be frightened by those who cannot overthrow them.  Plainly there was nothing to be done but to wait for better times, as he had suggested, and the better times did not seem to be within measurable distance.  He himself, after publishing a brochure entitled “Why I Ceased to Be a Revolutionist,” made his peace with the Government, and others followed his example.* In one prison nine made formal recantations, among them Emilianof, who held a reserve bomb ready when Alexander II. was assassinated.  Occasional acts of terrorism showed that there was still fire under the smouldering embers, but they were few and far between.  The last serious incident of the kind during this period was the regicide conspiracy of Sheviryoff in March, 1887.  The conspirators, carrying the bombs, were arrested in the principal street of St. Petersburg, and five of them were hanged.  The railway accident of Borki, which happened in the following year, and in which the Imperial family had a very narrow escape, ought perhaps to be added to the list, because there is reason to believe that it was the work of revolutionists.

     * Tikhomirof subsequently worked against the Social
     Democrats in Moscow in the interests of the Government.

By this time all the cooler heads among the revolutionists, especially those who were living abroad in personal safety, had come to understand that the Socialist ideal could not be attained by popular insurrection, terrorism, or conspiracies, and consequently that further activity on the old lines was absurd.  Those of them who did not abandon the enterprise in despair reverted to the idea that Autocratic Power, impregnable against frontal attacks, might be destroyed by prolonged siege operations.  This change of tactics is reflected in the revolutionary literature.  In 1889, for example, the editor of the Svobodnaya Rossia declared that the aim of the movement now was political freedom—­not only as a stepping-stone to social reorganisation, but as a good in itself.  This is, he explains, the only possible revolution at present in Russia.  “For the moment there can be no other immediate practical aim.  Ulterior aims are not abandoned, but they are not at present within reach. . .  The revolutionists of the seventies and the eighties did not succeed in creating among the peasantry or the town workmen anything which had even the appearance of a force capable of struggling with the Government; and the revolutionists of the future will have no greater success until they have obtained such political rights as personal inviolability.  Our immediate aim, therefore, is a National Assembly controlled by local self-government, and this can be brought about only by a union of all the revolutionary forces.”