ted--with the intention of using it, of course, entirely for the
public good. If the facts were not so well authenticated, we might
dismiss the whole story as incredible. A group of young people,
certainly not more than thirty or forty in number, without any organised
material force behind them, without any influential accomplices in the
army or the official world, without any prospect of support from the
masses, and with no plan for immediate action after the assassination,
deliberately provoked the crisis for which they were so hopelessly
unprepared. It has been suggested that they expected the Liberals
to seize the Supreme Power, but this explanation is evidently an
afterthought, because they knew that the Liberals were as unprepared
as themselves and they regarded them at that time as dangerous
rivals. Besides this, the explanation is quite irreconcilable with the
proclamation issued by the Executive Committee immediately afterwards.
The most charitable way of explaining the conduct of the conspirators is
to suppose that they were actuated more by blind hatred of the autocracy
and its agents than by political calculations of a practical kind--that
they acted simply like a wounded bull in the arena, which shuts its eyes
and recklessly charges its tormentors.

The murder of the Emperor had not at all the effect which the
Narodovoltsi anticipated. On the contrary, it destroyed their hopes of
success. Many people of liberal convictions who sympathised vaguely with
the revolutionary movement without taking part in it, and who did not
condemn very severely the attacks on police officials, were horrified
when they found that the would-be reformers did not spare even the
sacred person of the Tsar. At the same time, the police officials, who
had become lax and inefficient under the conciliatory regime of Loris
Melikof, recovered their old zeal, and displayed such inordinate
activity that the revolutionary organisation was paralysed and in great
measure destroyed. Six of the regicides were condemned to death, and
five of them publicly executed, amongst the latter Sophia Perovski,
one of the most active and personally sympathetic personages among the
revolutionists. Scores of those who had taken an active part in the
movement were in prison or in exile. For a short time the propaganda
was continued among military and naval officers, and various attempts
at reorganisation, especially in the southern provinces, were made, but
th