position, playing in the revolutionary contest a most remarkable part.
They have suffered imprisonment; they have risked their lives; some of
them have been condemned to hard labour. One of them was sentenced to
be shot--but this latter decision even the Czar, though having to wage
war against women, dared not carry out. This extraordinary mixing of the
female sex in a widely ramified conspiracy is of so phenomenal a
character that a sketch of the educational and emancipatory movement
which led up to it, may well be here in its place.

By way of contrast, let us first look into times which seem to lie ages
behind us, but which are yet in the recollection of a great many.

When Gogol wrote his "Dead Souls," not quite forty years ago, the
education of young ladies in Russia was conducted on wonderful
principles of "finishing." Young ladies--said Gogol, with cutting
satire--receive, as is well known, a very good education. Three things
are looked upon, in the establishments to which they are sent, as the
pillars of all human virtues: namely, first, a knowledge of the French
language; secondly, the piano; thirdly, domestic economy, which consists
of the embroidery of purses and other objects of surprise. "Our present
time," he added, "has shown itself most inventive as regards the
perfection of this educational method; for in one establishment they
begin with the piano, and then go on to French, concluding with the
domestic economy alluded to; whereas in another school the embroidering
of purses forms the introduction, upon which French and the piano
follow. It will be seen that there is much difference in the methods."

Gribojedoff also, in a telling comedy, has some striking sarcasms on the
superficiality and hollow frivolousness of the education of girls of the
upper classes. "We bring up our daughters," he says, "as if they were
destined to be the wives of the dancing-masters and the buffoons to whom
we entrust their instruction." Now and then a reformer started up, but
in a very curious fashion. One of the earliest was Tatjana Passek, the
cousin of Alexander Herzen, of whom a writer, who adopts the signature
of "Borealis," in the Berlin _Gegenwart_, says that in consequence of
the straitened circumstances of her father, she was compelled to open a
Young Ladies' Establishment in a provincial town. Intelligent, but
without any solid knowledge, she herself relates in her memoirs how she
taught ancient history off-hand, c