the Tiflis Geographical Society on the liberation of slaves in the Caucasus, and he will see how the Russian Government has accomplished it; and we have no reason to suppose that it has been accomplished better in Central Asia.

As to the agrarian relations, perhaps nowhere in Europe have they the same importance as in Central Asia, on account of the necessities of co-operative work and common agreement for the digging out and utilisation of irrigation-canals. In such countries, the slightest error of the administration in agrarian contests may have, and often has had on the Caucasus and in Russian Turkistan, countless consequences; a simple error, a confirmation of supposed rights, turns a rich garden into a desert. All European administrations are liable to such errors as soon as they come into contact with the Mohammedan agrarian law, and their consequences are too well known with regard to India to dwell upon. True that, as a rule, the Russian Administration, familiarised at home with village communities, does not interfere much with agrarian questions among the Mohammedan population which falls under its rule. But the direction prevailing at St. Petersburg with regard to agrarian questions is continually changing. For ten years the St. Petersburg rulers may favour self-government in villages, they may take the village communities under their protection; but for the next twenty years they will abandon the peasants; they will rely in the newly-conquered regions upon an aristocracy they will try to -create at the expense of the labourer. The history of the Caucasus is nothing but a series of such oscillations, which resulted in the growth of the Kabardian feudal system and the servitude of the Ossetians.

In Russian Turkistan, too, the reckless confirmation of imaginary rights in land which was carried on on a great scale at the beginning (we do not know if it continues) endangered the very existence of the Uzbeg villages. And one cannot but remember, when speaking on this subject, the scandalous robbery of Bashkir lands which was carried on for years at Orenburg and became known only when the Bashkir people were deprived of their means of existence. Of course, the cruelties of a khan at Khiva, or of a Persian shah, will not · be repeated under Russian rule; but the creation of a Turcoman, a Khivan, and a Bokharian aristocracy, adding the temptations of European luxury to Asiatic pomp, surely will be a much greater evil for the Central-Asian labourers than the atrocities of a khan. With regard to Russian administration itself, we must certainly admit that during the first years after a conquest the choice of administrators. is not very bad; but as time goes on and all enters into smooth water one will be perplexed to make his choice between them and the officials of a khan. Finally, the time is not far off when Russia will send to Central Asia her merchants, who will ruin whole populations, of which we may see plenty of proofs in Siberia,

and not only in Siberia, but also everywhere else where Europeans have made their appearance.

And what, on the other side, could England give? It is time, quite time, to cease repeating loud words about civilisation and progress, and closely to examine what British rule has done in India. Progress is not measured by the lengths of railways and the bushels of corn exported. It is time to examine what the creation of the class of zamindars, followed by the sub-infeudation and subdivision of rights, which is so well described by Sir John Phear, has produced in Bengal. It is time to ask ourselves whether the millions of Bengal have, each of them, even the handful of rice they need to live. upon. It is not enough to admire at the Indian Museum in London the ivory chairs and chess-boards brought from India by Mr. A. and Mr. B., and each piece of which represents a human life. It is time that the English people should consider and meditate over the model of an Indian bazaar exhibited at the same Museum, and ask themselves how it happens that the incredible riches exhibited in the rooms were brought about by the same naked and starving people who are represented in the bazaar around a woman whose whole trading-stock consists of a few handfuls of rice in a bowl. Perhaps they will discover that the very origin of the above riches must be sought for in the nakedness of the starving human figures whose portraits were exhibited in 1877 at the doors of the Mansion House. And perhaps they will agree then that, before carrying our present civilisation to Central Asia and India, we might do better to carry it to the savages who inhabit the den-holes of Moscow and Whitechapel.

P. KROPOTKIN.

VARIATIONS IN THE PUNISHMENT
OF CRIME.

It was lately suggested by the Home Secretary, both in the House of Commons and in papers officially communicated to the judges to which I am permitted to refer, that, crime having diminished, sentences might be less severe, and that sentences for similar offences should be more uniform than they are at present. He also suggested that it would be a good thing if the Lord Chancellor, in consultation with the judges, found it possible if any general rules in this matter, subject of course to the necessary exceptions in particular cases, should be safely laid down, so as to lead to greater uniformity of practice.'

The matter is one which is not only specially-I might almost say supremely interesting to a judge; but it is one on which he has a `kind and degree of experience altogether peculiar to his own position. No one but the judge who actually passes the sentence knows the difficulties by which he is surrounded in doing so, or the considerations by which the discretion entrusted to him is in fact guided. He soon learns that no one who does not listen attentively to a trial from end to end can really form much of an opinion on what ought to be its practical result, and that nothing can be more deceptive and incomplete than the accounts of it which are given in newspapers, necessarily in a highly condensed form, and constantly omitting circumstances which, though of little interest to the public, have much to do with the sentence.

