Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 1.djvu/53

Rh would happen to us when we should seriously begin our work of investigation? Almost every foreign traveler who has made a serious attempt to study Russian life and has gone for that purpose into the country has been arrested at least once. Lansdell, the English clergyman, was arrested near this same city of Perm in 1882, as a distributor of revolutionary pamphlets [Athenæum, September 16, 1882]; Mackenzie Wallace was arrested "by mistake" on the bank of the Pruth as he returned from Austria in 1872 [Wallace's Russia, page 209]; and even the great German scientist, Baron von Humboldt, did not wholly escape suspicion. The Russian historical review Rússkaya Stariná has recently published a letter from a police prefect in the little Siberian town of Ishím, written in 1829, when Humboldt was in that part of the empire making scientific reseaches. The letter, which is addressed to the governor-general, is as follows:

"A few days ago there arrived here a German of shortish stature, insignificant appearance, fussy, and bearing a letter of introduction from your Excellency to me. I accordingly received him politely; but I must say that I find him suspicious, and even dangerous. I disliked him from the first. He talks too much and despises my hospitality. He pays no attention to the leading officials of the town and associates with Poles and other political criminals. I take the liberty of informing your Excellency that his intercourse with political criminals does not escape my vigilance. On one occasion he proceeded with them to a hill overlooking the town. They took a box with them and got out of it a long tube which we all took for a gun. After fastening it to three feet they pointed it down on the town and one after another examined whether it was properly sighted. This was evidently a great danger for the town which is built entirely of wood; so I sent a detachment of troops with loaded rifles to watch the German on the hill. If the treacherous machinations of this man justify my suspicions, we shall be ready to give our lives for the Tsar and Holy Russia. I send this despatch to your Excellency by special messenger."

A letter more characteristic of the petty Russian police officer was never penned. The civilized world is to be congratulated that the brilliant career of the great von Humboldt was not cut short by a Cossack bullet or a police saber, while he was taking sights with a theodolite in that little Siberian town of Ishím.

Perm, which is the capital of the province of the same name, is a city of 32,000 inhabitants, situated on the left bank of the river Káma about 125 miles from the boundary line of European Russia. It is the western terminus of the Urál Mountain railway, and through it passes nearly the whole of the enormous volume of Siberian commerce. In outward appearance it does not differ materially from other Russian provincial towns of its class. It is cleaner and apparently more prosperous than Nízhni Nóvgorod, but it is much less picturesque than the latter both in architecture and in situation.