The same view precisely is given by Baron Fircks ("Schedo Ferroti") in his very elaborate and thoughtful account of nihilism in his _L'Avenir de la Russie_. It was merely, he said, the critical spirit--the spirit of intellectual revolt--carried to an extreme and running amuck against all accepted principles in religion, in politics, in domestic and social life. It was a common infirmity of contemporary society, and was in no way peculiar to Russia; but while that may be true, it has undoubtedly--as perhaps the Baron would admit--been carried into more extravagant manifestations in Russia than elsewhere. Nor are the reasons of this extravagance far to seek. First, the Russians are, in national character, singularly impressionable, volatile, and predisposed to run to extremes. Diderot says they were rotten before they were ripe. Second, they are mere children in political experience, and even in intellectual training. Their education is in general shallow, and they are liable to the vagaries of the half educated. Third, both Baron Fircks and Koscheleff think nihilism was largely due to the arbitrary government of the country. The Czar and the bureaucracy have themselves had much to do with destroying respect for law and authority by their capricious habits of administration. Laws were proclaimed to-day and repealed to-morrow, or even broken by the very officials engaged in administering them. Even in the days of Nicholas, Herzen complained bitterly of this constant inconstancy of the law; he said the Russian Government was "infatuated with innovation," that "nothing was allowed to remain as it was," that "everything was always being changed," that "a new ministry invariably began its work by upsetting that of its predecessors." Russia being a Functionary State, not a Law State, to employ a useful German distinction, the decrees of officials take the place elsewhere filled by fixed laws established by legislative authority; and where these decrees are continually changing, reverence for the law is impossible. But in all this there was no practical political disaffection before the Emancipation Act. The nihilists had as yet a vague belief in the Czar and the coming reforms; they felt that the Russian people were at last to have a chance of showing the rich genius that lay in them, and their whole anxiety was to have the people adequately trained for this great destiny. It was the common talk that the future belonged to Russia; and that she was already beginning to outshine all other nations in literature, in art, in science, in music. "Some young people among us," says Turgenieff, "have discovered even a Russian arithmetic. Two and two do make four with us as well as elsewhere, but more pompously, it would seem. All this is nothing but the stammering of men who are just awaking."