Contemporary Socialism

CHAPTER VIII. ANARCHISM.

The latest offspring of revolutionary opinion—and the most misshapen—is anarchism. Seven or eight years ago the word was scarcely known; but then, as if on a sudden, rumours of the anarchists and their horrid "propaganda of deed" echoed in, one upon another, from almost every country in the old world and the new. To-day they were haranguing mobs of unemployed in Lyons and Brussels under a black flag—the black flag of hunger, which, they explained, knows no law. To-morrow they were goading the peasants of Lombardy or Naples to attack the country houses of the gentry, and lay the vineyards waste. Presently they were found attempting to assassinate the German Emperor at Niederwald, or laying dynamite against the Federal Palace at Bern; or a troop of them had set off over Europe on a quixotic expedition of miscellaneous revenge on powers that be, and were reported successively as having killed a gendarme in Strasburg, a policeman in Vienna, and a head of the constabulary in Frankfort. Before these reports had time to die in our ears, fresh tales would arrive of anarchists pillaging the bakers' shops in Paris, or exulting over the murder of a mining manager at Decazeville, or flinging bombs among the police of Chicago; and it seemed as if a new party of disorder had broke loose upon the world, busier and more barbarous than any that went before it.

It is no new party, however; it is merely the extremer element in the modern socialist movement. Mr. Hyndman and other socialists would fain disclaim the anarchists altogether, and are fond of declaring that they are the very opposite of socialists—that they are individualists of the boldest stamp. But this contention will not stand. There are individualist anarchists, no doubt. The anarchists of Boston, in America, are individualists; one of the two groups of English anarchists in London is individualist; but these individualist anarchists are very few in number anywhere, and the mass of the party whose deeds made a stir on both sides of the Atlantic is undoubtedly more socialist than the socialists themselves. I have said in a previous chapter that the socialism of the present day may be correctly described in three words as Revolutionary Socialist Democracy, and in every one of these three characteristics the anarchists go beyond other socialists, instead of falling short of them. They are really more socialist, more democratic, and more revolutionary than the rest of their comrades. They are more socialist, because they are disposed to want not only common property and common production, but common enjoyment of products as well. They are more democratic, because they will have no government of any kind over the people except the people themselves—no king or committee, no representative institutions, either imperial or local, but merely every little industrial group of people managing its public affairs as it will manage its industrial work. And they are more revolutionary, for they have no faith, even temporarily, in constitutional procedure, and think making a little trouble is always the best way of bringing on a big revolution. Other socialists prepare the way for revolution by a propaganda of word; but the anarchists believe they can hasten the day best by the propaganda of deed. Like the violent sections of all other parties, they injure and discredit the party they belong to, and they often attack the more moderate section with greater bitterness than their common enemy; but they certainly belong to socialism, both in origin and in principle. There were anarchists among the Young Hegelian socialists of Germany fifty years ago. The Anti-socialist Laws bred a swarm of anarchists among the German socialists in 1880, who left under Most and Hasselmann, and carried to America the seed which led to the outrages of Chicago. The Russian nihilists were anarchists from the beginning; they broke up the International with their anarchism twenty years ago, and they are among the chief disseminators of anarchism in England and France to-day, because to the Russians anarchism is only the socialism and the democracy of the rural communes in which they were born. Socialists themselves are often obliged to admit the embarrassing affinity. Dr. and Mrs. Aveling complain, in their "Labour Movement in America," that while "the Chicago capitalist wanted us to be hanged after we had landed, Herr Most's paper, Die Freiheit, was for shooting us at sight"; that "anarchism ruined the International movement, threw back the Spanish, Italian, and French movements for many years, has proved a hindrance in America, and so much or so little of it as exists in England is found by the revolutionary socialist party a decided nuisance"; but they admit that "well nigh every word spoken by the chief defendants at the Chicago trial could be endorsed by socialists, for they then preached not anarchism, but socialism. Indeed," they add, "he that will compare the fine speech by Parsons in 1886 with that of Liebknecht at the high treason trial at Leipzig will find the two practically identical."

So far, then, as their socialism goes, there is admittedly no real difference between Parsons, the Chicago anarchist, and Liebknecht, the leader of the German socialists. Indeed, as I have said, the anarchists seem to show a tendency even to outbid the socialists in their socialism. Socialists generally say that, while committing all production to the public authority, they have no idea of interfering with liberty of consumption. Their opponents argue, in reply, that they would find an interference with consumption to be an inevitable result of their systematic regulation of production; but they themselves always repudiate that conclusion. They would make all the instruments of production common property, but leave all the materials of enjoyment individual property still. Ground rents, for example, would belong to the public; but every man would own his own house and furniture, at least for life, if he had built it by his own labour, or bought it from his own savings, because a dwelling house is not an instrument of production, but an article of enjoyment or consumption. But some of the more representative spokesmen of the anarchists would not leave this last remnant of private property standing, and strongly contend for the old primitive plan, still in use among savage tribes, of giving those who are in want of anything a claim—a right—to share the enjoyment of it with those who happen to have it. They would municipalize the houses as well as the ground rents, and no one should be allowed a right to a spare bed or a disengaged sofa so long as one of the least of his brethren huddled on straw in a garret in the slums, or slept out on a bench in Trafalgar Square. In a recent number of Freedom, for example, Prince Krapotkin announces that "the first task of the Revolution will be to arrange things so as to share the accommodation of available houses according to the needs of the inhabitants of the city, to clear out the slums and fully occupy the villas and mansions." Anarchist opinions are no doubt capricious and variable. There are as many anarchisms as there are anarchists, it has been said. But this tendency to go further than other socialists, in superseding individual by common property, has repeatedly appeared in some of their most representative utterances.

The Jurassian Federation of the International adopted a resolution at their Congress in 1880, in which they say: "We desire collectivism, with all its logical consequences, not only in the sense of the collective appropriation of instruments of production, but also of the collective enjoyment and consumption of products. Anarchist communism will in this way be the necessary and inevitable consequence of the social revolution, and the expression of the new civilization which that revolution will inaugurate."

Their principal difference with the other branch of the socialists, however,—and that from which they derive their name—is upon the government of the socialistic society. Anarchy as a principle of political philosophy was first advocated by Proudhon, and he meant by it, not of course a state of chaos or disorder, but merely a state without separate political or civil institutions,—"a state of order without a set government." "The expression, anarchic government," he says, "implies a sort of contradiction. The thing seems impossible, and the idea absurd; but there is really nothing at fault here but the language. The idea of anarchy in politics is quite as rational and positive as any other. It consists in this,—that the political function be re-absorbed in the industrial, and in that case social order would ensue spontaneously out of the simple operation of transactions and exchanges. Every man might then be justly called autocrat of himself, which is the extreme reverse of monarchical absolutism" ("Die Princip Federatif," p. 29). He distinguishes anarchy from democracy and from communistic government, though his distinctions are not easy to apprehend exactly. Communism, he says, is the government of all by all; democracy, the government of all by each; and anarchy, the government of each by each. Anarchy is, in his opinion, the only real form of self-government. People would manage their own public affairs together like partners in a business, and no one would be subject to the authority of another. Government is considered a mere detail of industrial management; and the industrial management is considered to be in the hands of all who co-operate in the industry. The specific preference of anarchism, therefore, seems to be for some form of direct government by the people, in place of any form of central, superior, or representative government; and naturally its political communities must be small in size, though they may be left to league together, if they choose, in free and somewhat loose federations. The anarchists are accordingly more democratic in their political theory than the socialists more strictly so called, inasmuch as they would give the people more hand in the work of government, though of course they preposterously underrate the need and difficulty of that work.

