ry, insult, and degradation heaped upon them that
patient and long-suffering humanity could bear, until my soul
sickened within me, and my spirit rose in revolt against the hateful
and inhuman tyranny that treated my people like vermin and wild
beasts, for no offence save a difference in race and creed.

"At last the shame and horror of it all got the better of my
prudence, and the righteous rage that burned within me spoke out
through my pen and my lips.

"I wrote faithful accounts of all I had seen to the committee in
England. They never reached their destination, for I was already a
marked man, and my letters were stopped and opened by the police.

"At last I one day attended a court of law, and heard one of those
travesties of justice which the Russian officials call a trial for
conspiracy.

"There was not one tittle of anything that would have been called
evidence, or that would not have been discredited and laughed out of
court in any other country in Europe; yet two of the five prisoners,
a man and a woman, were sentenced to death, and the other three, two
young students and a girl who was to have been the bride of one of
them in a few weeks' time, were doomed to five years in the mines of
Kara, and after that, if they survived it, to ten years' exile in
Sakhalin.

"So awful and so hideous did the appalling injustice seem to me,
accustomed as I was to the open fairness of the English criminal
courts, that, overcome with rage and horror, I rose to my feet as the
judge pronounced the frightful sentence, and poured forth a flood of
passionate denunciations and wild appeals to the justice of humanity
to revoke the doom of the innocent.

"Of course I was hustled out of the court and flung into the street
by the police attendants, and I groped my way back to my hotel with
eyes blinded with tears of rage and sorrow.

"That afternoon I was requested by the proprietor of the hotel to
leave before nightfall. I expostulated in vain. He simply told me
that he dared not have in his house a man who had brought himself
into collision with the police, and that I must find other lodgings
at once. This, however, I found to be no easy matter. Wherever I went
I was met with cold looks, and was refused admittance.

"Lower and lower sank my heart within me at each refusal, and the
terrible conviction forced itself upon me that I was a marked man
amidst all-powerful and unscrupulous enemies whom no Russian dare
offend. I was