what they saw around them, rebelled separately. Many of them perished without any apparent result; but the indifference of society was shaken. Even those who were most satisfied with existing conditions and the most ignorant were brought by these separate acts of rebellion to ask themselves: "For what cause did these people, honest and full of energy, rebel and prove ready to give their lives?" Gradually it became impossible to remain indifferent: people were compelled to declare themselves for or against the aims pursued by these individuals. Social thought woke up.
Little by little, small groups of men were imbued with the same spirit of revolt. They also rebelled—sometimes with the hope of a partial success; for example, that of winning a strike and of obtaining bread for their children, or of getting rid of some hated functionary; but very often also without any hope of success: they broke into revolt simply because they could not remain patient any longer. Not one or two such revolts, but hundreds of small insurrections in France and in England preceded the Revolution. This again was unavoidable. Without such insurrections, no revolution has ever broken out. Without the menace conatined in such revolts, no serious concession has ever been wrung by the people from the governing classes. Without such risings, the social mind was never able to get rid of its deep-rooted prejudices, nor to embolden itself sufficiently to conceive hope. And hope—the hope of an improvement—was always the mainspring of revolutions.
The pacific abolition of serfdom in Russia is often mentioned as a proof of the possibility of a deep change being accomplished without a revolution. But it is forgotten, or ignored, that a long series of peasant insurrections preceded and brought about the abolition of serfdom. These revolts began as early as the "fifties," perhaps as an echo of 1848, and every year they spread more and more over Russia, while at the same time they became more and more serious and took a violent character, up till then unknown. This lasted till 1857, when Alexander II. at last issued his letter to the nobility of the Lithuanian provinces, containing a promise of liberation to the serfs. The words of Herzen: "Better give liberty from above, than wait till it comes from below"—words repeated by Alexander II. before the nobility of Moscow, in 1856—were not a mere menace: they expressed the real state of affairs. It was the dread of a peasant uprising, perhaps even more terrible than that of Pugatchòff in 1773, which induced the serf-owners to yield.
