Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/279

Rh presumptuous fancies," but by ordinary men and women exasperated to the pitch of desperation by administrative suppression of free speech and free thought, administrative arrest without warrant, administrative imprisonment for years upon suspicion, administrative banishment to the arctic regions without trial, and, to crown all, administrative denial of every legal remedy and every peaceful means of redress.

It is true that in 1879, as a result of the criminal activity of the terrorists, martial law was declared throughout European Russia, unlimited discretionary power was given to governors-general, and exile by administrative process, as a quick and convenient method of dealing with political suspects, was expressly authorized by the Tsar; but the imperial authorization was nothing more than a formal sanction of a preëxisting measure, and an intimation that it might, thenceforth, be given a wider scope. To say that this form of exile was previously unknown, and that it was forced upon the Government by the crimes of the terrorists, is to set chronology at naught and to ignore all the historical facts of the case. The first attempt on the part of the terrorists to assassinate a Government official was the attempt of Véra Zasúlich to kill General Trepof, the St. Petersburg chief of police, on the 5th of February, 1878. Administrative exile for political reasons had then been common for almost a decade. If I mistake not, Véra Zasúlich herself had been one of its victims seven or eight years before. I think she was one of twenty or thirty persons who were tried before a special session of the Governing Senate in 1871 upon the charge of complicity in the Necháief conspiracy, who were judicially declared to be not guilty, but who were immediately rearrested, nevertheless, and exiled by administrative process, in defiance of all law and in contemptuous disregard of the judgment of the highest court in the empire. A government that acts in this way sows dragons' teeth and