that their demands would be complied with, the prisoners continued the golodófka. On the tenth day the state of affairs had become alarming. All of the starving men were in the last stages of physical prostration, and some of them seemed to be near their death. Count Dmitri Tolstoï, the Minister of the Interior, who had been apprised of the situation, telegraphed the commandant to keep a skórbnoi list, or “hospital sheet," setting forth the symptoms and condition of the strikers, and to inform him promptly of any marked change.[1] Every day thereafter a feldsher or hospital-steward went through the cells taking the pulse and the temperature of the starving men. On the thirteenth day of the golodófka Major Khaltúrin sent word to the wives of all the political convicts living at the Lower Diggings that they might have an interview with their husbands — the first in more than two months — if they would try to persuade them to begin taking food. They gladly assented, of course, to this condition, and were admitted to the prison. At the same time Khaltúrin went himself to the starving men and assured them, on his honor, that if they would end the hunger-strike he would do everything in his power
- ↑ I have never been able to understand why a government that is capable when irritated of treating prisoners in this way should hesitate a moment about letting them die, and thus getting rid of them. However, I believe it is a fact that in every case where political hunger-strikers have had courage and nerve enough to starve themselves to the point of death the authorities have manifested anxiety and have ultimately yielded. It is one of many similar inconsistencies in Russian penal administration. The Government seems to be sensitive to some things and brutally insensible to others. It prides itself upon its humanity in expunging the death penalty from its civil code, and yet it inflicts death constantly by sentences of courts-martial in civil cases. It has abolished the knut, but it flogs with the plet, which, according to the testimony of Russian officers, can be made to cause death in a hundred blows. It shrinks from allowing political convicts to die of self-starvation and yet it puts them to a slow death in the "stone bags” of the castle of Schlusselburg. To the practical American intelligence it would seem to be safer, as well as more humane, to order political convicts out into the prison courtyard and have them shot, than to kill them slowly under "dungeon conditions." Society would not be half so much shocked and exasperated by summary executions as it now is by suicides, hunger-strikes, and similar evidences of intolerable misery among the political convicts in prison and at the mines.
