An independent press was not among the liberties conceded, but Russian opinion at this period found a most effective voice in a newspaper started in London by Alexander Herzen, called the _Kolokol_ (Bell), which for a number of years made a great impression in Russia by the accuracy of its information on Russian affairs, by the boldness of its criticisms of the Government, and by the ease with which it got smuggled into universal circulation. When Herzen was sent to the Urals as a dangerous person, he was appointed, very anomalously--perhaps it was to keep him there--to an administrative and judicial post, in which he would have apparently to sentence others while under sentence himself; but he grew weary of his banishment, and was permitted to exchange it for the more complete, but much more agreeable, banishment from Russia altogether. After visiting Germany and France, and after witnessing, with deep interest and deeper disappointment, some of the revolutions of 1848, and writing that they had failed because their promoters were not prepared to follow them up with a positive social programme, as if, he says, the mere destruction of a Bastile were a revolution, he settled in England, and learnt there, as his son assures us, that revolution itself was but a vain expedient, and that gradual reform was the only effectual method of lasting social amelioration. It was probably while he was learning this lesson--it was certainly entirely in this spirit--that he began his political agitation on the accession of Alexander II. The moment the new Czar ascended the throne, Herzen addressed to him a famous letter, demanding amends for the ills his father, Czar Nicholas, had done the people, a complete breach with the old system, and the introduction of thoroughgoing Liberal reforms, and more especially the emancipation of the serfs. It was in the same spirit he conducted his agitation in the _Kolokol_. Without neglecting to ventilate his socialist and philosophical views, he welcomed the contemplated reforms as being in themselves true remedies for popular grievances, and intended in perfect good faith by the Czar to be so; and his chief care in all his criticisms always was to secure that these reforms should be real and thorough, that the judicial body should be independent, the educational arrangements efficient; above all, that the peasants should not be deprived, in the emancipation arrangements, of a foot of the land they then possessed, or made to pay terms for their emancipation which would be too heavy for them to meet. And perhaps the most popular and stirring part of his paper was always his exposure of existing abuses, and his criticism of the conduct of officials. The journal was written with wit, vigour, and accurate knowledge; and, as it spoke what most men thought, but few would as yet venture to say, it was greedily read and distributed, and was for some years a remarkable power in the country. Herzen was the hero of the young.