That led him to differences of opinion with many of his most intimate friends, for some of them were hoping against hope that there could be some settlement on the lines proposed by the great Bohdan. Shevchenko did not believe it possible and he dared to express his beliefs. To him a free Ukraine meant exactly what it said, a Ukraine that would be completely independent in every sense of the word, that would not be subject to interference by any foreign ruler, especially the Russian tsar. That was a more immediate danger than the old feuds with the Poles for after the division of that country and the failure of the revolt of 1831, Shevchenko saw that the Ukrainians, particularly those on the right bank and in the Hetman state had nothing to fear from the ruined Poland. He had an ardent democratic and revolutionary faith in the common people and he recognized that they were the very backbone of the Ukrainian stock. In his lifetime he was friendly with many of the more enlightened members of the Ukrainian nobility and with many of the conservative writers of Russia. Never did he compromise his beliefs that the new order was to be founded upon the rights of the common man who must be educated to enjoy his new privileges. His ideas were often in close agreement with those of the Russian radicals but he did not have much personal contact with them for his belief in a liberal and radical solution of the Ukrainian question on its own territory shut him off from their refusal to recognize the Ukrainians as distinct from the Russians and their attempts to create in Russia an ideal system based only on western ideas and ideologies. He was a peasant but he realized also that all was not well within the peasant communities and in the peasant way of life. They were cruel and merciless to one another, for example, in their dealings with girls who had transgressed the moral code and it was impossible to blame all this upon the external oppression to which they were subjected. It was perhaps a result of serfdom and of self protection but it was an attitude that needed to be changed, if Ukrainian life was to be enlightened. He felt from his own experience what the people could achieve, if they were awakened to a sense of their own responsibilities and he worked in every way to help them. He understood the need of education and of progress and he did not try to conceal what he felt with the result that he gave us realistic pictures of peasant life, avoiding both undue idealization and excessive condemnation of the people’s weaknesses, for he knew that much of these was due to ignorance.