APPENDIX 549

the work is domestic, and penal servitude consists merely of imprison- ment with light labor. Still less hard is the work of convicts leased to the owners of private gold-placers and salt-works. Their situation differs little from that of free laborers. Among the convicts, however, are not a few feeble or decrepit persons, who are unfit for work and who are de- pressed by sickness. Their condition is burdensome in the extreme, and for most of them I can see only one end — the grave. The prison hos- pitals and asylums are in a lamentable condition. It is greatly to be regretted that there are many children in penal servitude — children who have come from places of exile or who have been born in Siberia. At Kara there is little supervision over them, and little probabflity, on account of the lack of funds, that the children's asylum, which has been authorized, will soon become a reality. Unorganized and unregulated penal servitude of this sort fills all the surrounding country with brodydgs [runaway convicts], and overcrowds all the Siberian prisons. Even at the mines there are great numbers of recidivists, formerly convicts, who have escaped and been recaptured. The impossibility of establishing the identity of persons arrested without passports often results in the condemnation of a captured brodydg to four years of penal servitude, 1 when, before his escape, he had belonged to a class condemned to ten or more years of penal servitude. Escape, there- fore, besides giving him temporary freedom, lessens considerably his punishment, even after recapture and a new trial. When a convict finishes his term of penal servitude he goes into forced colonization in the same way that a forced colonist does if banished directly from one of the interior provinces. The Kara gold-placers are situated on the bank of the river Shilka, and steamers from the lower Amur come directly to the Kara landing. There was a project to bring convicts to Kara around the world and up the Amur ; but, although it was considered and found feasible, it has never been carried into effect for the reason that the volunteer fleet is not able to provide the necessary transportation. Penal servitude on the island of Saghalin is organized in the same way as at Kara, but the work at the former place is much harder, and the place itself is wilder and more solitary. This, with the prospect of remaining on a distant island as a settler after the completion of a term of hard labor, makes the lot of a Saghalin convict a very hard one, and one that corresponds much more nearly with the punishment which the law has in view.- It should be remembered, however, that the transpor- tation of convicts to Saghalin by sea is very convenient, and is much easier for the convict himself than the agonizing journey across the l This is the penalty for being found at 2 The number of convicts on the island large in Eastern Siberia without a pass- of Saghalin is 3000. [The number on the port, and refusing to disclose one's name 1st of January, 1889, was 5530. Author's

and previous place of residence. note.]