Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/486

470 whom it exiles. The amount of money to be paid for the support of such persons is fixed at $18.25 a year per capita, or five cents a day for every exile. To what extent this would operate in practice as a restriction of communal exile I am unable to say. The Siberian Gazette was of opinion that it would affect it very slightly, and attacked the plan vigorously upon the ground of its inadequacy.

Fifth. To modify sections 17 and 20 of the penal code so as to bring them into harmony with the changes in the exile system thus provided for.

This is all that there was in the scheme of reform submitted by the prison administration to the Tsar's ministers. It was a step in the right direction, of course, but it came far short of a complete abolition of the exile system, inasmuch as it did not touch the banishment to Siberia of political offenders, nor the transportation of hard-labor convicts to the mines, nor the deportation of religious dissenters; and it restricted communal exile only to a trifling extent. But even this limited and inadequate measure of reform failed to receive the support of his Imperial Majesty's ministers, and was defeated in the Council of the Empire. The Minister of Finance opposed it in toto, and said that "the reasons assigned by Mr. Gálkine Wrásskoy for the proposed changes in the exile system are not sufficiently convincing." He made an elaborate argument against it, the substance of which may be found in the Siberian Gazette for May 20, 1888, page 4. The Minister of Justice declared that the proposed reform could not be carried out without "the essential destruction of the whole existing system of punishment for crime," and that "the substitution of imprisonment in European Russia for colonization in Siberia is impossible." Furthermore, he went out of his way to say that "exile to Siberia for political and religious offenses must be preserved."