These facts are of more than personal and local importance.  They powerfully affected the European polity.  These were the years which saw the Bulgarian Question come to a climax; and the impotence of Russia enabled that people and their later champions to press on to a solution which would have been impossible had the Czar been free to strike as he undoubtedly willed.  For the present he favoured the cause of peace upheld by his chancellor, de Giers; and in the autumn of the year 1884, as will be shown in the following chapter, he entered into a compact at Skiernewice, which virtually allotted to Bismarck the arbitration on all urgent questions in the Balkans.  As late as November 1885, we find Sir Robert Morier, British ambassador at the Russian Court, writing privately and in very homely phrase to his colleague at Constantinople, Sir William White:  “I am convinced Russia does not want a general war in Europe about Turkey now, and that she is really suffering from a gigantic Katzenjammer (surfeit) caused by the last war[232].”  It is safe to say that Bulgaria largely owes her freedom from Russian control to the Nihilists.

[Footnote 232:  Memoirs and Correspondence of Sir William White, edited by H.S.  Edwards, ch. xviii.]

For the Czar the strain of prolonged warfare against unseen and desperate foes was terrible.  Surrounded by sentries, shadowed by secret police, the lonely man yet persisted in governing with the assiduity and thoroughness of the great Napoleon.  He tried to pry into all the affairs of his vast empire; and, as he held aloof even from his chief Ministers, he insisted that they should send to him detailed reports on all the affairs of State, foreign and domestic, military and naval, religious and agrarian.  What wonder that the Nihilists persisted in their efforts, in the hope that even his giant strength must break down under the crushing burdens of toil and isolation.  That he held up so long shows him to have been one of the strongest men and most persistent workers known to history.  He had but one source of inspiration, religious zeal, and but one form of relaxation, the love of his devoted Empress.

It is needless to refer to the later phases of the revolutionary movement.  Despite their well-laid plans, the revolutionaries gradually lost ground; and in 1892 even Stepniak confessed that they alone could not hope to overthrow the autocracy.  About that time, too, their party began to split in twain, a younger group claiming that the old terrorist methods must be replaced by economic propaganda of an advanced socialistic type among the workers of the towns.  For this new departure and its results we must refer our readers to the new materials brought to light by Sir D. Mackenzie Wallace in the new edition of his work Russia (1905).