Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/387

Rh The late Colonel Zagárin, inspector of exile transportation for Eastern Siberia, told me in the course of a long conversation that we had on the subject in Krasnoyársk, that in 1882 or 1883 he made a detailed report to Governor-general Anúchin in which he set forth the evils of the present system of forwarding exiles on foot the year round at the rate of only one party a week, and recommended that the Government restrict the deportation of criminals to the summer months, and then forward them swiftly to their destinations in wagons with relays of horses at the rate of a party every day. He showed conclusively to the governor-general, he said, by means of official statistics and contractors' estimates, that the cost of carrying the annual quota of exiles in wagons from Áchinsk to Irkútsk [780 miles] during the summer months would be fourteen rúbles less per capita, and more than 100,000 rúbles less per annum, than the cost of sending them over the same distance on foot in the usual way. Besides this lessening of expense, there would be a saving, he said, of at least sixty days in the time occupied by the journey, to say nothing of the economy of human life that would be effected by shortening the period of confinement in the forwarding prisons and étapes, and by making the season of exile-travel coincide