ass, and, above all, that large body of necessitous
students, including many of the children of the ill-paid clergy, whom M.
Leroy-Beaulieu styles the "intellectual proletariat." Classical studies,
German metaphysics, and the scientific theories and discoveries of
recent years have had much to do with the fermentation that has led to
so many violent explosions, the universities have been the chief
_foci_ of agitation, and in the attempts to suppress it the
government has laid itself open to the reproach of making war upon
learning and seeking to stifle intellectual development.

Such is the view presented by recent French and English writers who have
made the condition of Russia a subject of minute investigation. Mr.
Noble deals more in generalizations than in details, and sets forth a
theory which it is difficult to reconcile with the facts and conclusions
derived from other sources. According to him, Russia is, and has been
from the first establishment of the imperial rule, in a state of chronic
revolt. This revolt is "the protest of eighty millions of people against
their continued employment as a barrier in the path of peaceful human
progress and national development." "It is not the educated classes
alone, but the masses,--peasant and artisan, land-owner and student,--of
whose aspirations, at least, it may be said, as it was said of the
earliest and freest Russians, '_Neminem ferant imperatorem_.'"
Before the rise of the empire "the Russians lived as freemen and happy."
They "enjoyed what, in a political sense, we are fairly entitled to
regard as the golden age of their national existence." The _veche_,
or popular assembly, "was from a picturesque point of view the grandest,
from an administrative point of view the simplest, and from a moral
point of view the most equitable form of government ever devised by
man." The autocracy, established by force, has encountered at all
periods a steady, if passive, opposition, as exemplified in the Raskol,
or separation of the "Old Believers" from the Orthodox Church, and in
the resistance offered to the innovations of Peter the Great: "in the
one as in the other case the popular revolt was against authority and
all that it represented." It is admitted that "among the peasants the
revolt must long remain in its passive stage.... Yet year by year,
partly owing to educational processes, partly owing to propaganda, even
the peasants are being won over to the growing battalions of