selling from a shilling to one and ninepence a pound, according to the perfection of the tusks.
One of the travellers' especial wishes was, to have visited the town of Kiachta, the place of commerce between the Russians and the Chinese. But a note from the Governor mentioned that the Chinese had suddenly stopped all communication. But a few words may be given to a commerce so peculiar. By the treaty of Nertshinsk, a reciprocal liberty of traffic was stipulated; and accordingly caravans on the part of the Russian government, and individual traders, used to visit Pekin. But the Muscovites exhibited so much of the native habits in "drinking and roystering," that, after exhausting the patience of the Celestials during three-and-thirty years, they were wholly excluded. But a cessation of five years having taken place, the Russians in 1728 obtained a treaty, by which individuals were permitted to trade on the frontier; and Kiachta was built. But public caravans were permitted to go on to Pekin. At length, in 1762, Catherine fixed the grand emporium at Kiachta.
This town, standing on a beach of the same name, is within about half a furlong of the Chinese village of Maimatschin, (about the fiftieth parallel of latitude,) being one thousand miles from Pekin, and four thousand from Moscow. Such are the enormous distances through which the eagerness for money-making drives the children of men.
The materials of the Russian traffic are furs, woollens, cottons, linen, &c., with articles in tin, copper, iron, &c.—the whole amounting to about nineteen millions of rubles. The Chinese products are tea, silks, sugar-candy, &c.—nominally to the amount of seven millions of rubles, but probably rising to thrice the value. The chief time of the market is the winter. To the chief Russian merchants this is a species of monopoly, and a most thriving one, some of them being millionnaires, and living in the most sumptuous manner, the "merchant princes" of the wilderness!
We had some curiosity to know the condition of the exiles to Siberia from this intelligent eye-witness. But he gives little more than a glance to a subject on which the public mind of England is at present so much engaged. In Russia corporal punishment is much in use; but criminals are seldom put to death. They are marched off to Siberia for every kind of offence, from the highest political crime to petty larceny. The most heinous offenders are sent to the mines; those guilty of minor delinquencies are settled in villages, or on farms; and those guilty of having opinions different from those of the government—statesmen, authors, and soldiers—are generally suffered to establish themselves in little knots, where they spread refinement through the country. The consequence is, that "all grades of society are decidedly more intelligent than the corresponding grades in any other part of the empire, and perhaps more so than in most parts of Europe."
Many of the exiles are now men of large income.—"The dwelling in which we breakfasted to-day," says the traveller, "was that of a person who had been sent to Siberia against his will. Finding that there was but one way of bettering his condition, he worked hard, and behaved well. He had now a comfortably furnished house and a well-cultivated farm, while a stout wife, and plenty of servants, bustled about the premises. His son had just arrived from St Petersburg, to visit his exiled father, and had the pleasure of seeing him amid all the comforts of life, reaping an abundant harvest, and with one hundred and forty persons in his pay!"
He adds, "In fact, for the reforming of the criminal, in addition to the punishment of the crime, Siberia is undoubtedly the best penitentiary in the world. When not bad enough for the mines, each exile is provided with an allotment of ground, a house, a horse, two cows, agricultural implements, and, for the first year, with provisions. For three years he pays no taxes whatever, and for the next ten, only half the full amount. To bring fear as well as hope to operate in his favour, he clearly understands, that his very first slip will send him from his home and family, to toil in the mines. Thus does the government bestow an almost paternal care on the less atrocious criminals."
Yet with this knowledge before the British Government,—for we must presume that they had not overlooked the condition of the Russian exiles; and with the still more impressive knowledge of the growth of our Australian colonies, and the improvement of the convicts; the new-fangled and most costly plan is now to be adopted of reforming our criminals by keeping them at home! Thus we are to save the national expenditure by building huge penitentiaries, which will cost millions of money, and to secure society from depredation, by annually pouring out from those prisons, as the time of their sentences expires, the whole crowd of villany to live on villany once more;—making the very streets a place of danger, and filling the country with hungry crime.
The only argument on the opposite side is, that the free settlers are offended by finding themselves in a population of convicts. But to this the obvious answer is, that the colonisation of Australia was originally intended as a school of reform—that the convicts have been to a great extent reformed, which they never would have been at home—that the convicts were in the colony first, and that the settlers going there, with their eyes open, have no reason to complain.
We then have a Notice on another subject, which is at present engrossing the speculations of all Europe, namely, the gold-country on the Yenissei. Krasnoyayk, the capital, stands in a plain in the centre of the district, where the mania of gold-washing broke out about fifteen years ago. Some individuals have been singularly lucky in their search. One person, after having laboured in vain for three years, and expending a million and a half of rubles, suddenly, in this very year, had hit upon a depot which gave him a hundred and fifty poods of gold—worth thirty-five thousand rubles each, or five millions and a half of rubles. Gold here measures every thing: a lady's charms are by weight, "a pood is a good girl, and two or three poods are twice or thrice as good as a wife." This province alone has, in this year, yielded five hundred poods of gold.
Ekaterineburg is the centre of the mining district of the Uralian mountains. The population amounts to about fourteen thousand, who are all connected with the mines. The town has an iron foundery, a mint for copper and silver coin, and various establishments for cutting marble, porphyry, and polishing precious stones. The neighbouring mountains appear to be nature's richest repository of minerals, yielding, in great abundance, diamonds, amethysts, topazes, &c.; gold, silver, iron, and platina. These inexhaustible treasures chiefly belong to Count Demidoff and M. Yakovleff. The Count is said to receive half a million sterling a-year from this princely property.
Hurrying now towards England, with the anxiety which every one feels to reach home as the end of a long journey seems to be nigh, the traveller passed through Kazan, second in national honour to Moscow, but found it in ashes from a late fire. He then hurried on to Nishney-Novgorod, the place of the greatest fair in the world, where the traffic brings traders from the ends of the earth, and where the trade amounts to nineteen millions sterling a-year. He then traversed the property of General Sheremetieff, an estate of two days' journey, with a hundred thousand serfs—a comfortable race when under a good master, each head of a family having a farm, and paying its rent, part in produce and part in work. The people appear to be a gay race—singing every where; singing on the roads, singing at work, and singing at cutting up their cabbages for the national luxury of saurkraut.
At length was seen looming in the west, with all its steeples and domes, the queen of the wilderness, Moscow the Magnificent—the most frequently-burned of all cities, and, as Sir George observes, the most retaliatory on the burners—it having been burned to embers four times, and each time having seen the incendiary nation ruined. It must be admitted, however, that the revenge, however sure, was slow, for it seldom occurred in less than a couple of centuries!—Napoleon's fate being the only instance of promptitude on this point.
From Moscow to St Petersburg, a macadamised road of seven hundred versts conveyed the traveller to the northern city of the Czar, where, on the 8th of October, he terminated a journey from Ochotsk, of about seven thousand miles. In eight days from St Petersburg he reached Hamburg, and in five days more arrived in London, having rounded the globe in a period of nineteen months and twenty-six days!
We have given an abstract of this work with the more satisfaction, that it not merely
