Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/476

460 because such offenders make the best of citizens. Their protests are aimed particularly at the communal exiles and the forced colonists. Nearly all of the large towns in Western Siberia have sent memorials to the provincial governors, to the Minister of the Interior, or to the Crown, asking to be relieved from the burden of criminal colonization; and in many of these memorials the evils of the exile system have been set forth with fearless candor. The burghers' society of Yalútorfsk, for example, declared that in their town there were twice as many exiles as there were honest citizens, and that the former had almost ruined the latter by means of thefts and robberies.

The burghers' society of Turínsk complained of the constantly increasing quota of exiles quartered upon them, and said that such people would soon outnumber the old residents, and would force the latter to emigrate to some region where criminals were not so plentiful. The unpaid taxes of the exiles, moreover, rested as an additional burden upon society, and especially upon its less prosperous members, while the exiles themselves, having no means of earning an honest livelihood, either gave themselves up to indolence, drunkenness, and debauchery, or were guilty of robbery and other crimes which the police were almost powerless to prevent or investigate.

The town council of Tára, in its memorial, said: "The exiles sent to Siberia from the interior provinces of Russia, either on account of their crimes or because of their bad conduct in the communes to which they belonged, have brought hither habits of laziness, drunkenness, roguery, debauchery, and violence, and sometimes even of robbery and murder; and as they are adroit and experienced criminals, they are seldom convicted in the courts. Besides all this, their evil example tempts into crime the poorer class