great reforms initiated by his successor, Alexander II., they descended
into the arena of practical politics, and played a most useful and
honourable part in the emancipation of the serfs. In the new
local self-government, too--the Zemstvo and the new municipal
institutions--they laboured energetically and to good purpose. Of all
this I shall have occasion to speak more fully in future chapters.

But what of their Panslavist aspirations? By their theory they were
constrained to pay attention to the Slav race as a whole, but they were
more Russian than Slav, and more Muscovite than Russian. The Panslavist
element consequently occupied a secondary place in Slavophil doctrine.
Though they did much to stimulate popular sympathy with the Southern
Slavs, and always cherished the hope that the Serbs, Bulgarians, and
cognate Slav nationalities would one day throw off the bondage of the
German and the Turk, they never proposed any elaborate project for the
solution of the Eastern Question. So far as I was able to gather from
their conversation, they seemed to favour the idea of a grand Slavonic
Confederation, in which the hegemony would, of course, belong to Russia.
In ordinary times the only steps which they took for the realisation of
this idea consisted in contributing money for schools and churches
among the Slav population of Austria and Turkey, and in educating young
Bulgarians in Russia. During the Cretan insurrection they
sympathised warmly with the insurgents as co-religionists, but
afterwards--especially during the crisis of the Eastern Question which
culminated in the Treaty of San Stefano and the Congress of Berlin
(1878)--their Hellenic sympathies cooled, because the Greeks showed that
they had political aspirations inconsistent with the designs of Russia,
and that they were likely to be the rivals rather than the allies of the
Slavs in the struggle for the Sick Man's inheritance.

Since the time when I was living in Moscow in constant intercourse with
the leading Slavophils more than a quarter of a century has passed, and
of those with whom I spent so many pleasant evenings discussing the past
history and future destinies of the Slav races, not one remains alive.
All the great prophets of the old Slavophil doctrine--Jun Samarin,
Prince Tcherkaski, Ivan Aksakof, Kosheleff--have departed without
leaving behind them any genuine disciples. The present generation of
Muscovite frondeurs, who continue to rail against We