of bondage the outcome of the establishment of a freely chosen legislature. When, finally, the Poles, counting upon a corresponding movement in Russia, resolved upon that heroic though desperate rising which by anticipation I alluded to in the last article, such fresh cruelties were practiced by Alexander II. against the vanquished victims that every human heart worthy of the name must shudder at the mere recollection of them.

From those days, however, the conspiratory movement in Russia began to assume larger proportions. What I have said in the preceding pages goes far to explain the violence by which that movement has latterly been characterized.

V.

PARTLY from the aggressiveness which is the natural bent of a despotic military monarchy, partly from the wish to check the home-growth of liberal sentiments by frequent bloodletting abroad, the Government of Alexander II. has tried to meet the danger which has been gather-, ing round the autocratic system by lighting up foreign wars. Central Asia has served him for that purpose. So has Turkey. The flag of ambition was flaunted before public opinion as soon as there was a revival of the opposition tendency in internal affairs.

An attempt at opening up the whole Eastern Question was made as early as 1870, when France and Germany were locked together in deadly embrace. The confidential dispatches and cipher telegrams exchanged in 1870 between Mr. de Novikoff, the Russian Ambassador at Vienna, and Mr. Ionin, the Russian Consul-General at Ragusa, which fortunately came to light some years ago, have fully proved that even then Muscovite policy busied itself with getting up a phantom insurrection in Herzegovina preparatory to an attack upon Turkey. Nor is it a secret that a Bulgarian committee of insurrection, affiliated to Russia, had been in existence in Bucharest for years previous to the late war. All these propagandistic intrigues were in a measure designed to occupy some of the more active minds in Russia, who hesitated between home reform and Panslavistic ambition

The Czar has indulged in his warlike enter prises, but he has deceived himself in his calculations as regards home policy. All his frightful spilling of blood abroad has not been able to prevent the formation and extension of what is called the Nihilist Conspiracy. Side by side with his wars, the Secret League has grown apace, overshadowing all his glory. So extensive have the ramifications of that conspiracy become that the liveliest interest is now awakened as to its origin and its earliest germs.

In the nature of things it is impossible, at present, to speak with full certainty on this subject. The Russian revolutionists, being engaged in a desperate struggle, have neither the leisure necessary for writing such statements, nor is it their interest to go into details. Judicial inquiries have lifted, here and there, some corner of the mysterious winding-sheets in which the secret Vehme is enveloped. But more light can only be expected after the conspiracy has been entirely crushed, in which case, however, owing to the heroic silence which its adherents generally maintain, a great deal of knowledge will for ever be buried in the grave, or the fuller clearing up will come when, as I would fain hope, this fierce struggle ends with a triumph, whether complete or partial, of the cause of freedom.

Even under the iron rule of Nicholas, there were, many years after the St. Petersburg insurrection of 1825, still some faint traces of secret societies, in which the spirit of Pestel and Murawieff was continued. One of these occult leagues was that of Petrascheski, detected in 1849, whose members were sentenced to forced labor and to banishment to Siberia. A nearer approach to the plebeian element than was observable in the conspiracies of 1817-'25 characterized this later association. Altogether the more educated classes gradually began to seek closer contact with the people at large.

This task was in so far facilitated by the tyrannical Czar-Pope Nicholas, in that he not only trod under foot that 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.

"

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 Genghis 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 handand, 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 observable: the one inclining toward Western liberalism, while the other cultivates the nationalist sentiment under rather antiquated forms. The "Westerners," "Europeans," or "Liberals," are often regarded by the more stolid adherents of Katkoff as men lacking in patriotism. Between these two parties if we could speak of parties in a country which has no ordered public life-a third group is observable: the Panslavists, many of whom pursue, under a liberal mask, aims favorable to the aggrandizement of czardom. Not a few of the Panslavists are in reality mere Government tools. Others, who, like Aksakoff, began as independent workers in the Panslavist cause, finally yielded to Government temptation; but after a while even they were found to be too much imbued with reforming ideas, and consequently were placed under police surveillance.

The great mass of the Russian people has nothing to do with Panslavism; it does not even know what it is. The idea of a Slav brotherhood is foreign to it. It can be made, by much priestly preaching, to take a sort of bigoted interest in alleged co-religionists who are said to be ill-treated by "unbelieving Turks"; but the interest and the understanding do not go beyond that. Such is the distinct statement made lately by one of the best observers, Ivan Turgenieff, the novelist, in a conversation with a German writer. As to the revolutionary party in Russia, it has more and more become estranged from the Panslavistic tendency-so much so that at present it stands in direct opposition to it.

