ure:

'He gained brilliant victories at slight cost; and brought for a
time the greater part of Daghestan under Russian dominion.... He
absorbed the Persian and Tartar khanates, and treated Persia with
astonishing arrogance. But it was these very measures and successes
that led, on the one hand, to the Persian War and the revolt of the
newly-acquired provinces; on the other, to that great outburst of
religious and racial fanaticism which, under the banner of
Muridism, welded into one powerful whole so many weak and
antagonistic elements in Daghestan and Tchetchnia, thereby
initiating the bloody struggle waged unceasingly for the next forty
years. Daghestan speedily threw off the Russian yoke, and defied
the might of the mother empire until 1859. In Tchetchnia mere
border forays conducted by independent partisan leaders ...
developed into a war of national independence under a chieftain as
cruel, capable, and indomitable as Yermoloff himself.'

The Persian War ended in 1828, but in the same year hostilities broke
out with Turkey, involving the Russian troops on the Georgian frontier
in hard and hazardous fighting, which lasted, with a great expenditure
of men and money, until peace was concluded in 1829. From that year
until 1854, when the Crimean War began, Russia had a free hand in the
Caucasus, and applied her strength with inexorable energy to its
subjugation. And it is to the rise and spread of the ferocious
enthusiasm which Mr. Baddeley has called _Muridism_ that he attributes
the striking fact that the complete conquest of the country was only
accomplished in 1864--that the tribes held out against the forces of
the Russian empire for more than thirty years.

Muridism, in which this spirit of heroic and hopeless resistance by
armed peasants against the Russian armies was, so to speak, incarnate,
is a word employed by Mr. Baddeley with a special purpose and meaning,
which he explains at some length. For our present purpose it may be
sufficient to say that _Murshid_ denotes a religious teacher who
expounds the mystic Way of Salvation to his _Murids_, or disciples,
who gather round him, adopt his doctrines, obey his commands, and
cheerfully accept martyrdom in his service. Muridism, therefore, may
be taken to signify the passionate fanaticism of religious devotees,
of warriors who follow a spiritual leader and fight in the sacred
cause of Is