t, produced great
disappointment in all the theorising sections of the educated classes.
The thousands of men and women who had, since the accession of the
Tsar-Emancipator in 1855, taken a keen, enthusiastic interest in the
progress of their native country, all had believed firmly that in
some way or other Russia would escape "the festering sores of Western
civilisation." Now experience had proved that the belief was an
illusion, and those who had tried to check the natural course of
industrial progress were constrained to confess that their efforts had
been futile. Big factories were increasing in size and numbers, while
cottage industries were disappearing or falling under the power of
middlemen, and the Artels had not advanced a step in their expected
development. The factory workers, though all of peasant origin, were
losing their connection with their native villages and abandoning
their allotments of the Communal land. They were becoming, in short,
a hereditary caste in the town population, and the pleasant Slavophil
dream of every factory worker having a house in the country was being
rudely dispelled. Nor was there any prospect of a change for the better
in the future. With the increase of competition among the manufacturers,
the uprooting of the muzhik from the soil must go on more and more
rapidly, because employers must insist more and more on having
thoroughly trained operatives ready to work steadily all the year round.

This state of things had a curious effect on the course of the
revolutionary movement.

Let me recall very briefly the successive stages through which the
movement had already passed. It had been inaugurated, as we have
seen, by the Nihilists, the ardent young representatives of a
"storm-and-stress" period, in which the venerable traditions and
respected principles of the past were rejected and ridiculed, and the
newest ideas of Western Europe were eagerly adopted and distorted. Like
the majority of their educated countrymen, they believed that in the
race of progress Russia was about to overtake and surpass the nations of
the West, and that this desirable result was to be attained by making
a tabula rasa of existing institutions, and reconstructing society
according to the plans of Proudhon, Fourier, and the other writers of
the early Socialist school.

When the Nihilists had expended their energies and exhausted the
patience of the public in theorising, talking, and writing, a party o