ence had been neither demanded nor
desired--but when he died, the system of which he was the soul died with
him. What then could they seek to defend? They were told that the system
which they had been taught to regard as the sheet-anchor of the State
was in reality the chief cause of the national disasters; and to this
they could make no reply, because they had no better explanation of
their own to offer. They were convinced that the Russian soldier was the
best soldier in the world, and they knew that in the recent war the army
had not been victorious; the system, therefore, must be to blame. They
were told that a series of gigantic reforms was necessary in order to
restore Russia to her proper place among the nations; and to this
they could make no answer, for they had never studied such abstract
questions. And one thing they did know: that those who hesitated to
admit the necessity of gigantic reforms were branded by the Press as
ignorant, narrow-minded, prejudiced, and egotistical, and were held up
to derision as men who did not know the most elementary principles of
political and economic science. Freely expressed public opinion was
such a new phenomenon in Russia that the Press was able for some time
to exercise a "Liberal" tyranny scarcely less severe than the
"Conservative" tyranny of the censors in the preceding reign. Men who
would have stood fire gallantly on the field of battle quailed before
the poisoned darts of Herzen in the Kolokol. Under such circumstances,
even the few who possessed some vague Conservative convictions refrained
from publicly expressing them.

The men who had played a more or less active part during the preceding
reign, and who might therefore be expected to have clearer and deeper
convictions, were specially incapable of offering opposition to the
prevailing Liberal enthusiasm. Their Conservatism was of quite as limp
a kind as that of the landed proprietors who were not in the public
service, for under Nicholas the higher a man was placed the less likely
was he to have political convictions of any kind outside the simple
political creed above referred to. Besides this, they belonged to that
class which was for the moment under the anathema of public opinion, and
they had drawn direct personal advantage from the system which was now
recognised as the chief cause of the national disasters.

For a time the name of tchinovnik became a term of reproach and
derision, and the position of tho