p. 8 | ABOLITION OF EXILE

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jan 1, 1902

ABOLITION OF EXILE.

The czar's edict abolishing exile to Siberia marks the advancement of a vast area of the world's available land surface to the position of a great factor in the industrial battle of the nations. The building of the Trans-Siberian railway and large voluntary migration of settlers from European Russia made Siberia as a land of exile an impossibility.

Prisoners, political or other, hereafter will be punished by imprisonment instead of by exile, and there will disappear a sentence which carried civil as well as social death to men who still lived physically. At the end of his term of imprisonment the criminal will resume his place among human beings. On the delivery of a sentence of exile the condemned practically ceased to exist. The London Spectator says: “The property of the criminal went to his heirs; the wife or husband of the criminal was free to marry again; whatever provision he had made for the guardianship of his children came at once into effect. The sense of impassable distance lay at the root of all these provisions. Family relations imply the possibility of physical contact, and Siberia was so far off, and the means of intercourse with its inhabitants so wholly wanting, that it seemed natural to assume that the criminal had actually passed out of the world.”

The system of exile has been in operation over 200 years. Avvakum, a non-conformist priest, was the first man to be banished in chains across the Urals. Nearly 2,000 persons were transported to Siberia each year during the early years of this century. In the years 1873 to 1877 the average was 18,250 a year. In 1884 there were exiled 21,104 men, followed by 1,752 women and 3,631 children, who chose to share the banishment of husbands and fathers. The total number between 1823 and 1877 was about 600,000, many of whom were buried at hard labor in the salt and coal mines. The most of the prisoners were criminals, who can measure the sea of tears shed on Siberian soil by exiles whose offense was to aim at political freedom for their country!

Much of Siberia resembles in soil and climate portions of the northern United States and southern Canada. The region is capable of supporting an immense agricultural, cattle-raising, and mining population which will maintain extensive manufacturing establishments to supply its local needs. Not many years will pass until European Russia and Siberia will contain over 200,000,000 souls.—Selected.