er
a whole community to be flogged, or at any moment invoke the aid of a
military force or even lend it to private individuals for the
subjugation of refractory peasants.

And this was what they had been waiting and hoping for, for two
centuries and a half! But with touching loyalty not one of them
thought of blaming the Tsar. Their "Little Father," if he only knew
about it, would make everything right. It was the nobility, the wicked
nobility, that had brought all this misery upon them and cheated them
out of their happiness! They hated the nobility for stealing from them
their freedom and their land; and the nobility hated them for not being
prosperous and happy, and for bringing famine and misery into the
state, which had been so kind and had emancipated them.

As these conditions became year after year more aggravated acute minds
in Russia were employed in trying to solve the great social problems
they presented. In a land in which the associative principle was
indigenous, _Socialism_ was a natural and inevitable growth. Then,
exasperated by the increasing miseries of the peasantry, maddened by
the sufferings of political exiles in Siberia, there came into
existence that word of dire significance in Russia--_Nihilism_, and
following quickly upon that, its logical sequence--_Anarchism_, which,
if it could, would destroy all the fruits of civilization.

It was Turguenief who first applied the ancient term "Nihilist" to a
certain class of radical thinkers in Russia, whose theory of society,
like that of the eighteenth-century philosophers in France, was based
upon a negation of the principle of authority. All institutions,
social and political, however disguised, were tyrannies, and must go.
In the newly awakened Russian mind, this first assumed the mild form of
a demand for the removal of _legislative_ tyranny, by a system of
gradual reforms. This had failed--now the demand had become a mandate.
The people _must_ have relief. The Tsar was the one person who could
bestow it, and if he would not do so voluntarily, he must be compelled
to grant it. No one man had the right to wreck the happiness of
millions of human beings. If the authority was centralized, so was the
responsibility. Alexander's entire reign had been a curse--and
emancipation was a delusion and a lie. He must yield or perish. This
vicious and degenerate organization had its center in a highly educated
middle class, where men with ninetee