granted me permission to inspect the Semipalátinsk prison, said he would send the chief of the police to take us to the mosques and show us about the city, and promised to have prepared for us an open letter of introduction to all the subordinate officials in the Semipalátinsk territory.
From the house of the governor I went, upon his recommendation, to the public library, an unpretending log-house in the middle of the town, where I found a small anthropological museum, a comfortable little reading-room supplied with all the Russian newspapers and magazines, and a well-chosen collection of about one thousand books, among which I was somewhat surprised to find the works of Spencer, Buckle, Lewes, Mill, Taine, Lubbock, Tylor, Huxley, Darwin, Lyell, Tyndall, Alfred Russell Wallace, Mackenzie Wallace, and Sir Henry Maine, as well as the novels and stories of Scott, Dickens, Marryat, George Eliot, George Macdonald, Anthony Trollope, Justin McCarthy, Erckmann-Chatrian, Edgar Allan Poe, and Bret Harte. The library was particularly strong in the departments of science and political economy, and the collection of books, as a whole, was in the highest degree creditable to the intelligence and taste of the people who made and used it. It gave me a better opinion of Semipalátinsk than anything that I had thus far seen or heard.[1]
- ↑ Most of the works of the scientific authors above named were expurgated Russian editions. Almost every chapter of Lecky's "History of Rationalism" had been defaced by the censor, and in a hasty examination of it I found gaps where from ten to sixty pages had been cut out bodily. Even in this mutilated form, and in the remote Siberian town of Semipalátinsk, the book was such an object of terror to a cowardly Government, that it had been quarantined by order of the Tsar, and could not be issued to a reader without special permission from the Minister of the Interior. A similar taboo had been placed upon the works of Spencer, Mill, Lewes, Lubbock, Huxley, and Lyell, notwithstanding the fact that the censor had cut out of them everything that seemed to him to have a "dangerous" or "demoralizing" tendency. I subsequently ascertained that these volumes, with more than 100 others, had been put into the index expurgatorius, and that every public librarian in the empire had been forbidden to issue them to readers. A complete list of the books thus placed under the ban will be found in Appendix B.
