The more intelligent and the better educated representatives of this same party--Byelínskiy, Hérzen, Turguéneff, Tchernyshévskiy, who were all under the influence of advanced European thought, held quite different views. In their opinion the hardships suffered by workingmen and agricultural labourers in Western Europe from the unbridled power won in the parliaments, by both the landlords and the middle classes, and the limitations of political liberties introduced in the continental States of Europe by their bureaucratic centralisation, were by no means “historical necessities.” Russia--they maintained--need not necessarily repeat these mistakes; she must on the contrary, profit by the experience of her elder sisters, and if Russia succeeds in attaining the era of industrialism without having lost her communal land-ownership, or the autonomy of certain parts of the Empire, or the self-government of the _mir_ in her villages, this will be an immense advantage. It would be therefore the greatest political mistake to go on destroying her village community, to let the land concentrate in the hands of a landed aristocracy, and to let the political life of so immense and varied a territory be concentrated in the hands of a central governing body, in accordance with the Prussian, or the Napoleonic ideals of political centralisation--especially now that the powers of Capitalism are so great. Similar gradations of opinion prevailed among the Slavophiles. Their best representatives--the two brothers AKSÁKOFF, the two brothers KIRÉEVSKIY, HOMYAKÓFF, etc., were much in advance of the great bulk of the party. The average Slavophile was simply a fanatic of absolute rule and the Orthodox Church, to which feelings he usually added a sort of sentimental attachment to the “old good times,” by which he understood all sorts of things: patriarchal habits of the times of serfdom, manners of country life, folk songs, traditions, and folk-dress. At a time when the real history of Russia had hardly begun to be deciphered they did not even suspect that the federalist principle had prevailed in Russia down to the Mongol invasion; that the authority of the Moscow Tsars was of a relatively late creation (15th, 16th and 17th centuries); and that autocracy was not at all an inheritance of _old_ Russia, but was chiefly the work of that same Peter I. whom they execrated for having violently introduced Western habits of life. Few of them realised also that the religion of the great mass of the Russian people was _not_ the religion which is professed by the official “Orthodox” Church, but a thousand varieties of “Dissent.” They thus imagined that they represented the ideals of the Russian _people_, while in reality they represented the ideals of the Russian _State_, and the Moscow _Church_, which are of a mixed Byzantine, Latin, and Mongolian origin. With the aid of the fogs of German metaphysics--especially of Hegel--which were in great vogue at that