ol is
judged in two utterly different ways, each of which is partly
correct. The reactionary movement in its inception had the
appearance of an assertion of the rights of individual liberty and
national life, as opposed to the autocratic government; and such it
was, after a fashion--the fashion of refractory conscripts or of
smugglers, not to say of brigands--the fashion, in short, in which
all abuses and prejudices are defended. What it claimed
was liberty, indeed, but liberty as the commonalty understand
it--liberty to retain its customs, its superstitions and its
ignorance--liberty to go and come as it chose. But in all this there
was no notion of political freedom. With all his hatred of foreign
importations, the Old Believer is no enemy to reform in the sense of
national tradition or of furthering the interests of the lower
classes, the artisan and the peasant. Like all popular movements,
the Raskol is essentially democratic, and in some of its sects
socialistic and communistic.

Two things which have especially tended to give the Raskol a
democratic--or even liberal--complexion are serfdom and the
bureaucratic despotism of the country. It was no mere coincidence
which caused the Raskol to break out about half a century after
serfdom was established. Much of its popularity and life was due to
the enslavement of the mass of the people. The slave was proud of
having a different faith from his master; and slavery is always a
propitious soil for the growth of sects. This nation of serfs dimly
felt the Raskol to be an assertion of religious liberty and
self-respect against master, Church and government; and these were
symbolized by the beard and the peculiar sign of the cross. The
Raskol offered to all the oppressed a moral, and often a material,
refuge, an asylum for all enemies of the master and the law, and a
shelter for the fugitive serf, for the deserter, for public debtors
and outlaws of every description. Some sects (as the Wanderers, for
example) are specially organized for such purposes. In these
respects the Raskol was unconsciously one form of the opposition to
serfdom and official despotism; and hence the Old Believers are most
numerous among the most refractory elements of Russia--in the North
among the free peasants (the old colonists of Novgorod), and in the
South among the independent Cossacks of the steppes. Religious and
political opposition have joined hands, and to this combination is
due the stre