Lord's Prayer. He wrote the prayer out in the form of an official document on a sheet of stamped paper, numbered it, attached the proper seal to it, and handed it to the governor with a pile of other papers which required signature. He won his wager. The governor duly signed the Lord's Prayer, and it was probably as harmless an official document as ever came out of his office.
How much of this sort of careless and reckless signing there was in the cases of political offenders dealt with by administrative process may be inferred from the fact that, when the liberal minister Loris-Melikof came into power in 1880, he found it necessary to appoint a revisory commission, under the presidency of General Cherévin, to investigate the cases of persons who had been exiled and put under police supervision by administrative process, and to correct, so far as possible, the "mistakes," "misunderstandings," and "irregularities" against which the sufferers in all parts of the empire began to protest as soon as the appointment of a new Minister of the Interior gave them some reason to hope that their complaints would be heeded. There were said to be at that time 2800 political offenders in Siberia and in various remote parts of European Russia who had been exiled and put under police surveillance by administrative process. Up to the 23d of January, 1881, General Cherévin's commission had examined the cases of 650 such persons, and had recommended that 328, or more than half of them, be immediately released and returned to their homes.[1]
Of course the only remedy for such a state of things as this is to take the investigation of political offenses out of the hands of an irresponsible police, put it into the courts, where it belongs, and allow the accused to be defended there by counsel of their own selection. This remedy, however, the Government persistently refuses to adopt. The Moscow
- ↑ An official announcement by the Government, quoted in the newspaper Sibir for Jan. 31, 1881, p. 1.
