Then trouble began again. Kulish, Kostomarov, and Shevchenko, the leaders of the older generation, still endeavored to continue in the paths of the Society. In one of his articles Kostomarov referred to the dreams of the Ukrainians for membership in a great Federation of Slavs. This was, however, exceptional. The experiences of exile and growing caution with increasing age forced the writers to follow a more sober policy of emphasizing the necessity for educating the peasants and for promoting a modest cultural program. At the same time, Russian society itself had travelled far from the optimistic hopes that had swayed it during the Romantic period. In a sense, the Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius had been a belated child of that great idealistic movement that had swept over the Slavs in the thirties and had been inspired and nourished by the Czech writers of the period. It formed also a transition from the high hopes of the Decembrists of 1825 to the sentimental dreams of the forties. Now at the end of the fifties, the mood of the public had turned again. The intellectual leadership of Russia was in the hands of the intelligentsia, who were much interested in the social reforms that were sought for and were little interested in the general fate of Russia or of any particular part of it. It was the period of _Fathers and Children_ of Turgenev, the volume that launched on Russian society the character of Bazarov and the philosophy of nihilism, the idea that nothing was good that could not be justified by natural science and by reason. As a result, the younger men of the _Osnova_ cared very little for the more idealistic and sentimental sides of the journal. There was no one to control the contents of the magazine and to win the respect of the entire mass of people who were interested in the cause of Ukraine. Shevchenko was dying and within a year the _Osnova_ came to an untimely end. Yet it had done its work in transferring the cause of Ukraine from the older to the younger generation, even though the two differed in many important particulars.