But this system of lawless and unrighteous repression nursed a deep spirit of revolt against constituted authority in the heart of the people, and among the younger minds a kind of passion for the most extreme and forbidden doctrines. All the wildest phases of nihilist opinion in the sixties were already raging in Russia in the forties. Haxthausen says he was astounded, when he visited the Russian universities and schools, to find the students at every one of them given over, as he says, to political and religious notions of the most all-destructive description. "It is a miasma," he says. And although the only political outbreak of Nicholas's reign, the Petracheffsky conspiracy of 1849, was little more than a petty street riot, a storm of serious revolt against the tyranny of the Czar was long gathering, which would have burst upon his head after the disasters to his army in the Crimea, had he survived them. He saw it thickening, however, and on his death-bed said to his son, the noble and unfortunate Alexander II., "I fear you will find the burden too heavy." The son found it eventually heavy enough, but in the meantime he wisely bent before the storm, relaxed the restraints the father had imposed, and gave pledges of the most liberal reforms in every department of State--judicial administration, local government, popular education, serf emancipation. People believed completely in the young Czar's sincerity, awaited with great expectations the measures he would propose, and meanwhile indulged to the top of their bent in the practical liberties they were already provisionally allowed to enjoy, and gave themselves up to a restless fervour for liberty and reform.