Alexander Herzen,* who favored the Panslavistic cause, could still speak, retrospectively, of Russian czars as being Robespierres on horseback"-an expression of so doubtful a value that it rather reminds us of the pseudo-revolutionary language of Napoleonism than of the purer democratic principles. Herzen's idea being that Constantinople should become the capital of a great Russo-Slav empire, we can easily understand that he should have represented Muscovite history under such a deceptive garb. Bakunin also was a Panslavist for a time, but of a different type, aiming as he did at a loose democratic federation of the various Slav tribes. The impossibility of this federation all those will acknowledge who think it equally chimerical to form a Romanic federation between nations so dissimilar in origin, history, language, and aspirations, as are the Italians, the French, the Spaniards, the Portuguese, the French-speaking section of the Swiss, and the Roumans of MoldoWallachia and Hungary. Or would it be less chimerical to try to form a Teutonic federation among Germans, Dutch, Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, Icelanders, German-Swiss, Englishmen, North Americans, and the various English colonies?

Nihilism, on its part, has nothing in common with those Panslavist intrigues which mainly cover an imperialist ambition. Nihilism, as at present known, is, in fact, the very negation of such dangerous ambitious schemes.

The first Nihilist Society, properly speaking, is said to have been founded by Russian students about the year 1859. German works on philosophy and natural science were then much in demand, as forbidden fruit among the aspiring youths of Russia. The books not being allowed to pass the frontier, stray copies were smuggled in, and lithographed translations passed from hand to hand. The Agricultural College of Petrovski, near Moscow, is considered to have been one of the first places where young men became imbued with such advanced ideas. In this neighborhood the Netchaieff tragedy was enacted. Among literary men, Tchernitcheffski was one of the first who became a "Nihilist." He suffered for it by being banished to Siberia.

There is a notion in this country that Herzen, at one time, was banished to Siberia, and lived as an exile there. The idea is founded on a book of his, published in German and English, under the title of "My Exile in Siberia." Herzen, however, was never banished to Siberia, but only interned for a time at Perm, which is several hundred miles from the Siberian frontier, and later at Novgorod. There, as a Government official, he had to sign the passport documents of those who were

transported to Siberia. He left Russia, and lived abroad in voluntary exile when he wrote his works of Panslavistic propagandism under socialist colors.

The word "Nihilist " is, however, a somewhat misleading one. It was conferred at first as a nickname. Afterward it was adopted (like the name of the Gueux) in a kind of dare-devil mood; and has covered, ever since, a great many varieties of political and social discontent, as well as of philosophical radicalism. There are Nihilists who, from the sheer hopelessness engendered by a tyranny lasting a thousand years, have come to cultivate a philosophy of despair, of disgust, and of destruction, without troubling themselves as to the constitution of the future. These are men that profess a wish to do away with all state organizations, for the sake of a morbid individualism. Others there are who, in the semi-revolutionary vein of Comte, incline toward a socialist collectivism in a rather Utopian, not to say hierarchic, form. To them the word "Nihilist" is scarcely applicable.

Strictly speaking, the word "Nihilist" covers, at most, a small group of persons of a brooding and impracticable temper, such as is sometimes created under the darkest tyrannies. It may be doubted whether the majority of those who use the dagger and the revolver without compunction against the vile sbirri of an intolerable despotism would call themselves Nihilists, or even Socialists. The greater number of the members of the secret leagues are believed to hold views not far removed from those which have found a practical expression in some freely constituted countries. The violent means employed are, with many, only the outcome of a feeling of revenge easily to be understood under the circumstances; or else they are regarded as a dire necessity in insurrectionary warfare. True, there have been Russians abroad who spoke of "abolishing the family and property." But nothing warrants the assumption that this is the principle of the Nihilists in Russia itself.

If either mere anarchy or a system of barrack communism be the object of the majority of the men and women whose deeds have of late riveted the attention of all Europe, it is hard to comprehend that these conspirators should have secured so many friends among classes which by education and position can not possibly have any sympathy with mere destructive or Utopian schemes. Of the existence of numerous friends of the Nihilists in the higher classes there is, however, no doubt. Thus only can the hold be explained which the occult propaganda of this hic et ubique conspiracy has obtained upon the commonwealth.

VI.

