Nihilism as represented by Bazarof, in the novel of Turgenief, is certainly not an attractive picture. We may respect his courage, honesty, thoroughness, and independence; but his roughness, cynicism, and indifference to family feelings are very repellent. Through the early death of the hero we are prevented from observing what might have been the further development of his character. We feel sure that if the story of this typical life had been continued, we should have seen very considerable changes in a more positive direction. The mood of universal negation can only be a temporary phase in individual or national development. Negation may be the physic, it cannot be the diet, of the mind. No movement for emancipation can be a purely negative thing; and no movement can be adequately described by reference to a single characteristic. The Nihilists found a wider view of the world in the writings of Darwin, Herbert Spencer and J. S. Mill; and they had also at an early period felt the influence of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Robert Owen, and latterly also of Lassalle and Marx. From the first, Nihilism seems to have involved a broad and real sympathy with the suffering classes. They wished to recall the attention of men from windy verbiage about art and poetry, from a sentimentalism which was often spurious, and from the clatter of the parliamentary machine, whose grinding was solely for the benefit of the wealthier classes, to the question of ‘daily bread for all,’ to the common people perishing for lack of elementary knowledge. And they insisted strongly on the equal rights of women. It is evident that Nihilism could only be a passing phase in the history of Russia, and that it had a wholesome and beneficial side as well as a repellent one. In a country which was oppressed by an enormous burden of immemorial prejudices and abuses, a powerful dose of negation was calculated to have a most salutary operation. But the movement could not long live on negations merely. As time went on, the struggle for emancipation in Russia began to assume a more positive character.