The above decree was in a neat copper-plate handwriting in
Russian, while beneath was the sprawling signature of the ruler of
one hundred and thirty millions of people, that signature that was
all-powerful from the gulf of Bothnia to the
Pacific—"Nicholas."
The document was the one furnished to me a year before when, at
the invitation of the Russian Government, I had gone on a mission
of inquiry into the state of the prisons in order to see, on behalf
of the British public, whether things were as black as some writers
had painted them. It had been my intention to visit the far-off
penal settlements in Northern Siberia, but having gone through some
twenty prisons in European Russia, my health had failed and I had
been compelled to return to Italy to recuperate. The document had
