tasks allotted to them, they were forced to live socially separated from the older inhabitants. The absence of women, moreover, among the convicts, and the refusal of the older inhabitants to give their daughters in marriage, tended to generate a moral pestilence. The Russian Government at last realized that the indiscriminate mixing of criminal exiles, harmless political exiles and peaceful colonists was a danger to society, and would be certain to breed more criminality and political discontent, and prevent the peaceful economic development of the country. As early as 1870, therefore, attention was directed towards the Siberian problem, and from that time till the end of the century the Government, by administrative action, has attempted with more or less success to prevent the mixing of criminal exiles with peaceful colonists. The convicts were henceforth confined more and more to the north-eastern territories on the Lena River and to certain parts of the Far East, while political exiles and immigrant colonists were confined to the fertile lands of Western and Central Siberia. This policy is carried out to this day, and all convicts, other than those in the prisons of European Russia, are confined to special prisons in Far Eastern and North-Eastern Siberia and to the island of Saghalien on the Pacific Coast.
Perhaps the most important factor in the social development of modern Siberia has been not the convicts, nor even the Cossacks, but the peasant immigrants from European Russia. These were divided into two classes: those who immigrated under the supervision of the authorities, and those who immigrated independently of it.