On some minor points they contradict one another, and quite as often contradict themselves. Proudhon, for example, would still, even in anarchist society, retain the local policeman and magistrate; but anarchists of a stricter doctrine would either have every man carry his own pistol and provide for his own security, or, as the Boston anarchists prefer, apparently, would have public security supplied like any other commodity by an ordinary mercantile association—in Proudhon's words, "by the simple operation of transactions and exchanges." Emerson said the day was coming when the world would do without the paraphernalia of courts and parliaments, and a man who liked the profession would merely put a sign over his door, "John Smith, King." This is too much division of function however for anarchists generally, and they would have every industrial group do its government as it did its business by general co-operation. Just as in Russia every rural commune has its own trade, and the inhabitants of one are all shoemakers, while the inhabitants of another are all tailors, so in anarchist society, according to the more advanced doctrine, every separate group would have its own separate industry, because, in fact, the separate industry makes it a separate group. And it would be managed by all its members together, not by anything in the nature of a board, for it is important to recollect that anarchists of the purest water entertain as much objection to the domination of a vestry or a town council as to that of a king or a cabinet. Some who side with them, especially old supporters of the French Revolutionary Commune, have still a certain belief in a municipal council; but the Russian anarchists, at any rate, look upon this as a piece of faithless accommodation. Prince Krapotkin, I have already mentioned, thinks the first business of the contemplated revolution must be to redistribute the dwelling houses, so as to thin the slums and quarter their surplus population in the incompletely occupied villas or mansions of the West End. That is a very large task, which it will seem, to an ordinary mind, obviously impossible for the vast population of a great city like London to execute in their own proper persons at an enormous town meeting; yet, if I understand Prince Krapotkin, it is this preposterous proposal he is actually offering as a serious contribution to a more perfect system of government. "For," says he, "sixty elected persons sitting round a table and calling themselves a Municipal Council cannot arrange the matter on paper. It must be arranged by the people themselves, freely uniting to settle the question for each block of houses, each street, and proceeding by agreement from the single to the compound, from the parts to the whole; all having their voice in the arrangements, and putting in their claims with those of their fellow-citizens; just as the Russian peasants settle the periodical repartition of the communal lands." And how do the Russian peasants settle the periodical repartition of the communal lands? Stepniak gives us a very interesting description of a meeting of a Russian mir in his "Russia Under the Tsars" (vol. i. p. 2).

"The meetings of the village communes, like those of the Landesgemeinde of the primitive Swiss cantons, are held under the vault of heaven, before the Starosta's house, before a tavern, or at any other convenient place. The thing that most strikes a person who is present for the first time at one of these meetings is the utter confusion which seems to characterize its proceedings. Chairman there is none. The debates are scenes of the wildest disorder. After the convener has explained his reasons for calling the meeting, everybody rushes in to express his opinion, and for a while the debate resembles a free fight of pugilists. The right of speaking belongs to him who can command attention. If an orator pleases his audience, interrupters are promptly silenced; but if he says nothing worth hearing, nobody heeds him, and he is shut up. When the question is somewhat of a burning one, and the meeting begins to grow warm, all speak at once, and none listen. On these occasions the assembly breaks up into groups, each of which discusses the subject on its own account. Everybody shouts his arguments at the top of his voice. Charges and objurgations, words of contumely and derision, are heard on every hand, and a wild uproar goes on from which it does not seem possible that any good can result.

"But this apparent confusion is of no moment. It is a necessary means to a certain end. In our village assemblies voting is unknown. Controversies are never decided by a majority of voices; every question must be settled unanimously. Hence the general debate, as well as private discussions, must be continued until a proposal is brought forward which conciliates all interests, and wins the suffrage of the entire mir. It is, moreover, evident that to reach this consummation the debates must be thorough and the subject well threshed out; and in order to overcome isolated opposition, it is essential for the advocates of conflicting views to be brought face to face, and compelled to fight out their differences in single combat."

But beneath all this tough and apparently acrimonious strife a singular spirit of forbearance reigns. The majority will not force on a premature decision. Debate may rage fast and furious day after day, but at last the din dies. A common understanding is somehow attained, and the mir pronounces its deliverance, which is accepted, in the rude belief of the peasants, as the decree of God Himself. In this way tens of thousands of Russian villages have been, no doubt, managing their own petty business with reasonable amity and success for centuries, and the political philosophy of Russian writers like Bakunin and Prince Krapotkin, who have propagated anarchism in the west of Europe, is merely the naïve suggestion that the form of government which answers not intolerably for the few trivial concerns of a primitive Russian village would answer best for the whole complex business of a great developed modern society.

The anarchists carry their dislike to authority into other fields besides the political and industrial. They will have no invisible master or ruler any more than visible. They renounce both God and the devil, and generally with an energy beyond all other revolutionists. Some of the older socialists were believers; St. Simon, Fourier, Leroux and Louis Blanc were all theists; but it is rare to find one among the socialists of the present generation, and with the anarchists an aggressive atheism seems an essential part of their way of thinking. They will own no superior power or authority of any kind—employer, ruler, deity, or law. The Anarchist Congress of Geneva in 1882 issued a manifesto, which began thus:—

"Our enemy, it is our master. Anarchists—that is to say, men without chiefs—we fight against all who are invested or wish to invest themselves with any kind of power whatsoever. Our enemy is the landlord who owns the soil and makes the peasant drudge for his profit. Our enemy is the employer who owns the workshop, and has filled it with wage-serfs. Our enemy is the State, monarchical, oligarchic, democratic, working class, with its functionaries and its services of officers, magistrates, and police. Our enemy is every abstract authority, whether called Devil or Good God, in the name of which priests have so long governed good souls. Our enemy is the law, always made for the oppression of the weak by the strong, and for the justification and consecration of crime."

Among other restraints, they entertain often a speculative opposition to the restraint of the legal family, and sometimes advocate a return to aboriginal promiscuity and relationship by mothers; but this is only an occasional element in their agitation. It is plain, however, that when law is believed to be oppression, crime and lawlessness come to be humanity.

