But little is known of it in Russia itself, not even by the members of the autocratic political family, beyond the fact of its being a dreary, frozen land of political exile, a region without light or hope for the banished.
The people shudder at the mention of it, for they have heard much of it from the broken wretches who have been fortunate enough to escape, after years of toil and suffering. They know that the innocent as well as the guilty are liable to be sent there; that thousands upon thousands have died or been murdered there by the autocrat's petty tyrants, placed there to guard and work them, and that their bones molder or bleach upon the inhospitable shores, where wolves lay in wait for the bodies of victims which are thrown where they can reach them, and thus save the trouble of burial.
A large portion of the penal colony is honey-combed with mines, which the prisoners are forced to work for the benefit of the government that has exiled them there; and thousands of poor wretches, when once forced into them, never again see the light of day, but drag out a miserable existence hundreds of feet underground.
The serfs have been nominally freed; but slavery of the most horrible and degrading kinds is rampant in Russia to-day. The press is gagged and suppressed, and no man is free to speak his opinion regarding the tyrants and their doings.
Is it any wonder the people meet in secret conclave and resort to dynamite?
After a long and dreary passage, William Barnwell was landed, with his companions in misery, not one of whom could speak English, in Siberia, more dead than alive.
They had been treated worse than cattle during transportation, and now their fortunes were on the eve of being made even worse.
However guilty the others of his party may have been, his case was one of the grossest injustice, and one that the United States would have been quick to demand satisfaction for had there been an opportunity of finding it out.
As before stated, there is no such a thing in Russia as justice. All is selfish tyranny and inborn ingratitude.
They–the members of the secret tribunal–knew that the important letter which enabled the government to arrest dangerous and wholly unsuspected enemies had been brought over by a young American gentleman, and also that his identity had been blotted out, and he sent to Siberia; but whether he was innocent or guilty, they never gave themselves the trouble to think, and so, virtually, that was the end of him, so far as they were concerned or cared; not even thanks enough for the result he had innocently brought about to inquire into his case at all.