was not at all so terrible as is commonly supposed, because political exiles are not usually confined in prisons or compelled to labour in the mines, but are obliged merely to reside at a given place under police supervision.  Still, such punishment was severe enough for educated young men and women, especially when their lot was cast among a population composed exclusively of peasants and small shop-keepers or of Siberian aborigines, and when there were no means of satisfying the most elementary intellectual wants.  For those who had no private resources the punishment was particularly severe, because the Government granted merely a miserable monthly pittance, hardly sufficient to purchase food of the coarsest kind, and there was rarely an opportunity of adding to the meagre official allowance by intellectual or manual labour.  In all cases the treatment accorded to the exiles wounded their sense of justice and increased the existing discontent among their friends and acquaintances.  Instead of acting as a deterrent, the system produced a feeling of profound indignation, and ultimately transformed not a few sentimental dreamers into active conspirators.

At first there was no conspiracy or regularly organised secret society and nothing of which the criminal law in Western Europe could have taken cognisance.  Students met in each other’s rooms to discuss prohibited books on political and social science, and occasionally short essays on the subjects discussed were written in a revolutionary spirit by members of the coterie.  This was called mutual instruction.  Between the various coteries or groups there were private personal relations, not only in the capital, but also in the provinces, so that manuscripts and printed papers could be transmitted from one group to another.  From time to time the police captured these academic disquisitions, and made raids on the meetings of students who had come together merely for conversation and discussion; and the fresh arrests caused by these incidents increased the hostility to the Government.

In the letter above quoted it is said that the revolutionary ideas had taken possession of all classes, all ages, and all professions.  This may have been true with regard to St. Petersburg, but it could not have been said of the provinces.  There the landed proprietors were in a very different frame of mind.  They had to struggle with a multitude of urgent practical affairs which left them little time for idyllic dreaming about an imaginary millennium.  Their serfs had been emancipated, and what remained to them of their estates had to be reorganised on the basis of free labour.  Into the semi-chaotic state of things created by such far-reaching changes, legal and economic, they did not wish to see any more confusion introduced, and they did not at all feel that they could dispense with the Central Government and the policeman.  On the contrary, the Central Government was urgently needed in order to obtain a little ready money wherewith