I HAVE mentioned the participation of women in the present desperate struggle. Students, lawyers, officers, government officials, landed proprietors, merchants, all kinds of men of the

more educated or well-to-do classes, have been found to be mixed up with the "Nihilist" conspiracy. By far the most characteristic feature, however, is the share which women have taken in the late startling events. When women thus actively and enthusiastically step forth in a revolutionary or national movement, even to the extent of sacrificing their lives, it is always a sign of a people's feelings being wrought up to the highest tension. So great a strain upon the more delicate nature of the fairer sex can not be borne very long. It is only at a time of extreme crisis that the unusual event occurs; and Russia is now at the very acme of such a crisis.

We have seen, in succession, Vera Sassulitch, a captain's daughter; Sophia Löschern von Herzfeld, a lady of high rank; Nathalie von Armfeldt, the daughter of an imperial councilor; Mary Kovalevski, who also ranks as a noble ; Katharina Sarandovitch, the daughter of a tchinovnik, or official; and several more, of equally prominent 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 labor. 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 intrust 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 offhand, chiefly by means of a lively imagination. She even critically expounded the philosophical systems of Greece and Rome without knowing or understanding them. Her hand-book for Greek history was "The Travels of Young Anacharsis." There was no system or connection in what she taught, but the sprightliness of her delivery made up for the defect. "When we came to the history of Sparta, we became so enthusiastic for the Lacedæmonian girls that we tried to imitate their hardened style of life, washing ourselves with cold water, promenading with bare feet, doing gymnastics, drinking no tea, and ceasing to cry. When I look back upon these performances, I wonder how my pupils remained in good health." The same lady reports that the friends of her youth, disgusted with the hollowness of drawingroom life, had endeavored to satisfy their eman cipatory inclinations by donning men's dress, indulging in Amazonian tastes, and secretly frequenting taverns where, with their aristocratic small hands, they jubilantly raised the foaming cup.

So much for girls' education in the higher strata. As to the immense mass of the Russian population, they were left to rot, intellectually, in utter neglect. The school system in some Western countries including central and southern Italy before 1859-'60, France, and even England until a few years ago-was bad enough. In Russia it was simply non-existent. The private educational establishments and grammar-schools in a few towns, which were destined for the more well-to-do middle class, were sorry copies of the few Government institutions. I have before mentioned how, under the present reign, a movement for a more liberal education arose, which, however, soon led to students' tumults and to severe police measures. In girls' education, too, a progressive movement was initiated. For a short time it was said that the Empress herself, whose German origin inclined her to that view, would assume its protectorate. But soon it was seen that Government mainly busied itself

with bureaucratic regulations, while the foundation of the girls' schools, for which these extensive and often harassing regulations were framed, proceeded with extreme slowness. In fact, the regulations were there; but in most cases the schools were wanting.

Meanwhile, the aspiring girlhood of Russia threw itself with avidity upon the new sources of knowledge, scant as they were, which had at last been opened to it. The Minister of Public Instruction, Golovnin, who was in office between 1861-'66, promoted, in his quality of an opponent of the classical method of education, by preference the study of natural science. Hence a realistic tendency-often verging upon the harsh and the crude-became the prevailing tone. Girls, sick of the idleness and the conventional frivolities of social life, eagerly devoted themselves to scientific pursuits, both as students at the new academies and as subscribers to the courses of lectures which were getting into vogue. The very antagonists of the more extreme “emancipatory" practices acknowledge that the greater number of these lady-students, who soon were driven to seek for an opportunity of acquiring knowledge at a foreign university—that is, at Zurich-distinguished themselves by much diligence and talent, as well as by a spirit of personal sacrifice in regard to worldly comforts.

At the same time it must be averred that some of them, yielding to an exaltation and eccentricity easily aroused in womankind, mentally overbalanced themselves as it were, and began to assume hideous mannish and hermaphrodite ways. The close-cropped hair, the unnecessarily spectacled face, the short tight jacket, the cigar, and the frequenting of public-houses were unpleasant outward signs; but far more deplorable was the cynic tone. These were and are the sad excrescences of an otherwise laudable aspiration; but it may be hoped that in course of time the excrescences will disappear. The sooner the better, else the best friends of the progressive tendency among womankind will turn away from it in sorrow and anger at the unsexing of the sex, whose tenderer nature-in Schiller's words, let us hope not quite antiquated—is destined to "weave wreaths of heavenly roses into the earthly life."

However, all the odd eccentricities, all the sad contempt of the natural and recognized forms of beauty, delicacy, or even decency, into which some may have allowed themselves to be betrayed by their eagerness to throw off intolerable intellectual fetters, must not render us unjust to the sounder aspect of the movement. Nor can those vagaries prevent us from giving a due meed of admiring praise to the heroism displayed by those nobly aspiring women with whom the

exaggerated manner is more an outward form, while their self-sacrificing deeds in the cause of the freedom of the nation and the welfare of the neglected masses show the true humanity and nobility of their heart. "Dead souls" they are not. The fire of enthusiasm is within them.

