after month, in dirty, overcrowded cells; plans and estimates for new buildings go back and forth, year after year, between the mines and St. Petersburg; and when, at last, a prison like that at Górni Zerentúi is authorized, work upon it drags along, in a lazy, shiftless fashion, for a whole decade, without the least apparent reason. I said one day to the resident mining-engineer at the Kutomárski Zavód, "Why don't you provide yourself with suitable iron machinery, furnish your laborers with improved modern tools, set up steam-pumping, hoisting, and ventilating apparatus, and work your mines as they ought to be worked? What is the use of pottering along in the way you do?"
"My dear sir," he replied, "do you know what iron costs here? We have to bring it with horses from Petrófski Zavód, a distance of more than 600 versts, and it costs, delivered here, 5½ rúbles a pud [about 7⅔ cents a pound]. We can't afford to put in iron machinery."
"But," I said, "is n't there iron ore in this vicinity?"
"Yes," he replied; "but it has never been gotten out."
long — ten years — in process of erection?" "The delay has been due in part," he replied, "to repeated changes of plan. The building ought not to have been made of brick, in the first place. Careful estimates show that a brick prison for 300 convicts will cost at the mines about 160,000 rúbles, while a good log prison, to accommodate the same number of men, can be built for 52,000 rúbles. A brick prison has no advantage over a wooden one in point of permanency, because when the mine near which it stands has been worked out, the building must, of necessity, be abandoned; and it is less wasteful, of course, to abandon a log prison than one made of brick. The prison at Górni Zerentúi, however, was so far advanced when I assumed the direction of the prison department that it hardly seemed worth while to suspend work upon it and begin another." Neither Mr. Gálkine Wrásskoy nor his assistant, Mr. Kokóftsef, gave me any satisfactory explanation of the delays, mistakes, and bad management generally that seemed to me to characterize the administration of prison affairs in the mining district of the Trans-Baikál. They were doing, they said, all that they could do to improve the situation; but they had inherited most of the existing evils from their official predecessors, and time enough had not elapsed for complete and sweeping reforms. It is possible that I did not fully appreciate the difficulties and embarrassments with which they had to contend; but it seemed to me that many, if not most, of the evils of the exile system in general, and of the prison administration in particular, were the result of indifference, inefficiency, and a complicated bureaucratic method of transacting public business.