I have now shown that the anarchists, so far from representing an opposite movement to revolutionary social democracy, are really ultra-socialist and ultra-democratic, and it seems hardly necessary to show that they are ultra-revolutionary. All social democrats contemplate an eventual revolution, but some see no objection meanwhile to take part in current politics; while others, a more witnessing generation, practise an ostentatious abstention, and call themselves political abstentionists. Some, again, think and desire that the revolution will come by peaceful and lawful means; others trust to violence alone. The anarchists outrun all. They refuse to have anything to do with any politics but revolution, and with any revolution but a violent one, and they think the one means of producing revolution now or at any future time is simply to keep exciting disorder and class hatred, assassinating State officers, setting fire to buildings, and paralyzing the bourgeoisie with fear. All anarchists are not of this sanguinary mind, and it is interesting to remember that Proudhon himself wrote Karl Marx in 1846, warning him against "making a St. Bartholomew of the proprietors," and opposed resort to revolutionary action of any kind as a means of promoting social reform. "Perhaps," he says, "we think no reform is possible without a coup de main, without what used to be called a revolution, and which is only a shake. I understand that decision and excuse it, for I held it for a long time myself, but I confess my latest studies have completely taken it away from me. I believe we have no need of any such thing in order to succeed, and that consequently we ought not to postulate revolutionary action as a means of social reform, because that pretended means is nothing more nor less than an appeal to force, to arbitrary power, and is therefore a contradiction. I state the problem thus: to restore to society, by an economic combination, the wealth which has been taken from society by another economic combination." ("Proudhon's Correspondence," ii. 198.)

But whatever individual anarchists may hold or renounce, the general view of the party is as I have stated. A meeting of 600 anarchists—chiefly Germans and Austrians, but including also some Russians, Spaniards, and Frenchmen—was held at Paris on the 20th April, 1884, and passed a resolution urgently recommending the extirpation of princes, capitalists, and parsons, by means of "the propaganda of deed."[2] The Congress held at London in 1881, which sought to re-establish the International on purely anarchist lines, adopted a declaration of principles, containing, among other things, the following: "It is matter of strict necessity to make all possible efforts to propagate by deeds the revolutionary idea and the spirit of revolt among that great section of the mass of the people which as yet takes no part in the movement, and entertains illusions about the morality and efficacy of legal means. In quitting the legal ground on which we have generally remained hitherto, in order to carry our action into the domain of illegality which is the only way leading to revolution, it is necessary to have recourse to means which are in conformity with that end.... The Congress recommends organizations and individuals constituting part of the International Working Men's Association to give great weight to the study of the technical and chemical sciences as a means of defence and attack."[3] In the first French revolution Lavoisier and other seven and twenty chemists were put to the guillotine together, on the express pretence, "We have no need of savants"; but now "Technology" is a standing heading in the anarchist journals; a revolutionary organization has its chemical department as well as its press department; and anarchist tracts often end with the standing exhortation, "Learn the use of dynamite," as socialist tracts end with the old admonition of 1848, "Proletarians of all nations, unite."

The object of this policy of violence is partly, as we see from the above quotations, to inflame the spirit of revolt and disorder in the working classes; and it is partly to terrorize the bourgeoisie, so that they may yield in pure panic all they possess. But for its expressly violent policy, anarchism would be the least formidable or offensive manifestation of contemporary socialism. For, in the first place, its specific doctrine is one which it is really difficult to get the most ordinary common sense puzzled into accepting. Men in their better mind may be ready enough to listen to specious, or even not very specious, schemes of reform that hold out a promise of extirpating misery, and in their worse mind they may be quite as prone to think that if everybody had his own, there would be fewer rich; but they are not likely to believe we can get on without law or government of any sort. Even the vainest will feel that however superfluous these institutions may be for themselves, they are still unhappily indispensable for some of their neighbours. Then in the next place this doctrine of the anarchists is as great a stumbling-block to themselves as it is to other people, for they carry their objection to government into their own movement, and can consequently never acquire that concentration and unity of organization which is necessary for any effectual conspiracy. They are always found constituted in very small groups very loosely held together, and small as the several groups may be, they are always much more likely to subdivide than to consolidate. Even the few anarchist refugees in London who might be expected to be knit into indissoluble friendship by their common adversity have broken into separate clubs, and the "Autonomic" and the "Morgenrothe"—though they have hardly more than a hundred members between them, and all belong to the same socialist variety of anarchist doctrine—remain as the Jews and the Samaritans. It is said to be a subject of speculative discussion among anarchists whether two members are sufficient to constitute an anarchist club. This laxity of organization is a natural result of the dislike to authority which the anarchists cultivate as a cardinal principle. Subjection to an executive committee is as offensive to their feelings and as contrary to their principles as subjection to a monarch. The dread of subjection keeps them disunited and weak. As Machiavelli says, the many ruin a revolutionary society, and the few are not enough. A small group may concoct an isolated crime, but it can do little towards the social revolution.

The anarchist policy—the propaganda of deed—consists, however, exactly in this concoction of isolated crimes and outrages. Some of the continental powers are conferring at this moment on the propriety of taking international efforts against the anarchists, and the question may at least be reasonably raised before our own Government, whether a policy of promiscuous outrage like this should continue to be included among political offences, securing protection against extradition, and whether the propaganda of deed and the use of dynamite should not rather be declared outside the limits of fair and legitimate revolution, as, by the Geneva Convention, explosive bullets are put outside the limits of fair or legitimate war.

CHAPTER IX. RUSSIAN NIHILISM.

Haxthausen pronounced a confident opinion in 1847, when most of the continental nations were agitated with rumours of revolution, that Russia at any rate was safe from the danger, inasmuch as she enjoyed an absolute protection against all such revolutionary agitation in her communistic rural institutions. There was no proletariat in Russia, every man in the country being born to a share in the land of the township he belonged to; and without a proletariat, concluded the learned professor, there was neither motive nor material for social revolt. This belief became generally accepted, and passed, indeed, for years as a political commonplace; but perhaps never has a political prognostication so entirely reasonable proved on experience so utterly fallacious. Instead of sparing or avoiding Russia, revolutionary agitation has grown positively endemic in that country; it is more virulent in its type, and apparently more deepseated than elsewhere; and, stranger still, not the least of its exciting causes has been that very communistic agrarian system which was thought to be the surest preservation against it.

In its earlier period, before the emancipation of the serfs, the Russian revolutionary movement was largely inspired by an extravagant idealization of the perfections of the rural commune, and now since the emancipation it is fed far more formidably by an actual experience of the commune's defects. The truth is that the communistic land system of Russia, so far from preventing the birth of a proletariat, is now of itself begetting the most numerous and the most helpless proletariat in the world. The emancipation dues would have been a serious burden under any social arrangements, but they have proved so much heavier under the communistic system of Russia than they would have been elsewhere that the system itself is beginning to give way. With an unlimited stock of good land, all is plain sailing under any social institutions; but when land is limited in extent and every new-comer has the right to cut in and get an equal share with those already in possession, excessive subdivision is inevitable, and the point is soon reached where any fresh impost or outgoing destroys the profitableness of cultivation, and converts the right to the land from an asset into a liability. This is what is now happening in Russia. It appears there are already more paupers in St. Petersburg proportionally to population than in any other European capital, and as many as a third of the inhabitants of the provinces are either entirely landless, or, more unhappy still, find their land, instead of a benefit, to be only a grievous burden of which they cannot shake themselves clear. I shall have occasion later on to recur to this new economic development in rural Russia, which is very interesting to the student of socialism on its own account, but which will concern us in the present chapter more particularly in its bearing on the operations and prospects of the revolutionary party in that country.

