** I found this interesting letter (which might have been written today) thirty years ago among the private papers of Nicholas Milutin, who played a leading part as an official in the reforms of the time.  It was first published in an article on “Secret Societies in Russia,” which I contributed to the Fortnightly Review of 1st August, 1877.

The expected revolution did not take place, but timid people had no difficulty in perceiving signs of its approach.  The Press continued to disseminate, under a more or less disguised form, ideas which were considered dangerous.  The Kolokol, a Russian revolutionary paper published in London by Herzen and strictly prohibited by the Press-censure, found its way in large quantities into the country, and, as is recorded in an earlier chapter, was read by thousands, including the higher officials and the Emperor himself, who found it regularly on his writing-table, laid there by some unknown hand.  In St. Petersburg the arrest of Tchernishevski and the suspension of his magazine, The Contemporary, made the writers a little more cautious in their mode of expression, but the spirit of the articles remained unchanged.  These energetic intolerant leaders of public opinion were novi homines not personally connected with the social strata in which moderate views and retrograde tenderness had begun to prevail.  Mostly sons of priests or of petty officials, they belonged to a recently created literary proletariat composed of young men with boundless aspirations and meagre national resources, who earned a precarious subsistence by journalism or by giving lessons in private families.  Living habitually in a world of theories and unrestrained by practical acquaintance with public life, they were ready, from the purest and most disinterested motives to destroy ruthlessly the existing order of things in order to realise their crude notions of social regeneration.  Their heated imagination showed them in the near future a New Russia, composed of independent federated Communes, without any bureaucracy or any central power—­a happy land in which everybody virtuously and automatically fulfilled his public and private duties, and in which the policeman and all other embodiments of material constraint were wholly superfluous.

Governments are not easily converted to Utopian schemes of that idyllic type, and it is not surprising that even a Government with liberal humanitarian aspirations like that of Alexander II. should have become alarmed and should have attempted to stem the current.  What is to be regretted is that the repressive measures adopted were a little too Oriental in their character.  Scores of young students of both sexes—­for the Nihilist army included a strong female contingent—­were secretly arrested and confined for months in unwholesome prisons, and many of them were finally exiled, without any regular trial, to distant provinces in European Russia or to Siberia.  Their exile, it is true,