VII.

AFTER this rapid general survey of the condition of mind of the more advanced women in Russia I come to the tragic story of Vera Sassulitch. It is a story typical of the base cruelty of autocratic government-typical also of the results such a system must needs produce.

The victim and heroine of that ever-memorable tragedy was not, at first, a member of any secret organization. Far from it. At the age of seventeen, Vera, then a mere schoolgirl, had made the acquaintance of another schoolgirl,

whose brother was a student. In the course of this innocent girlish friendship she was induced to take care of a few letters destined for the student Netchaieff, who afterward played a part in the revolutionary movement. A "Nihilist "Miss Sassulitch, at that time, certainly was not. Her whole ambition centered in the wish of passing her examination to qualify herself for a governess, which she did "with distinction."

Netchaieff's democratic connections having been denounced by a traitor, whom he thereupon slew, the schoolgirl of seventeen, who had known his sister, and him through her, was thrown into prison as one "suspected" of conspiracy. There was not a shadow of proof against her. No accusation was even formulated against her. Nevertheless she was kept, for two long years, in the Czar's Bastile-an eternity of torture for a captive uncertain of her fate. These were the words which her counsel, Mr. Alexandroff, addressed to the jury, when, later on, she was tried for an attempt upon Trepoff, one of the most hated tools of despotic profligacy:

The time between the eighteenth and the twentienth year-these are the years of youth when childhood ceases; when impressions lasting for life are most powerful; when life itself appears yet spotless and pure. For the maiden it is the most beautiful time—the time of budding love-the time when the girl rises to the fuller consciousness of womanhood

-the time of fanciful reverie and enthusiasm-the time to which, in later days, as a mother and a matron, her thoughts will yet fondly turn. Gentlemen of the jury, you know in the company of what friends Vera Sassulitch had to pass her best years. The walls of a casemate were her companions. For two years she saw neither mother, nor relations, nor friends. Sometimes she heard that her mother had come and had given a message of greeting. That was all she was allowed to learn. Locked up with

out occupation within the walls of a prison ! . . . Everything human concentrated in the single person of the turnkey who brings the food! . . . The monotonousness only broken, now and then, by the call of the sentinel who, peering through the windowbars, asks, "Prisoner, have you not done any harm to yourself?" or by the rattling of the locks and door-bolts, the clack of guns shouldered or grounded, or the dreary striking of the hour in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul. . . . Far, far away from everything human! . . . Nothing there to nourish the feelings of friendship and love; nothing but the sympathy created by the knowledge that, to the right and to the left, there are fellow sufferers passing their wretched days in the same way. . . . Thus it was that, in the depth of her solitude, there arose, for every state prisoner that every political convict in Vera Sassulitch, such warm-hearted sympathy sufferer became for her a spiritual comrade in her recollections, to whom she assigned a place in the experience and the impressions of her past life.

During the two years that Vera was kept in dungeons under a mere suspicion she was twice only subjected to a secret inquiry-“ judicial,” if that is a word applicable to these dread inquisition procedures. At last she feared she was forgotten. Nothing whatever having come out against her, she was finally set free, and went back to her heart-broken mother, only to be suddenly rearrested ten days afterward! For a moment, in spite of a two years' bitter experience, she childishly thought there was some mistake. But the horrible truth of her situation soon broke upon her. One morning she was seized in prison, and, without being allowed to take even a change of dress or a mantle, transported by gendarmes to a distant province by way of banishment. One of these gendarmes threw his own fur over her shivering shoulders, or else she might have perished on the road.

I will not go here through the whole "infernal circle" of her sufferings and involuntary migrations, which I have elsewhere described more fully. I will not relate how she was "moved on" from one place to the other; the only variety in her treatment consisting of an occasional return to prison. Eleven years had thus altogether elapsed when at last, in those vast dominions of the Czar, and amid more thrilling events which began to crowd upon public attention, she seemed to be really forgotten. In this way she managed clandestinely to go back to the capital, whence again she started for Pensa. It was 66 Nothere that by chance she learned from the voje Vremja" ("New Times") the infamous treatment of Bogoljuboff, a political prisoner, by the chief of the police at St. Petersburg, the vile and universally despised Trepoff, the personal, intimate, and pampered darling of Alexander II.

The flogging practices of this tyrannic head