The importance of the question to which Sir William Harcourt has directed attention is undeniable, but I feel that the solution of it must be slow, gradual, and partial, and that to attempt to solve it in any trenchant, conclusive manner would be a great mistake, and, indeed, a great public misfortune. It cannot be dealt with at all until its real nature and the difficulties which beset it. are fully understood and solved-so far as they are capable of solution— one by one. A few specific suggestions may, I think, be made, and these I will mention in their place in the course of this article; but the most important and general conclusions may, I think, be thus stated. No grounds have been shown for a general reduction of sentences; and uniformity of sentences could be secured only by a

minute and fundamentally arbitrary legislation, which, practically speaking, it would be impossible to enact, or to administer in a satisfactory manner if it were enacted.

The only reason suggested for a general diminution in the severity of punishments is that there has been of late years a diminution of crime. I cannot myself follow the argument. The efficiency of punishment in the prevention of crime may, of course, be overrated. No doubt many other circumstances have had an influence in that direction; but surely the fear of punishment can hardly be denied to be one of the influences which restrain people from committing crimes, and the proposal to diminish its severity because it appears to be obtaining its object is to me unintelligible. A diminution in crime might be a good ground for reducing the number of the police, or the number of the prisons, or the number of judges and magistrates; but I do not see what it has to do with the severity of punishment. The vigilance of the police has contributed to check crime. Ought the police to be less vigilant because crime has become less common?

It seems to me undesirable to put forward such proposals, except upon most mature reflection and with reference to definite suggestions for the alteration of the law. The administration of criminal justice is necessarily the most invidious part of the whole government of the country. Nothing can be more easy than to raise a cry against it as being over-severe. Nothing can more effectually weaken the hands of those who administer it or diminish the moral weight attaching to their sentences. Moreover such criticism must always, from the nature of the case, be criticism in the dark. The widest experience can bear only upon what has happened. It is impossible for anyone to be sure as to what has not happened. How can anyone know what has been the operation of the present system in the way of preventing crime by intimidating those who intended to commit crimes? I have heard of particular cases in which severe punishments of crimes once common in particular places had been followed by a great diminution of the number of such crimes in those places, and in which the converse has happened after unusually light sentences. How far in these instances post implied propter it is of course difficult to say; but the sudden adoption of a great change in the severity of sentences without any other reason for it than a diminution of crime would, I should think, operate as an invitation to all persons hesitating on the brink of dishonesty or violence to take courage and sin vigorously, as it would be understood as an official announcement of the doctrine that the objections to crime have been overrated, and that it is not after all such a serious matter as it has hitherto been supposed to be.

Those who have to superintend the actual execution of sentences of imprisonment and penal servitude are under a special temptation to underrate the preventive effect of punishment-a

temptation which it is specially difficult for humane and amiable men to resist. In the discharge of their duty they have to concern themselves principally with the effects produced by the punishments which they have to inflict upon the individuals on whom they are inflicted, and they are probably quite right in thinking that, if regard is had to them only, a shorter sentence would have as much moral effect as a rather longer one. A man who has been sentenced to penal servitude may very probably have broken off bad associations and habits as effectually, and have learnt all he is capable of learning in the way of discipline and self-restraint as fully, and have received nearly as strong a warning against a repetition of his offences, at the end of a five years' sentence as at the end of a seven years' sentence; and from this it is easy to argue that a sentence for five years would have answered every purpose as well as a sentence for seven years. It may also be argued with much plausibility that very long sentences-fourteen years, twenty years, penal servitude for life-can never do good to the criminal. To undergo the discipline of a convict prison for a long term of years, and to have no other society than that of convicts for all those years, can never be anything but a terrible evil to anybody; but punishment is not intended to benefit the sufferer. It is distinctly intended, to a certain extent, to injure him for the good of others; and this consideration enters more or less into almost all punishments, and is the dominant one in the cases in which punishments of great severity are inflicted. It reaches its highest point in the case of the punishment of death. Very long sentences of penal servitude have no doubt much in common with the punishment of death. They are intended to prevent the criminal from repeating his offence, at all events for many years, and also to set upon his crime a mark of infamy, and to ratify and approve as far as a judicial sentence can the feeling of indignation and disgust which great crimes produce in the public mind. There is nothing in the administration of a convict prison to bring these matters before the minds of those who are charged with that duty. It is unavoidable that the judge should have his attention more strongly directed to the crime, and that the officials of the prison department should think more of the criminals. Neither point of view should be neglected, but the point of view most likely to be neglected in the present day is that of the judge. The whole tone of every kind of appeal to the public, by literature and art, by public speaking, has for a generation or more been on the side of pity. The whole tendency of the age is in the direction of regarding vice and crime rather as diseases qualifying their unfortunate victim for a hospital than as causes of just hatred and vindictive punishment. There is no arguing on questions of feeling and temperament. The common ground on which alone such a question as that of the proper amount of legal punishment can be discussed is that it should be enough to prevent