At some time, perhaps in 1846, there was organized at Kiev the Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius. This may well be regarded as the first formulation of the dream of a self-governing Ukraine as part of a general Slavonic federation. The men who took part were the keenest thinkers and the outstanding characters of the Ukrainian movement for many years. Foremost among them was Taras Shevchenko. He had already made a name for himself as the author of the _Kobzar_ and the _Haydamaki_ and as a promising painter in St. Petersburg. Now he was in Kiev, attached to the Archaeological Commission, with a commission to paint the churches and the ruins from the times of the Kozaks and Khmelnitsky. Not only that, but his travels had given him the opportunity to see the wretched conditions of the Ukrainian people and the evil that serfdom and dependence was doing to them. Another of the group was Nikolay Kostomarov, a Russian by birth, but a close student of the history of Ukraine. He was becoming convinced in his own mind of the differences between the ancient culture of Kiev and of Moscow. Here too was Panteleimon Kulish, also a collector of folk songs and a historian. Others of the group were Vasil Bilozersky and Prof. Mikhail Maksimovich. These men were all familiar with the existing condition of Ukraine, with the difficulties of the common people and with the work that was being done abroad for popular education. As a result they worked out a purely idealistic program for the future of the Slavs in general and the Ukrainians in particular. What was this? They demanded the abolition of serfdom and they called for freedom of conscience, of the press, of thought and speech. All this meant merely the application to the whole of Russia and especially to Ukraine of those commonplaces of personal and civic liberty that had been achieved in the England of the day and were the common demand of all the thinking youth of Europe. They then went further and visualized an independent Ukrainian republic, which was to form part of a great Slavonic federation. This federation was not to be dominated by any one country but was to be a real federation, expressing the ideas of free and independent citizens. It is easy to see that their ideas were influenced by the little that they knew about the United States. It is easy to see how far they were from the reactionary ideas of Pushkin, but they were not dominated by thoughts of hatred or antagonism. The interesting point was that while Belinsky and various other authors were arguing in St. Petersburg and Moscow for the same liberties for the Russians, these men dared to assert that the Ukrainian language could be developed as well as could the Great Russian and had equal claim to be studied and used by the people, by writers and by scholars.