Page:Taras Bulba. A Tale of the Cossacks. 1916.djvu/18

12 the Ukraina of that age played the part taken by Siberia at a later day, and received all criminals and undesirable persons banished to protect the rights of others, to save the peace, and to settle the Border Marches: the "bad men" were given a chance to rehabilitate themselves in a prison whose roof was the sky, whose walls were the horizon. With modifications, the description of conditions applies, with much accuracy to our own Western frontier, save that residence there was not compulsory. The local authorities were strictly forbidden to tamper with these wild colonists.

Then, when Tzar Boris Godunov, after usurping the throne, instituted serfdom (about 1592)—almost, under prevailing conditions, justifiable as a measure of state—every peasant who rebelled against being bound to the glebe fled to the Kamarynskaya. The Great Famine of 1601–3 sent more recruits. The district was conveniently near home for the immigrants, and fell into the category of "Crown Lands," so that serfdom was not established there. Naturally, also, no one was particularly anxious to own the sort of people who belonged there. In this throng, which comprised all sorts and conditions of men, the criminal element predominated. The scum came to the surface in the form of robber-bands, before whom the few peaceful inhabitants of the Ukraina—and