Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/174

158 overcoats. Not one of these mattresses contained less than twenty scraps and remnants of old cloth, while in some of them there must have been a hundred. They all looked like dirty "crazy-quilts" made out of paper-rags in a poor-house, and they could hardly have made any appreciable difference in the hardness of the plank sleeping-platforms. A man might as well seek to obtain a comfortable night's rest on a front door-step by interposing between it and his tired body a ragged and dirty bath-towel. There can be no reasonable excuse, it seems to me, for the failure of the Russian Government to provide at least beds and pillows of straw for its hard-labor convicts. Civilized human beings put straw even into the kennels of their dogs; but the Russian Government forces men to work for ten or twelve hours a day in its East-Siberian mines; compels them after this exhausting toil to lie down on a bare plank; and then, to console them in their misery, tacks up on the grimy wall over their heads the command and the promise of Christ, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Mr. Frost and I made a careful examination of ten prisons in the province of the Trans-Baikál, and in none of them — with the single exception of the new central prison in Vérkhni Údinsk — did we find a bed, a pillow, or a blanket. Everywhere the prisoners lay down at night in their gray overcoats on bare planks, and almost everywhere they were tortured by vermin, and were compelled to breathe the same air over and over again until it seemed to me that there could not be oxygen enough left in it to support combustion in the flame of a farthing rush-light. If any one who can read Russian thinks that these statements exaggerate the facts, I beg him to refer to the description of the convict prison at the Kará Lower Diggings in Maxímof's "Siberia and Penal Servitude," Vol. I, pages 100–103; to the description of the old Vérkhni Údinsk prison in Orfánof's "Afar," pages 220–222; and to the statements of the latter author