hoped that by that time the proprietors and their emancipated serfs would have invented some convenient modus vivendi, and that nothing but a little legislative regulation would be necessary.  But radical legislation is like the letting-out of water.  These fundamental principles, adopted at first with a view to mere immediate practical necessity, soon acquired a very different significance.  To understand this we must return to the periodical literature.

Until the serf question came to be discussed, the reform aspirations were very vague, and consequently there was a remarkable unanimity among their representatives.  The great majority of the educated classes were unanimously of opinion that Russia should at once adopt from the West all those liberal principles and institutions the exclusion of which had prevented the country from rising to the level of the Western nations.  But very soon symptoms of a schism became apparent.  Whilst the literature in general was still preaching the doctrine that Russia should adopt everything that was “liberal,” a few voices began to be heard warning the unwary that much which bore the name of liberal was in reality already antiquated and worthless—­that Russia ought not to follow blindly in the footsteps of other nations, but ought rather to profit by their experience, and avoid the errors into which they had fallen.  The chief of these errors was, according to these new teachers, the abnormal development of individualism—­the adoption of that principle of laissez faire which forms the basis of what may be called the Orthodox School of Political Economists.  Individualism and unrestricted competition, it was said, have now reached in the West an abnormal and monstrous development.  Supported by the laissez faire principle, they have led—­and must always lead—­to the oppression of the weak, the tyranny of capital, the impoverishment of the masses for the benefit of the few, and the formation of a hungry, dangerous Proletariat!  This has already been recognised by the most advanced thinkers of France and Germany.  If the older countries cannot at once cure those evils, that is no reason for Russia to inoculate herself with them.  She is still at the commencement of her career, and it would be folly for her to wander voluntarily for ages in the Desert, when a direct route to the Promised Land has been already discovered.

In order to convey some idea of the influence which this teaching exercised, I must here recall, at the risk of repeating myself, what I said in a former chapter.  The Russians, as I have there pointed out, have a peculiar way of treating political and social questions.  Having received their political education from books, they naturally attribute to theoretical considerations an importance which seems to us exaggerated.  When any important or trivial question arises, they at once launch into a sea of philosophical principles, and pay less attention to the little objects close at hand than to the big ones that appear on the distant horizon of the future.  And when they set to work at any political reform they begin ab ovo.  As they have no traditional prejudices to fetter them, and no traditional principles to lead them, they naturally take for their guidance the latest conclusions of political philosophy.