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Rh summon friends to prove his loyalty and good character, without great risk of bringing upon them the same calamity that has befallen him. He has no right to demand a trial, or even a hearing. He cannot sue out a writ of habeas corpus. He cannot appeal to his fellow-citizens through the press. His communications with the world are so suddenly severed that sometimes even his own relatives do not know what has happened to him. He is literally and absolutely without any means whatever of self-defense. To show the nature of the evidence upon which certain classes of Russians are banished to Siberia, and to illustrate the working of the system generally, I will give a few cases of administrative exile from the large number recorded in my note-books.

Some of the readers of this chapter will perhaps remember a young naval officer named Constantine Staniukóvich, who was attached to the staff of the Grand Duke Alexis at the time of the latter's visit to the United States. From the fact that I saw in Mr. Staniukóvich's house in Tomsk the visiting cards of people well known in New York and San Francisco, I infer that he went a good deal into society here and that he may still be recalled to mind by persons who met him. He was the son of a Russian admiral, was an officer of great promise, and had before him the prospect of a brilliant career in the Russian naval service. He was, however, a man of broad and liberal views, with a natural taste for literary pursuits, and after his return from America he resigned his position in the navy and became an author. He wrote a number of novels and plays which were fairly successful, but which, in the language of the censor, "manifested a pernicious tendency," and in 1882 or 1883 he purchased a well-known Russian magazine in St. Petersburg called the Diélo and became its editor and proprietor. He spent a considerable part of the summer of 1884 abroad, and in the latter part of that year left his wife and children at Baden-Baden and started for St. Petersburg.