reasons, and once settled in a Siberian village among the other peasants they take up land and merge in the community. I saw several such exiles in the parts of the Yenisei Government which I visited, and in no case was their social condition inferior to that of their free neighbours around them. In fact more than one declared his intention of remaining in Siberia after the expiration of his sentence. To these people exile opens up a new