social evolution of Siberia in the hands of these early settlers. It has not infrequently happened that nations emerging from a mediæval social state, and having an Imperial future before them, use the undesirable portion of their population as a means of colonizing the outlying portions of their empires. The tsars, therefore, in the middle of the seventeenth century, were by no means exceptional in sending convicts to Siberia, and the practice thus begun, was continued in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even the story of Yermak leaves one in doubt whether he should be classed as a convict exile or as a Cossack, who had been sent to conquer the Tartars. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries not only were criminals thus exiled, but prisoners of war from the western frontiers—Poles, Letts, Germans and Swedes—were banished to the wild regions of the East. Such was the zeal for colonizing the new eastern territories that even the lowest and worst criminals were utilized for this purpose, and in the reign of Catherine the Great the death sentence was temporarily commuted in order to give effect to this colonial policy.
This explains how it is that Siberia has come to be popularly regarded as a penal settlement. But although the convicts played their part in the early civilization of these regions, and although their influence on the little Cossack and trading communities, which sprang up side by side with them, was altogether injurious, it must not be forgotten that the immigrants from European Russia during the nineteenth century have been a counteracting force, and it is extremely doubtful whether convict colonization has left its mark on the present in-
