In 1878 they changed tactics again, inaugurating that system of terrorism by which they are best known in the West, and which has given them a name there at which the world turns pale. The determination to adopt this system of tactics sprang from an accidental circumstance. The day after the trial of the 193 ended, one of their comrades, the young woman Vera Sassulitch, called on General Trepoff, the head of the St. Petersburg police, on pretence of business, and while he was reading her papers, shot him with a revolver, flung her weapon on the ground, and allowed herself to be quietly arrested; and when she was brought up for trial, pled justification on the ground that her act was merely retaliation on the General for having subjected a friend of hers, a young medical student, to a brutal and causeless flogging while in prison on a political charge. The court having acquitted her, she was received by the public with every demonstration of enthusiasm, and it was this remarkable public sympathy that made the revolutionaries terrorists. They resolved to take up V. Sassulitch's idea of retaliation, and apply it on a great scale. The whole public of Russia was at that time considerably flushed with indignation against the imperial Government. The war in Turkey had revealed, as wars always do, a great deal of rottenness in the public administration; it had brought nothing but humiliation and debt upon the country, and it had exacted cruel sacrifices from the people merely to confer on the Bulgarians the political and constitutional liberty which was still denied to the Russians themselves. For the moment the old cry for a constitution rose again in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and there was a deep feeling far beyond the circles of the revolutionists that an end should be put to the autocratic _régime_. The revolutionists found powerful encouragement in all this outbreak of displeasure. Stepniak, who was himself one of the most active of them at that period, says their real strength lay, not in their numbers--which he admits to have been few--but in the general sympathy they received from what he calls the revolutionary nation around them. They had however special wrongs of their own to avenge; hundreds of their friends had been transported without trial; and in the case of the 193, whose trial was just over, the few who had been acquitted were nevertheless denied their liberty by the Czar, and banished administratively to Siberia after all; so that while Russian society was clamouring on public grounds for the downfall of the autocratic system, the revolutionists, for revenge, determined upon the death of the autocrat himself. The various secret societies had united into a single body, called first the "Troglodytes," and then "Land and Liberty," for the better prosecution of the nihilist colonization scheme; but in 1879 they broke again into two parties, one of which, the Will of the People party, adopted terrorism as its exclusive business