The revolutionary or nihilist movement in Russia has passed through several successive phases; but there is no good reason for denying its continuity, nor any impropriety, as is sometimes alleged, in the retention of the name of Nihilism, which it bore when it first engaged the attention of Western Europe, although it may be quite true that the word is more descriptive of the earlier developments of the movement than of the later. In its first stage, before the Emancipation Act, it was scarce more than an intellectual fermentation—an intellectual revolt all round, if you will—shaping more and more in its political ideas towards democratic socialism, but as yet entirely unorganized, and content to expend its force in violent opinions without recourse to action. Then, second, the Emancipation Act gave it organization, purpose, malignity, and made it, in short, the nihilism we know, converting it into the engine of the bitter discontent of the landed classes, who were seriously straitened and many of them ruined by the operation of that great reform. Third, while the impoverishment of thousands of landed families was the first result of the Emancipation Act, its slower but more serious result has been the impoverishment of the peasantry, and nihilism is now assuming a more agrarian character, and promoting the social revolution under the old Russian cry for "the black division."

For the origin of nihilism we must go back half a century to a little company of gifted young men, most of whom rose to great distinction, who used at that time to meet together at the house of a rich merchant in Moscow, for the discussion of philosophy and politics and religion. They were of the most various views. Some of them became Liberal leaders, and wanted Russia to follow the constitutional development of the Western nations; others became founders of the new Slavophil party, contending that Russia should be no imitator, but develop her own native institutions in her own way; and there were at least two among them—Alexander Herzen and Michael Bakunin—who were to be prominent exponents of revolutionary socialism. But they all owned at this period one common master—Hegel. Their host was an ardent Hegelian, and his young friends threw themselves into the study of Hegel with the greatest zeal. Herzen himself tells us in his autobiography how assiduously they read everything that came from his pen, how they devoted nights and weeks to clearing up the meaning of single passages in his writings, and how greedily they devoured every new pamphlet that issued from the German press on any part of his system. From Hegel, Herzen and Bakunin were led, exactly like Marx and the German Young Hegelians, to Feuerbach, and from Feuerbach to socialism. Bakunin, when he retired from the army, rather than be the instrument of oppressing the Poles among whom he was stationed, went for some years to Germany, where he lived among the Young Hegelians and wrote for their organ, the Hallische Jahrbücher; but before either he or Herzen ever had any personal intercommunication with the members of that school of thought, they had passed through precisely the same development. Herzen speaks of socialism almost in the very phrases of the Young Hegelians, as being the new "terrestrial religion," in which there was to be neither God nor heaven; as a new system of society which would dispense with an authoritative government, human or Divine, and which should be at once the completion of Christianity and the realization of the Revolution. "Christianity," he said, "made the slave a son of man; the Revolution has emancipated him into a citizen. Socialism would make him a man."

This tendency of thought was strongly supported in the Russian mind by Haxthausen's discovery and laudation of the rural commune of Russia. The Russian State was the most arbitrary, oppressive, and corrupt in Europe, and the Russian Church was the most ignorant and superstitious; but here at last was a Russian institution which was regarded with envy even by wise men of the west, and was really a practical anticipation of that very social system which was the last work of European philosophy. It was with no small pride, therefore, that Alexander Herzen declared that the Muscovite peasant in his dirty sheepskin had solved the social problem of the nineteenth century, and that for Russia, with this great problem already solved, the Revolution was obviously a comparatively simple operation. You had but to remove the Czardom, the services, and the priesthood, and the great mass of the people would still remain organized in fifty thousand complete little self-governing communities living on their common land and ruling their common affairs as they had been doing long before the Czardom came into being. And what, after all, was the latest dream of philosophical socialism but a world of communities like these? The new formula of civilization had merely come back to the old Russian mir.

All Russian writers draw a kindly and charming picture of the mir, the rude village council, in which the heads of families have for ages managed their common land, distributed their taxes, and settled all the burning problems of the hamlet with remarkable freedom, fairness, and mutual respect. They meet together on some open space—perhaps in front of the tavern, which is itself one of their common possessions; they beat out their question there till they are unanimous; for the mir will know nothing of decision by majorities—the will of the mir is believed to be the will of God Himself, and it must be no divided counsel. They argue sometimes long and keenly, and, as their interest waxes, they will raise many voices at once, or perhaps break up into separate groups, each discussing the subject apart; but presently, out of all the apparent disorder, the acceptable decision is somehow found, and peace reigns again in the village street. In these meetings they have the deepest feeling and habit of freedom; and even when a political question arises affecting their interests—a question of taxes or of administration—they make no scruple to speak in the plainest terms of the Government and the officials, and they are never interfered with. "Nobody but God," they say, "dare judge the mir," and the Czar, at any rate, respects the tradition. That rude assembly is the only free institution in Russia. Even revolutionary manifestoes have been publicly read at its meetings, and socialist addresses publicly delivered. And this instinctive spirit of freedom is attended there with the instinctive spirit of equality. A recent Russian writer observes that a Russian peasant would be quite unable to understand the sort of respect the English labourer shows to a gentleman. With its freedom, its equality, its strong family sentiment, its common property, its self-government, the mir is really the social democratic republic political philosophers have projected, and a Russian who dislikes the State and loves the mir is, without more ado, a social revolutionist of the anarchist type. The favourite ideal among Russian revolutionists for the last fifty years has accordingly all along been the anarchist ideal of a free federation of local industrial communities without any separate political organization; for the anarchist ideal is natural to the Russian situation.

Revolutionary opinions were very rife in Russia during the reign of Nicholas; but under his iron rule they were never suffered to be spoken above the breath. His ascension to the throne in 1825 had been greeted by a revolution—a very abortive one, it is true, but unfortunately sufficient to set every fibre of the young Czar's strong nature inflexibly against all the liberal tendencies encouraged by his father, and to stop the political development of the country for a generation. A handful of constitutional reformers—united three years before in a secret society to promote peasant emancipation, the common civil liberties, and stable instead of arbitrary law—gathered a crowd to a public place in the capital, and shouted for "the Archduke Constantine and a Constitution." Most part of the crowd had so little idea why they had come together that they thought Constitution was the name of the Archduke Constantine's wife; and the most distinguished man among the conspirators—Pestel, the poet—said, as he was going to execution, "I wished to reap the harvest before sowing the seed." He had done worse—he really kept the seed from being sown for thirty years to come. All freedom of opinion was ruthlessly suppressed; every means of influencing the public mind was stopped; there was no liberty of printing, speaking, or meeting; there was no saving grace but ignorance, for people of reading and intelligence lived under perpetual liability to most unreasonable suspicion. Alexander Herzen, for example, was banished to the Asiatic frontier while still a very young man, merely because he happened to make the casual remark in a private letter to his father, which was opened in the post, that a policeman had a few days before killed a man in the streets of St. Petersburg.

