to reorganise the estates in the new conditions, and the police organisation required to be strengthened in order to compel the emancipated serfs to fulfil their legal obligations.  These men and their families were, therefore, much more conservative than the class commonly designated “the young generation,” and they naturally sympathised with the “Philistines” in St. Petersburg, who had been alarmed by the exaggerations of the Nihilists.

Even the landed proprietors, however, were not so entirely free from discontent and troublesome political aspirations as the Government would have desired.  They had not forgotten the autocratic and bureaucratic way in which the Emancipation had been prepared, and their indignation had been only partially appeased by their being allowed to carry out the provisions of the law without much bureaucratic interference.  So much for the discontent.  As for the reform aspirations, they thought that, as a compensation for having consented to the liberation of their serfs and for having been expropriated from about a half of their land, they ought to receive extensive political rights, and be admitted, like the upper classes in Western Europe, to a fair share in the government of the country.  Unlike the fiery young Nihilists of St. Petersburg, they did not want to abolish or paralyse the central power; what they wanted was to co-operate with it loyally and to give their advice on important questions by means of representative institutions.  They formed a constitutional group which exists still at the present day, as we shall see in the sequel, but which has never been allowed to develop into an organised political party.  Its aims were so moderate that its programme might have been used as a convenient safety-valve for the explosive forces which were steadily accumulating under the surface of Society, but it never found favour in the official world.  When some of its leading members ventured to hint in the Press and in loyal addresses to the Emperor that the Government would do well to consult the country on important questions, their respectful suggestions were coldly received or bluntly rejected by the bureaucracy and the Autocratic Power.

The more the revolutionary and constitutional groups sought to strengthen their position, the more pronounced became the reactionary tendencies in the official world, and these received in 1863 an immense impetus from the Polish insurrection, with which the Nihilists and even some of the Liberals sympathised.* That ill-advised attempt on the part of the Poles to recover their independence had a curious effect on Russian public opinion.  Alexander II., with the warm approval of the more Liberal section of the educated classes, was in the course of creating for Poland almost complete administrative autonomy under the viceroyalty of a Russian Grand Duke; and the Emperor’s brother Constantine was preparing to carry out the scheme in a generous spirit.  Soon it became evident that