Page:Siberia and the Exile System Vol 2.djvu/57

Rh nothing "dangerous" or "prejudicial to public order" in a piano, and it was hardly to be supposed that Siberian children would become nihilists as a result of learning five-finger exercises. Governor-general Kolpakófski, however, either thought that the petitioners would undermine the loyalty of the children of Akmolínsk by teaching them revolutionary songs, or believed that destitution and misery are the natural and proper concomitants of administrative exile. He therefore replied to the letter by saying that teaching was an occupation forbidden by the "Rules Relating to Police Surveillance," and that if the administrative exiles in Akmolínsk needed work, in order to obtain the necessaries of life, they might "hire themselves out to the Kírghis, who pay from five to seven cents a day for laborers." This was almost as cruel and insulting as it would be to tell post-graduate students of the Johns Hopkins University, who had been banished without trial to the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, that if they needed employment they might catch grasshoppers for the Digger Indians.

About the same time, the political exiles in Ust Kámenogórsk asked General Kolpakófski for permission to occupy and cultivate a tract of Government land near their place of banishment. They offered to improve the land, to pay rent for it as soon as it should become productive, and to leave all their improvements to the state, without reimbursement, at the expiration of their term of exile. This, again, was a reasonable proposition, and, moreover, a proposition advantageous in every way to the state. The governor-general, however, made to it the same reply that he had made to the petition of the administrative exiles in Akmolínsk, viz., that if they needed work they might hire themselves out as day-laborers to the Cossacks.