The revolutionary movement of 1848 gave the first opportunity for the activity of Bakunin as agitator. He was particularly concerned in the rising at Dresden in 1849. But the hands of the reactionary Governments and of their police were heavy on the baffled enthusiasts of the revolution. Bakunin had a full share of their bitter experience. As he tells us himself in his work on Mazzini, he was for nearly eight years confined in various fortresses of Saxony, Austria, and Russia, and was then exiled for life to Siberia. Fortunately, Muravieff, Governor of Siberia, was a relative, who allowed him considerable freedom and other indulgences. After four years of exile, Bakunin effected his escape, and through the greatest hardships made his way to California, and thence to London in 1860. Bakunin thus passed in prison and in exile the dreary years of European reaction which followed the revolutionary period of 1848. When he returned to London he found that the forward movement had again begun. It was a time of promise for his own country after the accession of Alexander II. to the throne. In the _Kolokol_ he assisted Herzen to rouse his countrymen and prepare them for a new era; but the impatient temperament of Bakunin could not be satisfied with the comparatively moderate counsels followed by his friend. The latter years of his life he spent, chiefly in Switzerland, as the energetic advocate of international anarchism. In 1869 he founded the Social Democratic Alliance, which, however, dissolved in the same year, and entered the main International. He attempted a rising at Lyons in September 1870, soon after the fall of the Second Empire, but with no success whatever. At the Hague Congress of the International he was outvoted and expelled by the Marx party. His activity in later years was much impaired by ill-health. He died at Berne in 1876. In their preface to Bakunin’s work, _God and the State_, his friends Cafiero and Elisée Reclus afford us some interesting glimpses of the personality of the agitator. ‘Friends and enemies know that the man was great by his thinking power, his force of will, and his persistent energy; they know also what lofty disdain he felt for fortune, rank, glory, and all the miserable prizes which the majority of men are base enough to covet. A Russian gentleman belonging to the highest nobility of the empire, he was one of the first to enter in that proud association of the revolted, who knew to detach themselves from the traditions, the prejudices, the interests of race and class—to contemn their own happiness. With them he fought the hard battle of life, aggravated by prison, by exile, by all the dangers, and all the bitterness which devoted men have to undergo in their troubled existence.’