But this system of lawless and unrighteous repression nursed a deep spirit of revolt against constituted authority in the heart of the people, and among the younger minds a kind of passion for the most extreme and forbidden doctrines. All the wildest phases of nihilist opinion in the sixties were already raging in Russia in the forties. Haxthausen says he was astounded, when he visited the Russian universities and schools, to find the students at every one of them given over, as he says, to political and religious notions of the most all-destructive description. "It is a miasma," he says. And although the only political outbreak of Nicholas's reign, the Petracheffsky conspiracy of 1849, was little more than a petty street riot, a storm of serious revolt against the tyranny of the Czar was long gathering, which would have burst upon his head after the disasters to his army in the Crimea, had he survived them. He saw it thickening, however, and on his death-bed said to his son, the noble and unfortunate Alexander II., "I fear you will find the burden too heavy." The son found it eventually heavy enough, but in the meantime he wisely bent before the storm, relaxed the restraints the father had imposed, and gave pledges of the most liberal reforms in every department of State—judicial administration, local government, popular education, serf emancipation. People believed completely in the young Czar's sincerity, awaited with great expectations the measures he would propose, and meanwhile indulged to the top of their bent in the practical liberties they were already provisionally allowed to enjoy, and gave themselves up to a restless fervour for liberty and reform.

An independent press was not among the liberties conceded, but Russian opinion at this period found a most effective voice in a newspaper started in London by Alexander Herzen, called the Kolokol (Bell), which for a number of years made a great impression in Russia by the accuracy of its information on Russian affairs, by the boldness of its criticisms of the Government, and by the ease with which it got smuggled into universal circulation. When Herzen was sent to the Urals as a dangerous person, he was appointed, very anomalously—perhaps it was to keep him there—to an administrative and judicial post, in which he would have apparently to sentence others while under sentence himself; but he grew weary of his banishment, and was permitted to exchange it for the more complete, but much more agreeable, banishment from Russia altogether. After visiting Germany and France, and after witnessing, with deep interest and deeper disappointment, some of the revolutions of 1848, and writing that they had failed because their promoters were not prepared to follow them up with a positive social programme, as if, he says, the mere destruction of a Bastile were a revolution, he settled in England, and learnt there, as his son assures us, that revolution itself was but a vain expedient, and that gradual reform was the only effectual method of lasting social amelioration.

It was probably while he was learning this lesson—it was certainly entirely in this spirit—that he began his political agitation on the accession of Alexander II. The moment the new Czar ascended the throne, Herzen addressed to him a famous letter, demanding amends for the ills his father, Czar Nicholas, had done the people, a complete breach with the old system, and the introduction of thoroughgoing Liberal reforms, and more especially the emancipation of the serfs. It was in the same spirit he conducted his agitation in the Kolokol. Without neglecting to ventilate his socialist and philosophical views, he welcomed the contemplated reforms as being in themselves true remedies for popular grievances, and intended in perfect good faith by the Czar to be so; and his chief care in all his criticisms always was to secure that these reforms should be real and thorough, that the judicial body should be independent, the educational arrangements efficient; above all, that the peasants should not be deprived, in the emancipation arrangements, of a foot of the land they then possessed, or made to pay terms for their emancipation which would be too heavy for them to meet. And perhaps the most popular and stirring part of his paper was always his exposure of existing abuses, and his criticism of the conduct of officials. The journal was written with wit, vigour, and accurate knowledge; and, as it spoke what most men thought, but few would as yet venture to say, it was greedily read and distributed, and was for some years a remarkable power in the country. Herzen was the hero of the young. Herzenism, we are told, became the rage, and Herzenism appears to have meant, before all, a free handling of everything in Church or State which was previously thought too sacred to be touched. This iconoclastic spirit grew more and more characteristic of Russian society at this period, and presently, under its influence, Herzenism fell into the shade, and nihilism occupied the scene.

We possess various accounts of the meaning and nature of nihilism, and they all agree substantially in their description of it. The word was first employed by Turgenieff in his novel "Fathers and Sons," where Arcadi Petrovitch surprises his father and uncle by describing his friend Bazaroff as a nihilist.

"A nihilist," said Nicholas Petrovitch. "This word must come from the Latin nihil, nothing, as far as I can judge, and consequently it signifies a man who recognises nothing."

"Or rather who respects nothing," said Paul Petrovitch.

"A man who looks at everything from a critical point of view," said Arcadi.

"Does not that come to the same thing?" asked his uncle.

"No, not at all. A nihilist is a man who bows before no authority, who accepts no principle without examination, no matter what credit the principle has."...

"Yes, before we had Hegelians; now we have nihilists. We shall see what you will do to exist in nothingness, in a vacuum, as if under an air pump."

Koscheleff, writing in 1874, gives a similar explanation of nihilism. "Our disease is a disease of character, and the most dangerous possible. We suffer from a fatal unbelief in everything. We have ceased to believe in this or in that, not because we have studied the subject thoroughly and become convinced of the untenability of our views, but only because some author or another in Germany or England holds this or that doctrine to be unfounded. Our nihilism is a thing of a quite peculiar character. It is not, as in the West, the result of long falsely directed philosophical studies and ways of thinking, nor is it the fruit of an imperfect social organization. It is an entirely different thing from that. The wind has blown it to us, and the wind will blow it from us again. Our nihilists are simply Radicals. Their loud speeches, their fault-finding, their strong assertions, are grounded on nothing. They borrow negative views from foreign authors, and repeat them and magnify them ad nauseam, and treat persons of another way of thinking as absurd and antiquated people who continue to cherish exploded ideas and customs. The chief cause of the spread of this (I will not say doctrine, for I cannot honour it with such a name, but) sect is this, that it imparts its communications in secret conversations, so that, for one thing, it cannot be publicly criticised and refuted, and, for another, it charms by the fascination of the forbidden."

The same view precisely is given by Baron Fircks ("Schedo Ferroti") in his very elaborate and thoughtful account of nihilism in his L'Avenir de la Russie. It was merely, he said, the critical spirit—the spirit of intellectual revolt—carried to an extreme and running amuck against all accepted principles in religion, in politics, in domestic and social life. It was a common infirmity of contemporary society, and was in no way peculiar to Russia; but while that may be true, it has undoubtedly—as perhaps the Baron would admit—been carried into more extravagant manifestations in Russia than elsewhere.

