"I will own that one day, surrounded by dead bodies, by houses destroyed with balls and bullets, and listening feverishly as prisoners were being shot down, I called with my whole heart and intelligence upon the savage force of vengeance to destroy the old criminal world, without thinking much of what was to come in its place. Since that time twenty years have gone by; the vengeance has come, but it has come from the other side, and it is the people who have borne it, because they comprehended nothing either then or since. A long and painful interval has given time for passions to calm, for thoughts to deepen; it has given the necessary time for reflection and observation. Neither you nor I have betrayed our convictions; but we see the question now from a different point of view. You rush ahead, as you did before, with a passion of destruction, which you take for a creative passion; you crush every obstacle; you respect history only in the future. As for me, on the contrary, I have no faith in the old revolutionary methods, and I try to comprehend the march of men in the past and in the present, to know how to advance with them without falling behind, but without going on so far before as you, for they would not follow me--they could not follow me!" Herzen gradually lost hold over the wilder forces in Russia, he was even openly denounced as a reactionary by the revolutionist Dolgourouki; and when he alienated the more moderate parties likewise by his support of the Polish insurrection of 1863, his spell vanished, and during the remaining seven years of his life his influence was of little account.