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, and his heart-rending accounts of the sufferings endured by political and criminal offenders obviously called for some sort of an explanation from the Tsar's Government. A mere official denial of the charges would have been useless; a disinterested person was needed to report upon the prisons and _etapes_ which had been described as hells upon earth, and to either confirm or gainsay the statements made by the American traveller. The evidence of a Russian subject would, for obvious reasons, have met with incredulity, and it came to pass, therefore, that through the agency of Madame de Novikoff, herself a prison Directress, I was selected for a task, which although extremely interesting, subjected me to much unfavourable criticism on my return to England. Some yellow journals even went so far as to suggest that I had received payment from the Russian Government for "whitewashing" its penal system, but I fancy the following pages should conclusively disprove the existence of any monetary transactions, past or present, between the Tsar's officials and myself, to say nothing of the fact that my favourable account of the prisons of Western Siberia has been endorsed by such reliable and well-known English travellers as Dr. Lansdell and Mr. J. Y. Simpson. In fairness, however, to Mr. Kennan, I should state that my inspection of the Tomsk forwarding prison and similar establishments was made fully five years after his visit. In 1894 I again proceeded to Siberia (under similar conditions) to report upon the penal settlement on the Island of Sakhalin, the political prison of Akatui, and the mines, where only convict labour is employed, of Eastern Siberia. On this occasion I travelled from Japan to the Island of Sakhalin on board a Russian convict ship, a voyage which convinced me that the Russian criminal convict is as humanely treated and well cared for at sea as he is on land, which says a great deal. I have always maintained that were I sentenced to a term of penal servitude I would infinitely sooner serve it in (some parts of) Siberia than in England. It is not now my intention, however, to deal with the criminal question, but to describe, as accurately as I can, the life led by a handful of political exiles. There are now only two prisons throughout the Russian Empire where political prisoners are actually incarcerated,[40] one is the fortress of Schlusselburg on Lake Ladoga within a short journey of St. Petersburg, the
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