Nor are the reasons of this extravagance far to seek. First, the Russians are, in national character, singularly impressionable, volatile, and predisposed to run to extremes. Diderot says they were rotten before they were ripe. Second, they are mere children in political experience, and even in intellectual training. Their education is in general shallow, and they are liable to the vagaries of the half educated. Third, both Baron Fircks and Koscheleff think nihilism was largely due to the arbitrary government of the country. The Czar and the bureaucracy have themselves had much to do with destroying respect for law and authority by their capricious habits of administration. Laws were proclaimed to-day and repealed to-morrow, or even broken by the very officials engaged in administering them. Even in the days of Nicholas, Herzen complained bitterly of this constant inconstancy of the law; he said the Russian Government was "infatuated with innovation," that "nothing was allowed to remain as it was," that "everything was always being changed," that "a new ministry invariably began its work by upsetting that of its predecessors." Russia being a Functionary State, not a Law State, to employ a useful German distinction, the decrees of officials take the place elsewhere filled by fixed laws established by legislative authority; and where these decrees are continually changing, reverence for the law is impossible.

But in all this there was no practical political disaffection before the Emancipation Act. The nihilists had as yet a vague belief in the Czar and the coming reforms; they felt that the Russian people were at last to have a chance of showing the rich genius that lay in them, and their whole anxiety was to have the people adequately trained for this great destiny. It was the common talk that the future belonged to Russia; and that she was already beginning to outshine all other nations in literature, in art, in science, in music. "Some young people among us," says Turgenieff, "have discovered even a Russian arithmetic. Two and two do make four with us as well as elsewhere, but more pompously, it would seem. All this is nothing but the stammering of men who are just awaking."

Under these influences the energies of the nihilists took a different outlet than plotting. Instead of founding secret societies, they founded Sunday schools. For to their mind the first need of the time, above even political liberty, was popular education. As to liberty, the measure they practically enjoyed at the gracious pleasure of the Czar for the present contented them, inasmuch as it seemed an earnest of the better securities that were expected to follow; but they could not with any satisfaction look round them and see the Russian people, for whom they were prophesying such a great career, still lying in almost aboriginal ignorance. The stuff was indeed there which should yet astonish the world, but it must first be made. To "make the people," as they phrased it, was the task the nihilists now undertook, and they threw themselves into it with the zeal of apostles. They put on shabby clothes to avoid any offensive superiority to their poorer neighbours, and they wore green spectacles to correct the even more intolerable inequality of personal beauty, for, as they were fond of saying, they had put off the old man and were now new men created again by Büchner and Feuerbach in the gospel of humanity; but with all their extravagances they carried on for some years a most active and no doubt useful work in the Sunday schools and reading circles which they rapidly established everywhere.

Although this movement fell eventually under the suspicion of the Government, as in despotic countries any movement will, it seems to have had no political, or what the authorities call "ill-intentioned" purpose. It was pervaded with patriotic and humanitarian feeling, and though no doubt many of the nihilists who took part in it held as extreme opinions in politics as they did in everything else, yet these opinions were mere matters of speculation. It is certain that democratic and revolutionary socialism was a very popular doctrine among the nihilists, even at that earliest period of their history, for their most representative man during that period was Tchernycheffsky, the editor of the Contemporary magazine, and a political economist of some note in his day; and Tchernycheffsky was undoubtedly a democratic and revolutionary socialist. He belonged to a younger generation than Herzen and Bakunin, but, like them, he had been led to socialism through Hegel and Feuerbach, and he expounded his ideas in a famous romance entitled, "What is to be done?" which the Government allowed him to write, and even to publish, while in prison for sedition in 1862, though they suppressed the book sternly when they saw it beginning to make a sensation.

But although revolutionary and socialistic principles may have been very considerably entertained by the nihilists from the first, there was no practical revolutionary or socialistic organization before the emancipation of the serfs. Up till then nihilism may be said to have been a benignant growth, if I may use a medical expression, and it was that great historical measure that converted it into the malignant and deadly trouble which we best know. The Russian Radicals, including the socialists, were strongly disappointed with that measure from the outset, because they thought it inflicted serious injustice on the peasantry. It deprived them, they said, of much of the land they had hitherto enjoyed as a right, and which was necessary for their comfortable subsistence, while it imposed on them for what they got excessive dues which their holdings would never be able to bear; and so the first Land and Liberty League was founded in 1863. But it was not the peasants, or the peasants' friends—it was the small landed gentry who were the first to feel the effects of the Emancipation Act, and to raise the standard of revolt. The Act made a serious change in their fortunes. Although the landlords were allowed most liberal terms of compensation for the enforced emancipation of their serfs, few of them actually received a kopeck, because they were almost all of them already deeply indebted to Government, and Government applied the compensation money to cancel their old debts, and gave up the policy of granting any more mortgages in the future. Then a great part of the land which was formerly cultivated by means of the serfs was now found to be too poor to afford the expense of paid labour; the landlords had neither stock nor implements to work it, if it were more fertile, the peasantry having in the old days tilled the field for them with their own horses and ploughs; nor had they any means of raising the stock on credit, and, besides, most of them were complete absentees, engaged as Government or railway officials, or in other professional work, and knew nothing whatever about the business of agriculture. The smaller landlords have therefore been compelled to sell their estates to the larger, or to leave much of their ground entirely uncultivated. In Moscow there were 633 separate estates in 1861, before the emancipation, but only 422 in 1877, and not more than one-fifth of the land that was cultivated in that province in 1861 continued in cultivation in 1877. Many of the sons of the smaller proprietors were at the universities studying for one of the professions, and had either to give up their studies altogether for want of means, or were put on shorter allowances, which was scarcely less annoying, and was indeed a great cause of revolutionary opinions at the universities. Many more of the sons of the gentry were in the army, and the pay of a Russian officer being extremely small, they had been accustomed to receive allowances from home, without which, indeed, they could hardly live; and now in the altered circumstances of the family these allowances were perforce suddenly stopped. Much of the revolutionary discontent that exists in the Russian army to such a serious extent that 200 arrests were made in March, 1885, and Government appointed a special commission of inquiry into the subject, has come from the source, and is practically a revolt against insufficient pay. But what happened at the universities and in the army happened in other departments of Russian life; the Emancipation Act had left on every shore some wreckage of the gentry, an upper-class and educated proletariat, whose distress might be due originally to their own improvidence or ignorance, but was undoubtedly first driven into an acute state by an act of Government, and therefore clamoured for vengeance on the Government that produced it.

The clamour of the victims of the Emancipation Act naturally woke up all the earlier discontents of the country. The Poles and the dissenting sects, with all their ancient wrongs, seem to have contributed but a small contingent to the nihilist ranks; but the Jews, subject to a barbarous and often very acute persecution, have filled the secret societies from the beginning with many of their most determined members, and have supplied a great part of the "Nihilistesses"; and even though the Revolutionary Executive Committee has latterly issued a proclamation against the Jews, mainly on the ground of the extortion practised by Jewish money-lenders on the peasantry, there are still, as appears very abundantly from the nihilist trials of 1890, many Jews among the revolutionists.

