action that was wholly innocent in the first place, and that ought not to have been punished at all. The chinóvniks in the office of the governor-general had no time to investigate or to make discriminations. The orders were to banish to Siberia all persons then under police surveillance; and if they should once begin to inquire, and investigate, and grant hearings, they would never get anybody banished at all. If he felt aggrieved he could send a petition to the Minister of the Interior from Siberia. All the young man's efforts to get his case reconsidered on its merits were fruitless, and in the summer of 1879 he was sent to Eastern Siberia by administrative process. In the prison of Krasnoyársk, where the exile party to which he belonged was detained for a few days, a misunderstanding of some sort arose between the prison officials and the politicals, in the course of which the latter became insubordinate and turbulent. The inspector of exile transportation came to the prison in a state of semi-intoxication to quiet the disturbance, and while he was haranguing and threatening the politicals, one of them exclaimed ironically, "Vazhno!" which may be rendered in English, "How important we are!" The inspector was beside himself with fury, and, not being able to find out who had uttered the offensive exclamation, he caused all the prisoners in that kámera to be sent to the sub-arctic territory of Yakútsk. The young student from Kiev was not a political and had taken no active part in the disorder, but he happened to be in the cell from which the ironical cry, "Vazhno!" came, and that circumstance alone was sufficient to send him to the arctic regions. In the next five years of enforced solitude he had ample time to reflect upon the danger of falling under suspicion in a country where the will of a chinóvnik is the law of the land, and where patriotic admiration for a great general may be punished as severely as an assault with intent to kill. The Persian poet Saadi, who evidently saw practised at Bagdad in the twelfth century the same governmental
