s a National Assembly controlled by local
self-government, and this can be brought about only by a union of all
the revolutionary forces."

There were still indications, it is true, that the old spirit of
terrorism was not yet quite extinct: Captain Zolotykhin, for example,
an officer of the Moscow secret police, was assassinated by a female
revolutionist in 1890. But such incidents were merely the last fitful
sputterings of a lamp that was going out for want of oil. In 1892
Stepniak declared it evident to all that the professional revolutionists
could not alone overthrow autocracy, however great their energy and
heroism; and he arrived at the same conclusion as the writer just
quoted. Of course, immediate success was not to be expected. "It is only
from the evolutionist's point of view that the struggle with autocracy
has a meaning. From any other standpoint it must seem a sanguinary
farce--a mere exercise in the art of self-sacrifice!" Such are the
conclusions arrived at in 1892 by a man who had been in 1878 one of the
leading terrorists, and who had with his own hand assassinated General
Mezentsef, Chief of the Political Police.

Thus the revolutionary movement, after passing through four stages,
which I may call the academic, the propagandist, the insurrectionary,
and the terrorist, had failed to accomplish its object. One of those
who had taken an active part in it, and who, after spending two years
in Siberia as a political exile, escaped and settled in Western Europe,
could write thus: "Our revolutionary movement is dead, and we who are
still alive stand by the grave of our beautiful departed and discuss
what is wanting to her. One of us thinks that her nose should be
improved; another suggests a change in her chin or her hair. We do not
notice the essential that what our beautiful departed wants is life;
that it is not a matter of hair or eyebrows, but of a living soul, which
formerly concealed all defects, and made her beautiful, and which now
has flown away. However we may invent changes and improvements, all
these things are utterly insignificant in comparison with what is really
wanting, and what we cannot give; for who can breathe a living soul into
a corpse?"

In truth, the movement which I have endeavoured to describe was at an
end; but another movement, having the same ultimate object, was coming
into existence, and it constitutes one of the essential factors of
the present situation. Some of the exil