In 1862, perceiving the discontent raised by the Emancipation Act, Government took alarm, and withdrew or curtailed the liberties it had for a few years allowed the people to enjoy. It stopped some newspapers and warned a number more; it prohibited the Sunday schools and reading clubs altogether; it banished many persons on mere suspicion to remote provinces; and for a greater example it cast the eminent writer Tchernycheffsky into prison on a charge of exciting the peasantry to revolt, and after leaving him there without trial for nearly two years, brought him out at length to a public square in St. Petersburg, read out to him a sentence of transportation, broke a sword over his head, and sent him to the Siberian mines for the rest of his life. There he still remains, broken now both in mind and body, but probably doing more harm to the Government by his wrongs than he could ever have done by his pen, for nihilists have for twenty-seven years been constantly exciting popular sympathy by descriptions of his martyrdom and demands for his release. It was while this alienation against the Government was thickening that Michael Bakunin escaped from Siberia, and it was by emissaries sent by Bakunin to Russia that the first successful attempt was made to incite and organize all these revolutionary materials into a revolutionary movement. When Bakunin came back in 1862 and joined Herzen in London, the two old friends found their ideas had parted far asunder during their long separation. Herzen had, from his twelve years' observation of affairs, broadened from revolutionist to statesman, and had no patience now for the extravagance of the young Russian patriots who visited him in London. "Our black earth," he would say, "needs a deal of draining." And there is a remarkable letter which he wrote shortly before his death, and apparently to Bakunin himself, in which he says:--