Men who had all their lives earned their bread by the sweat of their brow found themselves under the thumb of prison inspectors, who placed them at once on an equal footing with criminals sentenced to hard labor.

In these surroundings they were sometimes kept for several weeks and then dispatched in batches to their "homes" which many of them never saw again.

At the threshold of the prisons the people belonging to the "unprivileged" estates--the artisans were almost without exception members of the "burgher class"-- had wooden handcuffs put on them....[1] It is difficult to state accurately how many people were made to endure these tortures, inflicted on them without the due process of law.

Some died in prison, pending their transportation.

Those who could manage to scrape together a few pennies left for the Pale of Settlement at their own expense.