virtually exempt from corporal punishment. They did not enjoy this exemption, however, by virtue of any law. Theoretically and legally they were liable to the same punishments that were inflicted upon common criminals — namely, twenty to one hundred blows with the "rods" or the plet [a heavy whip of hardened rawhide with a number of lashes]. In practice, however, it was the custom for the prison surgeon to make a pro formâ examination of the political offender who had rendered himself or herself liable to corporal punishment, and certify to the governor of the prison that, in his judgment, such offender was not strong enough to take a flogging without danger to life. Whether, as a matter of fact, this certificate was true or false, the governor always made it his warrant for substituting some other form of punishment. The Government did not venture at that time to use the whip upon the backs of educated and refined men and women, and the surgeon's certificate was a mere legal fiction, intended to relieve the prison administration from the necessity of actually enforcing its right to flog political convicts and, at the same time, to hold that right in abeyance. The issuance in March, 1888, of the order above set forth marked a new departure in the treatment of political convicts, and since that time they have been put into the same cells with thieves, burglars, and murderers, and have been flogged precisely as if they were common criminals. On the 16th of September, 1888, a little more than six months after the above order appeared, two of the very political offenders named in it — Vassílli Volnóf and Iván Meísner — were flogged at the penal establishment on the island of Saghalín as the result of a collision with the local authorities, caused by the failure of one of them to take off his cap to a petty official whom he happened to meet.
At the mines of Kará, however, Mr. Gálkine Wrásskoy's order had much more tragic consequences than these, inasmuch as it led there to the flogging to death of a cultivated
