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268 Nevertheless, under a system of administration that allows an irresponsible official to punish at his own discretion, such results are not only possible but probable.

In the year 1874, a young student named Egór Lázaref was arrested in one of the south-eastern provinces of European Russia upon the charge of carrying on a secret revolutionary propaganda. He was taken to St. Petersburg and kept in solitary confinement in the House of Preliminary Detention and in the fortress of Petropávlovsk for about four years. He was then tried with one hundred and ninety-two other political suspects before the Governing Senate, found to be not guilty, and acquitted. As there still existed, however, a possibility that he might be guilty on some future occasion, he was punished in advance by being sent as a soldier to a regiment then engaged in active service in the Trans-Cáucasus. One would suppose that to be arrested without cause, to be held four years in solitary confinement, to be declared innocent by the highest court in the empire, and then to be punished with compulsory military service in Asia Minor for an offense prophetically foreseen, but not yet committed, would make a revolutionist, if not a terrorist, out of the most peaceable citizen; but Mr. Lázaref, as soon as he had been released from the army, quietly completed his education in the university, studied law, and began the practice of his profession in the city of Sarátof on the Vólga. He had no more trouble with the Government until the summer of 1884, when a police