y palace, and its neighboring tenement. Yet they sprang up
among one class only--the young men and the young women of the race. The
light was the light of intellectual desire for education, for science;
and by it all Russia was presently set ablaze. In the history of mankind
there is to be found no such tale of bloodless civil war as here. Young
men and delicately nurtured girls were casting off every tradition of
class, of custom, of convention, assuming the right to go forth freely
to the universities, to study: willing, nay, glad, to renounce not only
the luxuries but the comforts, almost the bare necessities of existence,
they assumed the burden of dogged labor under almost unbearable poverty.
Finally, bitterest of all, came the breaking of love-forged chains;
the piteous, fruitless struggle of children to explain their
position to their parents, members of that older generation who
could not understand, who would not yield, who capped defeat by
disinheritance.--Such were the battles of this war; such the sudden
marvellous development of higher education in Russia.

Many were the virtues of this little army of youths and maidens. They
worked together in perfect harmony of theory and practice. There was
honor among the men; there was faith among the women. The wonderful
history of Sonya Kovalevsky, delicate daughter of a noble house, who
became the first woman to occupy a university professorship in Europe,
was repeated a thousand times with humbler results. Nor have there
failed to linger innumerable stories of those _mariages de
facilite_--levers used simply to force the freedom of some too
well-guarded aspirant for knowledge. And all of the young men married,
in an hour, to girls whom they had never before seen, not ten, perhaps,
failed in giving chivalrous protection, or ever took the possible, cruel
advantage of this last, desperate ruse to escape the fettering
guardianship of parentage.

But unhappily, though scandal scarcely raised its head among the sincere
members of the youthful army, other ills as far-reaching and even more
dangerous began soon to sow seeds of evil and of suffering among them.
For out of the fermentation arising among these isolated bands, came the
bitterest drink that Russia has had to swallow. Poverty, alienation,
the common cause against a common enemy--how should it not breed
socialism? That established, where find a lack of bolder spirits to take
the short step into downright anarchy