Revolutionary opinions were very rife in Russia during the reign of Nicholas; but under his iron rule they were never suffered to be spoken above the breath. His ascension to the throne in 1825 had been greeted by a revolution--a very abortive one, it is true, but unfortunately sufficient to set every fibre of the young Czar's strong nature inflexibly against all the liberal tendencies encouraged by his father, and to stop the political development of the country for a generation. A handful of constitutional reformers--united three years before in a secret society to promote peasant emancipation, the common civil liberties, and stable instead of arbitrary law--gathered a crowd to a public place in the capital, and shouted for "the Archduke Constantine and a Constitution." Most part of the crowd had so little idea why they had come together that they thought Constitution was the name of the Archduke Constantine's wife; and the most distinguished man among the conspirators--Pestel, the poet--said, as he was going to execution, "I wished to reap the harvest before sowing the seed." He had done worse--he really kept the seed from being sown for thirty years to come. All freedom of opinion was ruthlessly suppressed; every means of influencing the public mind was stopped; there was no liberty of printing, speaking, or meeting; there was no saving grace but ignorance, for people of reading and intelligence lived under perpetual liability to most unreasonable suspicion. Alexander Herzen, for example, was banished to the Asiatic frontier while still a very young man, merely because he happened to make the casual remark in a private letter to his father, which was opened in the post, that a policeman had a few days before killed a man in the streets of St. Petersburg.