storted reflection of the earlier
Socialist movements of the West; but it has local peculiarities and
local colouring which deserve attention.

* See Chapter XXVI.

The Russian educated classes had been well prepared by their past
history for the reception and rapid development of the Socialist virus.
For a century and a half the country had been subjected to a series of
drastic changes, administrative and social, by the energetic action of
the Autocratic Power, with little spontaneous co-operation on the
part of the people. In a nation with such a history, Socialistic ideas
naturally found favour, because all Socialist systems until quite recent
times were founded on the assumption that political and social progress
must be the result not of slow natural development, but rather of
philosophic speculation, legislative wisdom, and administrative energy.

This assumption lay at the bottom of the reform enthusiasm in St.
Petersburg at the commencement of Alexander II.'s reign. Russia might
be radically transformed, it was thought, politically and socially,
according to abstract scientific principles, in the space of a few
years, and be thereby raised to the level of West-European civilisation,
or even higher. The older nations had for centuries groped in darkness,
or stumbled along in the faint light of practical experience, and
consequently their progress had been slow and uncertain. For Russia
there was no necessity to follow such devious, unexplored paths. She
ought to profit by the experience of her elder sisters, and avoid the
errors into which they had fallen. Nor was it difficult to ascertain
what these errors were, because they had been discovered, examined
and explained by the most eminent thinkers of France and England, and
efficient remedies had been prescribed. Russian reformers had merely to
study and apply the conclusions at which these eminent authorities had
arrived, and their task would be greatly facilitated by the fact
that they could operate on virgin soil, untrammelled by the feudal
traditions, religious superstitions, metaphysical conceptions, romantic
illusions, aristocratic prejudices, and similar obstacles to social and
political progress which existed in Western Europe.

Such was the extraordinary intellectual atmosphere in which the Russian
educated classes lived during the early years of the sixties. On the
"men with aspirations," who had longed in vain for more light and
more public ac