alleged that the prison doctor ascribed her death to the flogging. It is not alleged that any one who saw her after the flogging saw her terribly cut up and fainting from weakness, or giving any other indication of fatal flogging. The only evidence that the flogging, which she actually courted, was unduly severe, is that she died in three days afterward — the day when the other prisoners committed suicide. Your obedient servant,
C M.
There seems to me to be very little in the quibble that Madam Sigída was not flogged to death because, so far as we know, she did not actually die under the lash. If Mr. C M's younger sister, a cultivated, generous, im- pulsive, and patriotic young Irish girl, we will say, had been sent to the Andaman Islands for twenty years as a hard-labor convict because she had helped to maintain a secret "Home Rule" printing-office in Belfast; if, driven to despair by cruel treatment of herself and her companions in penal servitude, she had starved herself twenty-two days in order to bring about, by the only means of compulsion open to her, the removal of the officer responsible for such cruel treatment; if, finally, she had been fed by force through a rubber tube; if, in the abnormal mental condition that would naturally be caused by so terrible an experience of hunger and outrage, she had committed a breach of prison discipline ; if she had then been stripped, held by the wrists on a sol- dier's back, and flogged until she fainted; and if, at last, in an agony of helplessness, shame, and despair, she had taken her own life, I do not think that Mr. C M would re- gard it as an overstatement if I should say that his sister had been "flogged to death." But the question is unimpor- tant. It seems to me that, so far as moral responsibility is concerned, Madam Sigida and her three companions were just as truly put to death by the East-Siberian officials as if their throats had been cut in the prison courtyard by the prison executioner. You may so treat a high-spirited woman, if she is wholly in your power, that she will cer-
