Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/310

294 of this wretched prison. They were all precisely like the first one except that they differed slightly in dimensions. All were overcrowded, all were swarming with vermin, and the air in them was polluted almost beyond endurance. At the time of our visit the prison as a whole contained 169 convicts—about twice the number for which there was adequate air space.

At the first favorable opportunity I said to Lieutenant-colonel Saltstein: "I cannot understand why you allow such a prison as this to exist. You have here 169 convicts. Only forty or fifty of them work in the mine; the rest lie all day in these foul cells in idleness. Why don't you take them out to the nearest forest, set them to work cutting timber, make them drag the logs to the village, and have them build a better and larger prison for themselves! They would be glad to do it, the expense would be trifling, and in a few months you would have here a prison fit for a human being to live in."

"My dear sir," he replied, "I cannot send convicts into the woods without orders to do so. Suppose some of them should escape,—as they probably would,—I should be held responsible and should lose my place. I don't dare to do anything that I have not been ordered to do by the prison department. The authorities in St. Petersburg are aware of the condition of this prison. I have reported on it year after year. As long as five years ago, after calling attention as urgently as I dared to the state of affairs, I received orders to consult with the district architect and draw up a plan and estimates for a new prison. I did so; but you know how such things go. Letters are two or three months in reaching St. Petersburg from here. When our plans and estimates finally get there they go to the prison department, where they have to take their turn with hundreds of other documents from hundreds of other prisons in all parts of the Empire. Perhaps for months they are not even