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the accounts of the “Prikas” (the Bureau of Deportation)
as to the number of exiles who had crossed the border
into this promised land. But what more was needed to
construe brilliant results? It was shown that up to 1850
about half-a-million of exiles—of more or less dangerous
subjects in other words—had been expatriated. According to
the laws of natural increase, the system would thus have
added more than a million to the population of Siberia —
truly a great and important reinforcement for so thinly
peopled a country!
In Russia it was naively believed that the exiles on the
other side of the Urals were all living in the places whither
they had been sent, cultivating the soil, building homes,
increasing and multiplying, and generally behaving
themselves in a most satisfactory and model fashion. If the
subject were not so hopelessly melancholy, the rose-coloured
effusions published in Moscow and St. Petersburg in early
days about the great blessings and success of this ingenious
system—which satisfied alike the criminalists, the
representatives of the reform-principle, and the humanitarians—would
form amusing reading. Such highly laudatory opinions
from such differing and irreconcilable sources ought, it is
true, to have aroused suspicion in the minds of thinking
people, but on the contrary, they contributed to strengthen
the faith in the infallibility of the system. Now and then
a voice crying in the wilderness of the awful misery
prevailing reached the ears of the authorities, but these voices
were soon silenced for ever, or overpowered by the
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