A Russian Reformer's Fate

A man with a conscience lias suddenly emerged from the Kussian civil service. This is Pavel Birwanski, an imperial state attorney, who has recently been commissioned by the government tomake a special investigar tion of the judicial and administrativo abuses in Orenburg. An account of his experience during the four nionths which his mission occupied has been published in the Sjeverny Viestnik, and translated by the Telegraph, of London. It is a ghastly record of misgovernmeñt, heartlessness, tyranny and barbarity. The commissioner describes himself as living in "an atmosphere of appalling groans and heartrending sighs." He liberated innocent captives who had been secretly tortured and closely conflned for years after they had been' publicly acquitted in open court. lie ruceived the sworn statements of peasant women whose flesh had been pinched with red-hot tongs as a punishment for their "firesumption in pleading for their husband's Uves. He visited the state prisons, were hundreds of prisoners draped in rotten rags are condemned to lingering death without ever being allowed to know who has accused them of wrong. The roofs of these charnel houses wherein they grovel are ready to fall in upon them at any moment; the walls are lined with damp and clammy fungus; and the air in these loathsome dens is so rank and fetid from the "dirt of ages" and "exhalations from every sortof abomination" as absolutely to stop the visitor's breath. He leamed that absent-minded prisoners, who used the familiar forin of "Thou" in place of "You" in addressing the cials in charge of their dungeons, were tied to a horse's tail and flogged with thorny rods steeped in salt water, receiving sometimes as many as 125 blows. He found in the infirmarles the majority of the sick patients stretehed upon the bare boards and often among the dead bodies of their companions. "Sk) it was revealed to me," says the commissio-ier, "how our judges trample the law uuder foot; how cynical and wanton is the behavior of our pólice; how savagely brute f orce is brought to bear upon the weak and friendless." The most shocking disclosures which the commissioner makes relate to the town jail of Ilczk, not f ar f rom Orenburg. All the prisoners had been let out on one occasion to a public square, and not so much beaten as "half hammered to death," so that the populace "wept bitterly and crossed thenMelves in utter consternation." As the details of this horrible outrage are recited, they were llogged until they fainted; next they were soused with buckets of water until they regained consciousness, and then knocked about with prison keys, ironchains and rifle-stocks; and flnally they were all tied together by the f eet and driven into the prison yard, "where they feil from sheer exhaustion, in bleeding and disügured heaps." The govemor of this jail, who had ordered bis punisliment to be inflicted upon all the prisoners without exception and solely for his own amusement, was once a commissary of pólice and had beeD dismissed from the servise for shrraeful corruption; yet he had retained t ifieient influence in high quarters to S )ure another and more responsible post , where he eould satisf y the bestial insuncts of his nature and wreak his voyage vengeance upon the helpless fellow-creatures committed to his charge. The man with a conscience, who used his eyes to such good purpose, was not allowed to pursue his investigations longer than four months. He met with resistance from benen, bureau and military headquarters. He did not attempt to accomplish very much. He only aimed to give the wretched captives alittle air and a little light, and to protect them from torture and inhuman punishment. Yet he was dismissed from the public service as one of the secret allies of the nihilists, and the newspaper which published his painful narrative was suspended