Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/475

Rh When this great body of offenders reaches Siberia it is divided into two penal classes, viz: first, criminals who are shut up in prisons; and, secondly, criminals who are assigned places of residence, and are there liberated to find subsistence for themselves as best they may. The first of these penal classes — that of the imprisoned — comprises all the hard-labor convicts and all of the vagrants, and numbers in the aggregate 3270. The second or liberated class includes all of the forced colonists, all of the communal exiles, and most of the political and religious offenders, and numbers in the aggregate nearly seven thousand.

It is manifest, I think, that when a flood of ten thousand vagrants, thieves, counterfeiters, burglars, highway robbers, and murderers is poured into a colony, the class most injurious to the welfare of that colony is the liberated class. If a burglar or thief is sent to Siberia and shut up in prison, he is no more dangerous to society there than he would be if he were imprisoned in European Russia. The place of his confinement is immaterial, because he has no opportunity to do evil. If, however, he is sent to Siberia and there turned loose, he resumes his criminal activity and becomes at once a menace to social order and security.

For more than half a century the people of Siberia have been groaning under the heavy burden of common criminal exile. More than two-thirds of all the crimes committed in the colony are committed by common felons who have been transported thither and then set at liberty; and the peasants, everywhere, are becoming demoralized by enforced association with thieves, burglars, counterfeiters, and embezzlers from the cities of European Russia. The honest and prosperous inhabitants of the country protest, of course, against the injustice of a system that liberates every year, at their very doors, an army of from seven to ten thousand worthless characters and felons. They do not object to the hard-labor convicts, because the latter are shut up in prisons. They do not object to the political and religious exiles,