to restore Russia to her proper place among the nations; and to this they could make no answer, for they had never studied such abstract questions.  And one thing they did know:  that those who hesitated to admit the necessity of gigantic reforms were branded by the Press as ignorant, narrow-minded, prejudiced, and egotistical, and were held up to derision as men who did not know the most elementary principles of political and economic science.  Freely expressed public opinion was such a new phenomenon in Russia that the Press was able for some time to exercise a “Liberal” tyranny scarcely less severe than the “Conservative” tyranny of the censors in the preceding reign.  Men who would have stood fire gallantly on the field of battle quailed before the poisoned darts of Herzen in the Kolokol.  Under such circumstances, even the few who possessed some vague Conservative convictions refrained from publicly expressing them.

The men who had played a more or less active part during the preceding reign, and who might therefore be expected to have clearer and deeper convictions, were specially incapable of offering opposition to the prevailing Liberal enthusiasm.  Their Conservatism was of quite as limp a kind as that of the landed proprietors who were not in the public service, for under Nicholas the higher a man was placed the less likely was he to have political convictions of any kind outside the simple political creed above referred to.  Besides this, they belonged to that class which was for the moment under the anathema of public opinion, and they had drawn direct personal advantage from the system which was now recognised as the chief cause of the national disasters.

For a time the name of tchinovnik became a term of reproach and derision, and the position of those who bore it was comically painful.  They strove to prove that, though they held a post in the public service, they were entirely free from the tchinovnik spirit—­that there was nothing of the genuine tchinovnik about them.  Those who had formerly paraded their tchin (official rank) on all occasions, in season and out of season, became half ashamed to admit that they had the rank of General; for the title no longer commanded respect, and had become associated with all that was antiquated, formal, and stupid.  Among the young generation it was used most disrespectfully as equivalent to “pompous blockhead.”  Zealous officials who had lately regarded the acquisition of Stars and Orders as among the chief ends of man, were fain to conceal those hard-won trophies, lest some cynical “Liberal” might notice them and make them the butt of his satire.  “Look at the depth of humiliation to which you have brought the country”—­such was the chorus of reproach that was ever ringing in their ears—­“with your red tape, your Chinese formalism, and your principle of lifeless, unreasoning, mechanical obedience!  You asserted constantly that you were the only true patriots, and branded with the name of traitor those who warned you of the insane folly of your conduct.  You see now what it has all come to.  The men whom you helped to send to the mines turn out to have been the true patriots."*