Then there are thirteen millions of native heretics in Russia, sects of various sorts springing up like the early Quakers from the bosom of the people, and filled with a rude spirit of freedom and a tendency towards socialistic ideas in their condemnation of luxury and accumulation, their hatred of war and military government, and their belief in fraternity and mutual assistance. Some writers allege that these sects are an important factor in the revolutionary movement; but though they certainly have suffered many wrongs from Government, they do not seem to have furnished any great quota to the revolutionary ranks. They are the freethinkers of the unlettered classes, however, and their ideas no doubt have some influence in preparing these classes for socialist principles. But there is another class very numerous in Russia, who are the natural allies of revolution—the "illegal men" who, for various reasons, go about on false passports, and are thus living in revolt already. And to all these diverse sources of disaffection must be added the aggravation arising at the moment from the tyrannical and arbitrary measures to which the Government resorted on the first outburst of complaints.

In 1862, perceiving the discontent raised by the Emancipation Act, Government took alarm, and withdrew or curtailed the liberties it had for a few years allowed the people to enjoy. It stopped some newspapers and warned a number more; it prohibited the Sunday schools and reading clubs altogether; it banished many persons on mere suspicion to remote provinces; and for a greater example it cast the eminent writer Tchernycheffsky into prison on a charge of exciting the peasantry to revolt, and after leaving him there without trial for nearly two years, brought him out at length to a public square in St. Petersburg, read out to him a sentence of transportation, broke a sword over his head, and sent him to the Siberian mines for the rest of his life. There he still remains, broken now both in mind and body, but probably doing more harm to the Government by his wrongs than he could ever have done by his pen, for nihilists have for twenty-seven years been constantly exciting popular sympathy by descriptions of his martyrdom and demands for his release.

It was while this alienation against the Government was thickening that Michael Bakunin escaped from Siberia, and it was by emissaries sent by Bakunin to Russia that the first successful attempt was made to incite and organize all these revolutionary materials into a revolutionary movement. When Bakunin came back in 1862 and joined Herzen in London, the two old friends found their ideas had parted far asunder during their long separation. Herzen had, from his twelve years' observation of affairs, broadened from revolutionist to statesman, and had no patience now for the extravagance of the young Russian patriots who visited him in London. "Our black earth," he would say, "needs a deal of draining." And there is a remarkable letter which he wrote shortly before his death, and apparently to Bakunin himself, in which he says:—

"I will own that one day, surrounded by dead bodies, by houses destroyed with balls and bullets, and listening feverishly as prisoners were being shot down, I called with my whole heart and intelligence upon the savage force of vengeance to destroy the old criminal world, without thinking much of what was to come in its place. Since that time twenty years have gone by; the vengeance has come, but it has come from the other side, and it is the people who have borne it, because they comprehended nothing either then or since. A long and painful interval has given time for passions to calm, for thoughts to deepen; it has given the necessary time for reflection and observation. Neither you nor I have betrayed our convictions; but we see the question now from a different point of view. You rush ahead, as you did before, with a passion of destruction, which you take for a creative passion; you crush every obstacle; you respect history only in the future. As for me, on the contrary, I have no faith in the old revolutionary methods, and I try to comprehend the march of men in the past and in the present, to know how to advance with them without falling behind, but without going on so far before as you, for they would not follow me—they could not follow me!"

Herzen gradually lost hold over the wilder forces in Russia, he was even openly denounced as a reactionary by the revolutionist Dolgourouki; and when he alienated the more moderate parties likewise by his support of the Polish insurrection of 1863, his spell vanished, and during the remaining seven years of his life his influence was of little account.

Bakunin was more in unison with the troubled spirit of the times. While Herzen had been ripening in political wisdom under the ampler intellectual life to which his exile introduced him, Bakunin's twelve years' confinement had maddened him into a fanatic, and instead of curing him of revolutionary propensities, only fixed the idea of revolution in his mind like a mania. When he came to London a huge, haggard man, always excited, always talking, he used to speak of himself as a Prometheus unbound, and he was to live henceforth for the undoing of the powers and systems that were. He was never found without a group of conspirators and refugees of all shades and nationalities about him. With some reminiscences of socialistic philosophy remaining in the background of his mind, his only real interest now was revolution, and he seemed always thenceforth to look on his socialism as a means of revolution rather than on revolution as a means to socialism. His socialism itself had grown less sane—it was no longer the anarchism of the old days: it was what he called "amorphism"—society not merely without governmental institutions, but without institutions of any kind; and he was domineered by the thought of a universal revolution, in which all States and Churches and all institutions religious, political, judicial, financial, academical, and social should perish in a common destruction. "Amorphism" and "Pan-destruction" are not articles of a rational creed, but they were propagated with almost preternatural energy by Bakunin. The work of exciting revolution and disorder of any kind was the main business of his life till he died in 1876. Others might play a waiting game, but for him the work of the revolutionist was revolution; and he ought to be incessantly promoting it, not by word only, but by deed, by an unremitting terrorism, by shooting a policeman when you can't reach a king, and destroying a Bastile if you cannot overturn an empire. In his "Revolutionary Catechism," written in cipher, but read by the public prosecutor at a Russian nihilist trial in 1871, he says (I quote the passage from M. de Laveleye):—

"The revolutionist is a man under a vow. He ought to have no personal interests, no business, no sentiments, no property. He ought to occupy himself entirely with one exclusive interest, with one thought and one passion: the Revolution.... He has only one aim, one science: destruction. For that and nothing but that he studied mechanics, physics, chemistry, and medicine. He observes with the same object, the men, the characters, the positions and all the conditions of the social order. He despises and hates existing morality. For him everything is moral that favours the triumph of the Revolution. Everything is immoral and criminal that hinders it.... Between him and society there is war to the death, incessant, irreconcilable. He ought to be prepared to die, to bear torture, and to kill with his own hands all who obstruct the revolution. So much the worse for him if he has in this world any ties of parentage, friendship, or love! He is not a true revolutionist if these attachments stay his arm. In the meantime he ought to live in the middle of society, feigning to be what he is not. He ought to penetrate everywhere, among high and low alike; into the merchant's office, into the church, into the Government bureaux, into the army, into the literary world, into the secret police, and even into the Imperial Palace.... He must make a list of those who are condemned to death, and expedite their sentence according to the order of their relative iniquities.... A new member can only be received into the association by a unanimous vote, and after giving proofs of his merit not in word but in action. Every 'companion' ought to have under his hand several revolutionists of the second or third degree, not entirely initiated. He ought to consider them part of the revolutionary capital placed at his disposal, and he ought to use them economically, and so as to extract the greatest possible profit out of them.... The most precious element of all are women, completely initiated, and accepting our entire programme. Without their help we can do nothing."

Bakunin naturally turned his first attention to his own country, and the subsequent development of Russian affairs show sufficiently distinct signs of his ideas and influence.

