t portion of the
nobiliary class which aimed at a Constitutional share of the political
power, but also persecuted the various dissenting sects in the most
barbarous fashion.

Under an outward gloss of official orthodoxy, Russia is eaten up with a
chaos of sects. The Raskolniks, or Old Believers, profess to be the real
Church; yet the simplest civic rights were always denied to them.
Besides those Old Believers, numerous other sects exist. They in their
turn are surrounded by a strange fringe of "Runners," "Jumpers,"
"Flagellants," "Self-Mutilators," and other eccentric or anti-social
pests which crop up most thickly in the dank shadow of an obscurantist
despotism, whose very roots, however, they gradually destroy and
encroach upon. Persecuted men often seek solace in wild hopes and
prophetic beliefs, which, if strongly nurtured by agitation, are apt to
imperil the persecutor. Under Nicholas, the persecutor of all
Dissenters, popular seers occasionally arose, who in their occult
meetings predicted from the book of Esdra that, after the reign of
Nicholas should be over, the Monarchy would fall down under his son and
that "the people then would be happy and free."

Such a state of feeling in the lower and more backward social strata
rendered it at all events easier for would-be reformers of the
conspirator type to enter into closer contact with the plebeian
element. Though educated men could not have any sympathy with the
mystic views and tone, they found a practical ally in the sullen
dissatisfaction which drove Dissenters to opposition against the
Government. So it was under Nicholas. So it still is under Alexander II.
It may suit the sacerdotal Ritualists, who would fain establish a
connection of High Church Anglicanism with the official orthodoxy of the
East, to promote the aggressive policy of the Czar. But English
Dissenters, who prize their freedom from clerical trammels, might
remember that Autocracy in Russia represents all that is worst in
political as well as in religious fields. Besides upholding the Stuart
doctrine with the means of a Gengis Khan and a Tamerlane, it pretends,
in Church matters, to a Papal authority, crushing the Bible Christian,
the eccentric Mystic, and the religious Rationalist, with an equally
heavy hand--and, if need be, as in the case of the Greek Uniates under
Alexander II., with the Cossack knout.

In the educated class of Russia, two very different political currents
are observabl