Some Russian noblemen and students were among the next arrivals. They were full of enthusiasm for the future of the settlement, though enraged at their banishment, and a little jealous of the established order they found on the island and of the influence of the Scholar and the Priests. The former, by the love and esteem in which he was held by many, and even by the beauty of his venerable countenance, seemed to them dangerously like a patriarch or chief, and the superiority of the western dwellings was to them a sign of something reactionary. They built their own homes rather carelessly, and gathered little companies together by the side of the Lagoon to whom they talked in low and earnest tones and in excellent English of the beauty of Anarchy and of Nihilism, glorifying the _absence_ of certain things as a _presence_ more than any religion or philosophy had done before. The “Nothing” of Molinos, the emptiness of Nirvana, would have been far too existent for them. Their ideas did not always meet with acceptance, for even the more violent of the Socialists could hardly see that there was an object for destructive denunciations in the simple order which seemed to them an assurance of individual freedom. But a change was coming. I am not going here to write the history of the great Irish revolution which followed the separation of that country from England. It is well known how terrible that time was, and how, when all men were wearied out and sick to death of the horrors of civil war, there followed a great swing of the pendulum towards order and high-handed government; they entreated for a king of the Royal Family of England, and a strongly Conservative Cabinet in Dublin banished in large numbers all who remained of the disaffected party. These were the men who next landed in Meliora. They had been maddened with rage against their own Church in consequence of the wise part taken by the Pope and the Irish bishops against the revolutionary party. Hence they were enemies of all creeds and forms of religion, and they were also of course filled with the old bitterness against all of English race. At the same time a great number of German and Belgian Socialists of the most violent kind were also landed on the Island, and they found no difficulty in making friends at once with the Irish company, the German system of education having made them as perfect in the use of foreign tongues as it left them ignorant of the first principles of moral law and of all sound theories of government and political economy.