Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/477

Rh of old-resident burghers, and especially the young, some of whom already have taken the criminal infection."

The Ishím town council expressed itself with regard to the subject as follows: "The greater part of the exiles have not even means to pay for an identification-paper, and they roam about the town and the district, begging, thieving, robbing, and trying to excite sympathy or inspire terror by calling themselves brodyágs. The wickedness of these exile inhabitants of Ishím is so notorious that it has passed into a proverb; and travelers, while they are yet hundreds of versts away, are warned to be particularly cautious and watchful while passing through our town."

The burghers' society of Kurgán protested vigorously against a continuance of the practice of colonizing criminals in their town, and declared that the exiles were, in every sense of the words, "a homeless and houseless proletariat and a scourge to the community." They not only were lazy, tricky, depraved, and dissipated, but they were everywhere the corrupters of the young and the sowers of the seeds of crime in the families of the old residents.

The statements of the West-Siberian town councils and burghers' societies need no other confirmation than the statistics of vagrancy and crime in the books of the Siberian police-stations, the records of the local exile bureaus, and the columns of the Siberian newspapers. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Siberia literally swarms with brodyádgs, escaped exiles, and runaway convicts of the worst class. Thousands of forced colonists leave the places where they are enrolled on the very next day after their arrival.