dreaming about
an imaginary millennium. Their serfs had been emancipated, and what
remained to them of their estates had to be reorganised on the basis
of free labour. Into the semi-chaotic state of things created by such
far-reaching changes, legal and economic, they did not wish to see any
more confusion introduced, and they did not at all feel that they could
dispense with the Central Government and the policeman. On the contrary,
the Central Government was urgently needed in order to obtain a little
ready money wherewith to reorganise the estates in the new conditions,
and the police organisation required to be strengthened in order to
compel the emancipated serfs to fulfil their legal obligations. These
men and their families were, therefore, much more conservative than the
class commonly designated "the young generation," and they naturally
sympathised with the "Philistines" in St. Petersburg, who had been
alarmed by the exaggerations of the Nihilists.

Even the landed proprietors, however, were not so entirely free from
discontent and troublesome political aspirations as the Government would
have desired. They had not forgotten the autocratic and bureaucratic way
in which the Emancipation had been prepared, and their indignation had
been only partially appeased by their being allowed to carry out the
provisions of the law without much bureaucratic interference. So much
for the discontent. As for the reform aspirations, they thought that, as
a compensation for having consented to the liberation of their serfs and
for having been expropriated from about a half of their land, they ought
to receive extensive political rights, and be admitted, like the upper
classes in Western Europe, to a fair share in the government of the
country. Unlike the fiery young Nihilists of St. Petersburg, they did
not want to abolish or paralyse the central power; what they wanted
was to co-operate with it loyally and to give their advice on important
questions by means of representative institutions. They formed a
constitutional group which exists still at the present day, as we shall
see in the sequel, but which has never been allowed to develop into an
organised political party. Its aims were so moderate that its programme
might have been used as a convenient safety-valve for the explosive
forces which were steadily accumulating under the surface of Society,
but it never found favour in the official world. When some of its
leading memb