or falling under the power of middlemen, and the Artels had not advanced a step in their expected development.  The factory workers, though all of peasant origin, were losing their connection with their native villages and abandoning their allotments of the Communal land.  They were becoming, in short, a hereditary caste in the town population, and the pleasant Slavophil dream of every factory worker having a house in the country was being rudely dispelled.  Nor was there any prospect of a change for the better in the future.  With the increase of competition among the manufacturers, the uprooting of the muzhik from the soil must go on more and more rapidly, because employers must insist more and more on having thoroughly trained operatives ready to work steadily all the year round.

This state of things had a curious effect on the course of the revolutionary movement.

Let me recall very briefly the successive stages through which the movement had already passed.  It had been inaugurated, as we have seen, by the Nihilists, the ardent young representatives of a “storm-and-stress” period, in which the venerable traditions and respected principles of the past were rejected and ridiculed, and the newest ideas of Western Europe were eagerly adopted and distorted.  Like the majority of their educated countrymen, they believed that in the race of progress Russia was about to overtake and surpass the nations of the West, and that this desirable result was to be attained by making a tabula rasa of existing institutions, and reconstructing society according to the plans of Proudhon, Fourier, and the other writers of the early Socialist school.

When the Nihilists had expended their energies and exhausted the patience of the public in theorising, talking, and writing, a party of action came upon the scene.  Like the Nihilists, they desired political, social, and economic reforms of the most thorough-going kind, but they believed that such things could not be effected by the educated classes alone, and they determined to call in the co-operation of the people.  For this purpose they tried to convert the masses to the gospel of Socialism.  Hundreds of them became missionaries and “went in among the people.”  But the gospel of Socialism proved unintelligible to the uneducated, and the more ardent, incautious missionaries fell into the hands of the police.  Those of them who escaped, perceiving the error of their ways, but still clinging to the hope of bringing about a political, social, and economic revolution, determined to change their tactics.  The emancipated serf had shown himself incapable of “prolonged revolutionary activity,” but there was reason to believe that he was, like his forefathers in the time of Stenka Razin and Pugatcheff, capable of rising and murdering his oppressors.  He must be used, therefore, for the destruction of the Autocratic Power and the bureaucracy, and then it would be easy to reorganise society on a basis of universal equality, and to take permanent precautions against capitalism and the creation of a proletariat.