e. They conspired
against the life of civilization--as if it were not better to be ruled
by despots than assassins, as if a bad government were not better than
none!

The existence of Nihilism may be explained, though not extenuated. Can
anyone estimate the effect upon a single human being to have known that
a father, brother, son, sister, or wife has perished under the knout?
Could such a person ever again be capable of reasoning calmly or sanely
upon "political reforms"? If there were any slumbering tiger-instincts
in this half-Asiatic people, was not this enough to awaken them? There
were many who had suffered this, and there were thousands more who at
that very time had friends, lovers, relatives, those dearer to them
than life, who were enduring day by day the tortures of exile, subject
to the brutal punishments of irresponsible officials. It was this
which had converted hundreds of the nobility into conspirators--this
which had made Sophia Perovskaya, the daughter of one of the highest
officials in the land, give the signal for the murder of the Emperor,
and then, scorning mercy, insist that she should have the privilege of
dying upon the gallows with the rest.

But tiger-instincts, whatever their cause, must be extinguished. They
cannot coexist with civilization. Human society as constituted to-day
can recognize no excuse for them. It forbids them--and the Nihilist is
the Ishmael of the nineteenth century.

The world was not surprised, and perhaps not even displeased, when
Alexander III. showed a dogged determination not to be coerced into
reforms by the assassination of his father nor threats of his own. His
coronation, long deferred by the tragedy which threatened to attend it,
finally took place with great splendor at Moscow in 1883. He then
withdrew to his palace at Gatschina, where he remained practically a
prisoner. Embittered by the recollection of the fate of his father,
who had died in his arms, and haunted by conspiracies for the
destruction of himself and his family, he was probably the least happy
man in his empire. His every act was a protest against the spirit of
reform. The privileges so graciously bestowed upon the Grand Duchy of
Finland by Alexander I. were for the first time invaded. Literature
and the press were placed under rigorous censorship. The _Zemstvo_,
his father's gift of local self-government to the liberated serfs, was
practically withdrawn by placing that body unde