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276 that would have a tendency to raise a presumption that her presence in Kiev was about to become more or less "prejudicial to public tranquillity."

I have not space for a quarter of the evidence that I collected in Siberia to show that administrative exile is not only cruelly unjust, but, in hundreds of cases, is a punishment of barbarous severity. If it attained the objects that it is supposed to attain, there might, from the point of view of a despotic Government, be some excuse if not justification for it; but it does not attain such objects. Regarded even from the side of expediency, it is uselessly and needlessly cruel. In a recent official report to the Minister of the Interior, Major-General Nicolái Baránof, the governor of the province of Archangel, in discussing the subject of administrative exile says:

From the experience of previous years, and from my own personal observation, I have come to the conclusion that administrative exile for political reasons is much more likely to spoil the character of a man than to reform it. The transition from a life of comfort to a life of poverty, from a social life to a life in which there is no society whatever, and from a life of activity to a life of compulsory inaction, produces such ruinous consequences, that, not infrequently, especially of late, we find the political exiles going insane, attempting to commit suicide, and even committing suicide. All this is the direct result of the abnormal conditions under which exile compels an intellectually cultivated person to live. There has not yet been a single case where a man, suspected with good reason of political untrust worthiness and exiled by administrative process, has returned from such banishment reconciled to the Government, convinced of his error, and changed into a useful member of society and a faithful servant of the Throne. On the other hand, it often happens that a man who has been exiled in consequence of a misunderstanding, or an administrative mistake, becomes politically untrustworthy for the first time in the place to which he has been banished—partly by reason of his association there with real enemies of the Government, and partly as a result of personal exasperation. Furthermore, if a man is infected with anti-Government ideas, all the circumstances of exile tend only