fever, excitement, or the maddening effect of long solitary confinement, and that he frequently heard his cries when he was put into a strait-jacket or strapped to his bed by the fortress guard.
In October, 1878, Muíshkin was finally tried with "the 193" before a special session of the Governing Senate. All of the political prisoners brought to the bar on the occasion of this famous trial insisted that the public should be admitted to hear the proceedings, and that they — the prisoners — should be allowed to have their own stenographer. The Government declined to accede to either of these demands, and, as a consequence, most of the politicals refused to make any defense or to take any part in the proceedings. At the end of the trial Muíshkin, when asked if he had any last words to say, made a fiery speech denouncing the secrecy of the trial, and declaring that they did not desire nor expect to escape punishment, but thought they had a right to ask that they be tried in open court and that their case be laid before the people through the press. As soon as Muíshkin began to attack the Government he was ordered by the presiding judge to be silent, and when he refused, and insisted upon his right to be heard, the gendarmes were directed to remove him from the court-room. The last words he uttered before he was choked into silence and dragged out were: "This court is worse than a house of ill-fame; there they sell only bodies, but here you prostitute honor, and justice, and law!" For his original offense, aggravated by this outrageous insult to the court, Muíshkin was sentenced to ten years of penal servitude with deprivation of all civil rights, and was shortly afterwards incarcerated in the central convict prison at Kharkóf.[1] I have not space for even the briefest description of the sufferings of the political convicts in that prison. The story has been writ ten by one of them and published surreptitiously in
- ↑ A brief summary of Muíshkin's speech and a description of this scene were published in the New-York Tribune for March 7 or 8, 1878.
