officials don't take suggestions very kindly—especially from their subordinates."[1]
Since my return from Siberia an attempt has been made to secure certainty of identification in criminal parties by means of small photographs of the convicts attached to their statéini spíski, but I do not know how it has resulted.
Deportation by étape in Siberia is attended by miseries and humiliations of which a European or an American reader can form only a faint conception. I had many opportunities, during our journey from Tomsk to Irkútsk, to see convicts on the march in sunshine and in rain; to inspect the wretched étapes in which they were herded like cattle at night; to visit the lazarets where they sometimes lie sick for weeks without skilled medical attention or proper care; and to talk with intelligent officers of the prison department who had been familiar for years with every feature of the exile system. The result of my investigation was a deliberate conviction that the suffering involved in the present method of transporting criminals to Siberia is not paralleled by anything of the kind that now exists in the civilized world outside of the Russian Empire. Some of this suffering is due, of course, to negligence, indifference, or official corruption; but a very large part of it is the necessary result of a bad and cruel system, and it can be removed only by the complete abolition of the system itself, and by the substitution for it of imprisonment for life
- ↑ This remark, "Our high officials don't take suggestions very kindly," was made to me, in substance, by at least a dozen experienced officers of the exile administration in Siberia, including the inspector of exile transportation, the warden of one of the largest of the convict prisons, and two successive governors of the Kará mines, I have, in my note-books, a score or more of suggestions made by these officers to their superiors with regard to methods of reforming the exile system, or of dealing with some of the evils that had been found, in practice, to arise. Most of these suggestions seemed to me to be wise and judicious, and all of them deserved serious and attentive consideration. Not one, so far as I know, was ever adopted, and in several cases the higher authorities distinctly intimated to their over-zealous subordinates that when they—the higher authorities—felt themselves to be in need of information or advice, they would make a requisition for it in due form.
