egarded
by them as the protecting power that is to redress their grievances and
fulfil all their aspirations. The discontent which has bred so many
conspiracies, and which aims at nothing less than the subversion of the
monarchy, is confined to a portion of the educated classes, and proceeds
from causes that affect only those classes. Among them alone is there
any perception of the wide and ever-increasing difference between the
Russian system of government and that of every other European country,
any craving for the exercise of political rights and the activity of
political life, any experience of the restrictions imposed on thought
and speech and the obstacles to the advancement and diffusion of
knowledge and ideas, any consciousness that the corrupt, vexatious, and
oppressive bureaucracy by which all affairs are administered is a direct
outgrowth of unlimited and irresponsible power. Nor are they united in
desiring to destroy, or even to modify, this system. Apart from those
who find in it the means of satisfying their personal interests and
ambitions, and the larger number in whom indolence and the love of ease
stifle all thought and aspiration, there are many who believe, with
reason, that the country is not ripe for the adoption of European
institutions, that the foundations on which to construct them do not yet
exist, and that any attempt to introduce them would lead only to
calamitous results; while there is even a large party which contends
that, far from needing them, Russia is happily situated in being exempt
from the struggles and the storms, the wars of classes and of factions,
that have attended the course of Western civilization, and in being left
free to work out her own development by original and more peaceful
methods. No doubt the great majority of thinking people feel the
necessity for some large measures of reform and look forward to the
establishment of a constitutional system and the gradual extension of
political freedom to the mass of the nation. But there is no evidence
that the revolutionary spirit has spread or excited sympathy in any such
degree as its audacity, its resoluteness, and the terror created by its
sinister achievements have seemed at times to indicate. The active
members of the propaganda are almost exclusively young persons, living
apart from their families, of scanty means and without conspicuous
ability. They belong to the lower ranks of the nobility, the rising
_bourgeois_ cl