e, and still more because
Russia had not yet emerged from that stage of civilization in which
every great popular movement assumes a religious aspect. A national
prestige was thus communicated to the Raskol, which in its turn lent
to the popular resistance the energy of religion. By giving the
social revolt the semblance of a struggle for the rights of
conscience the schism imparted to it a vigor and persistency which
the lapse of two centuries has not succeeded in crushing.

But the Raskol rebelled not only against innovations and the
introduction of foreign elements, but still more obstinately against
the principle of the reforms and the modern method of state
administration. The Russian, like the Mohammedan East of to-day and
all other primitive societies, was most keenly sensitive to the
burdens and vexations made necessary by this imitation of the
European governmental system. From this point of view the Raskol was
the opposition of a half-patriarchal society to the regular,
scientific, omnipresent, impersonal system of European
administration. It kicks instinctively against centralization and
bureaucracy--against the state's encroachments upon private life,
the family and the community. It struggles to tear itself loose from
the pitiless machinery of government, hemming every life within its
iron pale. The Cossack took refuge in the wild freedom of nomadic
life, and the Old Believer was equally averse to giving in to the
complicated mechanism of government. He would have nothing to do
with the census, with passports or stamped paper. He strove to elude
the new systems of taxation and conscription, and to this day some
of the Raskolniks are in a state of systematic revolt against the
simplest of governmental methods. Religious grounds, of course, are
found for this insubordination, and they have theological arguments
to urge against the census, as well as against the registration of
births and deaths. In the opinion of a strict Old Believer the right
of numbering the people belongs to God alone, as is shown by the
biblical record of David's punishment. Sometimes the official
designations strengthen the scruples of these simple folk, with
their tendency to attach a great importance to phrases and names;
and hence, partly at least, the popular antipathy to the poll-tax
under its Russian form, "soul-tax." The revolt against such phrases
is the fashion in which this nation of serfs, whose body was chained
to the soil