Has not the populace a terrifying example in the martyrs of Russian thought? A terrible destiny awaits him who dares to step beyond the line traced by the hand of the government, who ventures to look over the wall erected by imperial ukase. “The history of Russian thinkers,” says Alexander Herzen (_Russland’s Sociale Zustände_, page 136), “is a long list of martyrs and a register of convicts.” Those whom the hand of the imperial government has spared died in the prime of youth, before they had time to develop, like blossoms hurrying to quit life before they could bear fruit. A Pushkin and a Lermontov fell in the prime of youth, one thirty-eight and the other twenty-seven years old, victims of the unnatural state of society. Russia’s Beaumarchais, Griboiedov, found a premature end in Persia in his thirty-fifth year; Kolzov, the Russian Burns, Bielinski, the Russian Lessing, died in misery, the latter at the age of thirty-eight. Czerncevski was torn from his literary activity and sent to Siberia. Dobrolubov sang his swan-song in his twenty-fifth year. Chaadaev, the friend of Schelling, was declared mad by order of the government. If such measures have kept the people in a state of ignorance and still lowered the already low level of civilisation, the autocratic rule has further, as it was unable to crush it, caused the intelligentia to turn its thoughts into a certain direction. If we follow the development of the Russian intelligentia we notice at once that all the currents of its intellectual life are, at the present time at least, converging into one centre, swelling the stream, that is already running high, to a vast and mighty ocean, which is sending its waters, through many channels, all over Europe. This centre is literature. Since the foundation of the Academy of Science by Peter the Great Russian achievements in the domains of science, technical education, art, sculpture, music, painting, history and philosophy have been very small. In science and art the Russians have produced nothing of importance, nothing original. Mendeleev, Lobatshevski, Pirogov, Botkin, Soloviev are a few scientific names of some eminence but they are few as compared with Europe and America. Many others, who are known to the western world as Russians, are in reality Germans or Armenians. The great historian, Karamzin, was of Tatar extraction. In the domain of art Vereshchagin is a Russian but Ainasowski is an Armenian, Brulov a Prussian and Antokolski a Jew (cf. Brüggen, _Das heutige Russland_, p. 182).