ntirely new order of things
on the basis of a free federation of productive Communes, in which all
the land should be distributed among those capable of tilling it and the
instruments of production confided to co-operative associations. Efforts
to obtain mere political reforms, even of the most radical type, were
regarded by him with contempt as miserable palliatives, which could be
of no real, permanent benefit to the masses, and might be positively
injurious by prolonging the present era of bourgeois domination.

For the dissemination of these principles a special organ called The
Cause of the People (Narodnoye Dyelo) was founded in Geneva in 1868 and
was smuggled across the Russian frontier in considerable quantities.
It aimed at drawing away the young generation from Academic Nihilism to
more practical revolutionary activity, but it evidently remained to some
extent under the old influences, for it indulged occasionally in very
abstract philosophical disquisitions. In its first number, for example,
it published a programme in which the editors thought it necessary to
declare that they were materialists and atheists, because the belief
in God and a future life, as well as every other kind of idealism,
demoralises the people, inspiring it with mutually contradictory
aspirations, and thereby depriving it of the energy necessary for
the conquest of its natural rights in this world, and the complete
organisation of a free and happy life. At the end of two years this
organ for moralising the people collapsed from want of funds, but other
periodicals and pamphlets were printed, and the clandestine relations
between the exiles in Switzerland and their friends in St. Petersburg
were maintained without difficulty, notwithstanding the efforts of the
police to cut the connection. In this way Young Russia became more and
more saturated with the extreme Socialist theories current in Western
Europe.

Thanks partly to this foreign influence and partly to their own
practical experience, the would-be reformers who remained at home came
to understand that academic talking and discussing could bring about no
serious results. Students alone, however numerous and however devoted to
the cause, could not hope to overthrow or coerce the Government. It was
childish to suppose that the walls of the autocratic Jericho would fall
by the blasts of academic trumpets. Attempts at revolution could not be
successful without the active support of th