disguised form, ideas which
were considered dangerous. The Kolokol, a Russian revolutionary
paper published in London by Herzen and strictly prohibited by the
Press-censure, found its way in large quantities into the country, and,
as is recorded in an earlier chapter, was read by thousands, including
the higher officials and the Emperor himself, who found it regularly on
his writing-table, laid there by some unknown hand. In St. Petersburg
the arrest of Tchernishevski and the suspension of his magazine, The
Contemporary, made the writers a little more cautious in their mode of
expression, but the spirit of the articles remained unchanged. These
energetic intolerant leaders of public opinion were novi homines not
personally connected with the social strata in which moderate views and
retrograde tenderness had begun to prevail. Mostly sons of priests or
of petty officials, they belonged to a recently created literary
proletariat composed of young men with boundless aspirations and meagre
national resources, who earned a precarious subsistence by journalism or
by giving lessons in private families. Living habitually in a world of
theories and unrestrained by practical acquaintance with public life,
they were ready, from the purest and most disinterested motives to
destroy ruthlessly the existing order of things in order to realise
their crude notions of social regeneration. Their heated imagination
showed them in the near future a New Russia, composed of independent
federated Communes, without any bureaucracy or any central power--a
happy land in which everybody virtuously and automatically fulfilled
his public and private duties, and in which the policeman and all other
embodiments of material constraint were wholly superfluous.

Governments are not easily converted to Utopian schemes of that idyllic
type, and it is not surprising that even a Government with liberal
humanitarian aspirations like that of Alexander II. should have become
alarmed and should have attempted to stem the current. What is to be
regretted is that the repressive measures adopted were a little too
Oriental in their character. Scores of young students of both sexes--for
the Nihilist army included a strong female contingent--were secretly
arrested and confined for months in unwholesome prisons, and many
of them were finally exiled, without any regular trial, to distant
provinces in European Russia or to Siberia. Their exile, it is true, was
not at all