occurred to any revolutionist to trouble himself about what sort of coat he should put on to face his judges. But of course we provided him with the means of shining for the last time in public; the papers remarked that “the chief defendant presented a very gentlemanly appearance,” and his speech of defence was reported with approval in various foreign journals. He was condemned to death; and although this sentence was commuted to one of penal servitude for life, he very narrowly escaped suffering the full rigour of the law. Had the attempt—planned for that very day—to kill Alexander II. at the station in Alexandrovskaia been successful, or had the trial taken place two days later, after the 19th November, when the Tsar’s train was blown up at Moscow,—all would have been over for Mirsky. As it was, however, he escaped with his life, and was confined in the famous Alexei-Ravelin tower of the Fortress of Peter and Paul, where at that time the most important “politicals” were imprisoned. Four years later he was brought to Kara, and he was one of my companions in the “nobles’ room.” Footnote 81: The secret police, which was then under the chief of gendarmerie, though it has since been constituted a separate department, controlling vast sums of money. Footnote 82: See portrait, p. 112. Instead of a slender, aristocratic youth, as Mirsky was described at the time of his trial, I knew him as a robust, somewhat undersized but well-built man, of about twenty-seven. And he had changed in more than outward appearance; he was no longer the hot-headed boy, ready for any rash deed, but a serious man who had been through much and had thought deeply. Keen-witted and well educated, he had formed his own conclusions as to social conditions in Russia and their development in the future. The teaching of Marx was unknown to him, but he had attained a similar standpoint by following out his own reasoning. He was particularly sceptical concerning the views then prevalent among Russian revolutionists, according to which a purely Russian programme should be based on the organisation of the _artèls_ (workmen’s unions), and on the already existing system of the joint ownership of land by the village communes; a programme which must differ essentially from that of Socialists in all other civilised countries. He did not believe that anything further could be built on these remnants of patriarchal institutions. He was of opinion that the complete overthrow of the existing political régime was the first thing to be aimed at in Russia, but he was convinced that terrorist tactics would never entirely bring this about; and he expected equally little from any uprising of the working classes, since the mass of the people were sunk in apathetic resignation and hopelessness. Yet still the question tortured him—how should this task be approached?—and he was of all the prisoners in Kara the best prepared for the philosophical arguments of a Marxist.