The revolutionary or nihilist movement in Russia has passed through several successive phases; but there is no good reason for denying its continuity, nor any impropriety, as is sometimes alleged, in the retention of the name of Nihilism, which it bore when it first engaged the attention of Western Europe, although it may be quite true that the word is more descriptive of the earlier developments of the movement than of the later. In its first stage, before the Emancipation Act, it was scarce more than an intellectual fermentation--an intellectual revolt all round, if you will--shaping more and more in its political ideas towards democratic socialism, but as yet entirely unorganized, and content to expend its force in violent opinions without recourse to action. Then, second, the Emancipation Act gave it organization, purpose, malignity, and made it, in short, the nihilism we know, converting it into the engine of the bitter discontent of the landed classes, who were seriously straitened and many of them ruined by the operation of that great reform. Third, while the impoverishment of thousands of landed families was the first result of the Emancipation Act, its slower but more serious result has been the impoverishment of the peasantry, and nihilism is now assuming a more agrarian character, and promoting the social revolution under the old Russian cry for "the black division." For the origin of nihilism we must go back half a century to a little company of gifted young men, most of whom rose to great distinction, who used at that time to meet together at the house of a rich merchant in Moscow, for the discussion of philosophy and politics and religion. They were of the most various views. Some of them became Liberal leaders, and wanted Russia to follow the constitutional development of the Western nations; others became founders of the new Slavophil party, contending that Russia should be no imitator, but develop her own native institutions in her own way; and there were at least two among them--Alexander Herzen and Michael Bakunin--who were to be prominent exponents of revolutionary socialism. But they all owned at this period one common master--Hegel. Their host was an ardent Hegelian, and his young friends threw themselves into the study of Hegel with the greatest zeal. Herzen himself tells us in his autobiography how assiduously they read everything that came from his pen, how they devoted nights and weeks to clearing up the meaning of single passages in his writings, and how greedily they devoured every new pamphlet that issued from the German press on any part of his system. From Hegel, Herzen and Bakunin were led, exactly like Marx and the German Young Hegelians, to Feuerbach, and from Feuerbach to socialism. Bakunin, when he retired from the army, rather than be the instrument of oppressing the Poles among whom he was stationed, went for some years to Germany, where he lived among the Young Hegelians and wrote for their organ, the