ered patiently for years from the utter
shipwreck of his generous illusions, and when he could no longer hope to
see the dawn of a brighter day, he ended by committing suicide. Yet that
man believed himself to be a Realist, a Materialist, and a Utilitarian
of the purest water, and habitually professed a scathing contempt for
every form of romantic sentiment! In reality he was one of the best and
most sympathetic men I have ever known.

To return from this digression. So long as the subversive opinions were
veiled in abstract language they raised misgivings in only a comparative
small circle; but when school-teachers put them into a form suited to
the juvenile mind, they were apt to produce startling effects. In a
satirical novel of the time a little girl is represented as coming
to her mother and saying, "Little mamma! Maria Ivan'na (our new
school-mistress) says there is no God and no Tsar, and that it is wrong
to marry!" Whether such incidents actually occurred in real life, as
several friends assured me, I am not prepared to say, but certainly
people believed that they might occur in their own families, and that
was quite sufficient to produce alarm even in the ranks of the Liberals,
to say nothing of the rapidly increasing army of the Reactionaries.

To illustrate the general uneasiness produced in St. Petersburg, I may
quote here a letter written in October, 1861, by a man who occupied one
of the highest positions in the Administration. As he had the reputation
of being an ultra-Liberal who sympathised overmuch with Young Russia,
we may assume that he did not take an exceptionally alarmist view of the
situation.

"You have not been long absent--merely a few months; but if you returned
now, you would be astonished by the progress which the Opposition, one
might say the Revolutionary Party, has already made. The disorders in
the university do not concern merely the students. I see in the affair
the beginning of serious dangers for public tranquillity and the
existing order of things. Young people, without distinction of costume,
uniform and origin, take part in the street demonstrations. Besides
the students of the university, there are the students of other
institutions, and a mass of people who are students only in name.
Among these last are certain gentlemen in long beards and a number of
revolutionnaires in crinoline, who are of all the most fanatical. Blue
collars--the distinguishing mark of the students' un