dge the whole weight of their
superiority in culture for these possessions and guarantees of the
undeniable progress of mankind.

It is different in Russia. The political and social, the mental and
moral conditions of this large but barbarian empire do not afford much
opportunity for the growth even of a moderate amount of conservatism.
For what can there be to conserve, to maintain, or to improve in those
lives that depend on the mere sign of a bloodthirsty and savage
despotism, in that society that has hardly raised itself from the
primitive tribal level, in those rotten national economics, trade and
industry, in a spiritual life groaning under the banner of orthodoxy
and an arbitrary police, of popes and Tschinowniks? Must not the only
possible way, the inevitable presupposition of any possible
improvement be a desire for a total and universal overthrow, a radical
annihilation of all these conditions that render life and development
impossible? The Russian need not shrink from the thought that all
present conditions should be annihilated, for when he looks round
about him he finds nothing that his heart would care to preserve; and
the higher he ranks in the mental or social sphere, the stronger must
this "Nihilist" feeling naturally become. We who are citizens of a
State that, with all its faults, is yet richly blessed by
civilisation, show our comprehension of these facts by regarding with
a milder and more sympathetic glance the acts of a few desperate men
in Russia, which we should condemn severely if they occurred under the
happier circumstances that surround ourselves. In fact, nothing is
more natural--lamentable as it may be--than that, under circumstances
such as those of Russia, revolutionary Radicalism should assume this
purely negative "Nihilist" and murderously destructive character in
the desperate struggle of the individual against a society that is
totally degenerate.

"Among us," says Stepniak,[1] "a revolution or even a rising of any
importance, such as those in Paris, is absolutely impossible. Our
towns contain barely a tenth of the total population, and most of them
are merely great villages, miles and miles away one from another. The
real towns, such as, _e. g._, those of from 10,000 or 15,000
inhabitants, contain only 4 or 5 per cent. of the total
population--that is, about three or four million people. And the
Government which rules over the military contingent of the whole
people--that is, ov