536 SIBEEIA

first time that day] in his presence. The stench that met him was so great that, in spite of his desire to conceal from the prisoners his recog- nition of the fact that their accommodations were worse than those pro- vided for dogs, he could not at once enter the building. He ordered the opposite door to be thrown open, and did not himself enter until a strong wind had been blowing for some time through the prison. The first thing that he saw, in one corner of the corridor, was an overflowing pardsha [excrement bucket] and through the ceding was dripping filth from a similar pardsha in the story above. In that corner of the corridor he found six men lying on the floor asleep. He was simply astounded. " How can people sleep," he exclaimed, " on this wet, foul floor, and under such insupportable conditions ? " He shouted indignantly at the wai-den and other prison authorities, but he could change nothing. — " Afar," by M. I. Orfanof , pp. 220 - 222. Moscow, 1883. Scurvy constituted 13.7 per cent of all the sickness in the Verkhni IJd- insk prison in 1888. — Rep. of Chf . Pris. Dept. for 1888, p. 293. THE YENISEISK PRISONS. The following are the official statistics of sickness and mortality in all the prisons "of general type " in the province of Yeniseisk for the years 1886, 1887, and 1888. 1886. 1887. 1888. Average daily number of prisoners 1715 1877 .. 2117 Average daily number in hospital 427 . . 449 . . 445 Siek-rate —per cent 24.9 . . 23.9 . . 21 Total number of deaths 247 . . 231 . . 205 Death-rate — per cent 14.4 . . 12.3 . . 9.6 — Reps, of Chf. Pris. Adm. for years indicated, pp. 9, 9, and 9. Death-rate in railroad convict camps in North Carolina in 1879 and 1880 11.5 per cent. ; in Texas convict camps 4.7 to 5.4 per cent. — " The Convict Lease System in the Southern States," by George W. Cable, Century Magazine, vol. xxvii, p. 582. PRISONS IN GENERAL. A correspondent of the Novoe Vremya reports that, notwithstanding the recent journey through Siberia of the chief of the prison administra- tion, Mr. Galkine Wrasskoy, the unsatisfactory condition of the prisons

and of the exiles remains unchanged. The whole prison question, the