In 1865 he sent a young medical student named Netchaïeff to Moscow, to work among the students there, and Netchaïeff had, by 1869, established a number of secret societies, which he linked together under the name of the Russian Branch of the International Working Men's Association. This organization was not very numerous—no Russian secret society is—but in 1873 as many as eighty-seven persons were brought to trial for connection with it, and in 1866 one of its members, a working man called Karakasoff, who was suffering from an incurable disease, made the first attempt on the life of the Czar—an event which had most important effects on the course of Russian politics. It rang out the era of reform, and rang in the era of reaction. The popular concessions which the Czar had already given he now began to withdraw. The people had never got, as they expected, an independent judiciary—perhaps in an autocratic country a judiciary independent of the executive is hardly possible—but they had enjoyed some pretence of public trial, and now that pretence was done away, and Karakasoff and his companions were not brought before the court at all, but tried and condemned by an extraordinary commission, with a military officer of approved ferocity at its head. Administrative trial and administrative condemnation became again the regular rule in Russia; and though these things were borne in the days of Nicholas as almost matters of course, they were now deeply resented as fresh invasions of right and direct breaches of imperial promises. Then the bodies to which a certain amount of the local government of the country, the management of roads, schools, poor, health, etc., had been entrusted, were obstructed in the exercise of their powers, or gradually deprived of their powers altogether, and forced into complete dependence on the imperial executive. The students at the universities began to be interfered with in their sick and benefit societies and their reading circles; their studies in the class-rooms were restricted to what was thought a safe routine; and even their private lives and motions were watched with an exasperating espionage. People felt the hand of the despot pressing back upon them everywhere, and they felt it with a most natural and righteous recoil. This reactionary policy, which has continued ever since—this return to the hated old methods of arbitrary and repressive rule—produced, as was inevitable, deep and general discontent at the very moment when the great historical measure of serf emancipation was desolating the families of the landed gentry, province after province; and when the execution of the Emancipation Act was completed in 1870, Russian society was already quivering with dangerous elements of revolt.

From that time evidences of an active revolutionary propaganda multiplied rapidly every year. In 1871 and 1872 the writings of the German socialists were translated and ran into great favour. Even of Marx's far from popular work, "Capital," a large edition was eagerly bought up, and ladies of position baptized their children in the name of Lassalle. Secret societies were discovered both north and south. From 1873 to 1877 nihilist arrests, nihilist prosecutions, nihilist conflicts with the police, were the order of the day, till at length, in 1878, the young girl, Vera Sassulitch, fired the shot at the head of the Russian police which began that long vendetta between the revolutionists and the executive, in which so many officials perished, and eventually, in 1881, after many unsuccessful attempts, the Czar himself was so cruelly assassinated.

The ardent youth of Russia, who, in 1861, were still giving themselves to the work of Sunday schools and reading circles, were, in 1871, throwing their careers away to go out, like the first apostles, without scrip or two coats, and propagate among the rude people of the provinces the doctrines of modern revolutionary socialism, and by 1881 had become absorbed in sheer terrorism, in avenging the official murder of comrades without trial by the revolutionary murder of officials, in contriving infernal plots and explosions, and trying vainly to cast out devils by the prince of devils.

Stepniak attributes the impetus which the socialist agitation received in 1871 to the impression produced in Russia by the Paris Commune; but it would perhaps be more correct simply to ascribe it to the exertions of two active Russian revolutionists, who were themselves associated with the Communard movement, and who happened to enjoy at this period unusual facilities of communication with the younger mind of Russia. One was Bakunin, who had himself organized an insurrection at Lyons on the principles of the Commune six months before the outbreak at Paris in March, 1871; and the other was Peter Lavroff, the present Nestor of Russian nihilism, who actually took part in the Paris Commune itself. Lavroff, who had been a colonel in the Russian army, and professor in the military college of St. Petersburg, was compromised in the attempt of Karakasoff in 1866 and administratively banished to Archangel; but, as happens so singularly often in Russia, he escaped in 1869, and lived to edit a revolutionary journal in Zurich, and play for a time no inconsiderable part in making trouble in Russia. At present, communications between the active revolutionists who are at work in Russia and their predecessors who have withdrawn to Western Europe are entirely interrupted; but they were still abundant twenty years ago. Partly in consequence of the reactionary educational policy of the Government, young Russians flocked at that time to Switzerland for their education, and were there conveniently indoctrinated into the new gospel of the International. Bakunin and Lavroff were both in Zurich, and in the year 1872 there were 239 Russian students, male and female, in Zurich alone. These young people were, of course, in continual intercourse with the older refugees. Bakunin and Lavroff both held stated and formal lectures on socialism and revolution, which were always succeeded by open and animated discussions of the subject treated in them. A little later there were, according to Professor Thun, four distinct groups among the Russian revolutionists in Zurich, some of them caused by personal quarrels. But from the first there were always two, one of whom swore by Bakunin, and the other by Lavroff.

Bakunin was an anarchist—an "amorphist" even, as we have seen—and he believed in the propaganda of deeds. Every little village, he thought, should make its own revolution; and if it could not make a revolution, it might always be making a riot, or an explosion, or a fire, or an assassination of some official, or something else to raise panic or confusion. All this seemed to Lavroff and his friends to be unmitigated folly. They too believed in revolution; but in their view revolution, to be successful, must be organized and simultaneous; it must, above all, first have the peasantry on its side; and therefore, instead of the mad and premature propaganda of deed, the true policy for the present was manifestly "going into the people," as they termed it—that is, an itinerant mission to indoctrinate the people into the faith of the coming revolution. Then, again, Lavroff, though, like almost all Russian revolutionists, an anarchist, was not, like most of them, prepared to dispense all at once with the State. He thought the new society would eventually be able to do without any central authority, but not at first, nor for a considerable time, the length of which could not now be more precisely determined. In this Lavroff and his party stood much nearer the Social Democrats of Germany than other Russian nihilists, and they have come nearer still since then. They have cast off the Russian commune, of which the early nihilists made so great an idol. They see that it is an old-world institution doomed to dissolution, and rapidly undergoing the process.

The two tendencies—diverging both in principle and in tactics—appeared in Russia as well as Zurich. At first the more peaceful method prevailed. Lavroff's idea of "going into the people" was the enthusiasm of the hour, and brought upon the scene the typical nihilist missionary—the young man of good birth who laid down station and prospects, learnt a manual trade, browned his hands with tar and his face by smearing it with butter and lying in the sun, put on the peasant's sheepskin, and then, with a forged pass, procured at the secret nihilist pass factory, and a few forbidden books in his wallet, set off "without road" to be a peasant with peasants, if by any means he could win them over to the cause; and the still more remarkable young woman who went through a marriage ceremony to obtain the right of independent action, and the moment the ceremony was over, left father and mother and husband and all in order to work among the peasants of the Volga as a teacher or nurse, and live on milk and groats according to Tchernycheffsky's prescription in "What is to be Done?". Stepniak justly remarks that "the type of propagandist of the first lustre of 1870-80 was religious rather than revolutionary. His hope was socialism, his God the people. Notwithstanding all the evidence to the contrary, he firmly believed that from one day to the other the revolution was about to break out, as in the middle ages people believed at certain periods in the approach of the day of judgment." ("Underground Russia," p. 30.)