on behalf of the liberation of the peasantry, and that he endeavoured to win over the aristocratic landowners to the idea of liberation. Truthfully and in moving terms he showed them how the free lords were themselves degraded by the institution of serfdom, writing: "We are slaves because we are masters. We are servants because we are landowners. We are ourselves serfs because we keep our brothers in servitude, those brothers whose origin, whose blood, and whose language we share."
The Russian mir has become for him the "lightning conductor" of revolution; and the supreme value of the mir consists for him in this, that the mir is not an abstract theory of cultured socialists, but a practical institution prevailing among a huge population—a population of illiterates.
The contrast between Herzen's views after 1861 and the socialism of his earlier phase will now be plain. The goal for Russia is no longer a social revolution but a political revolution, and the social revolution has become merely means to an end. Herzen now demands for Russia all that Europe possesses, the things which to Europe (according to his previous view) had been valueless. He demands civilisation, culture, and a parliament. In 1864 he insists upon the need for a zemskii sobor or a duma, elected by universal suffrage. In Europe, he has told us, the suffrage is a contemptible "arithmetical pantheism" which has given the vote to undeveloped orang-utans (of French men four-fifths are orang-utans, of Europeans nineteen-twentieths). But in Russia the suffrage, above all thanks to the existence of the old believers, will secure the genuine representation of the Russian people.[1] The intelligentsia will introduce "the idea of modern science." Do we discern here the brain equality of his earlier days?
As we have already learned, Herzen further tells Bakunin that he accepts the Russian state. "If the sunrise takes place without blood-tinged clouds" it really does not matter whether the sunrise wears Monomach's crown or the Phrygian cap.
It is by no means easy to say what Herzen really meant by his "sunrise." In the letter to Bakunin he says the time has come to ascertain whether we are all ready for the definitive deed of liberation. Herzen often speaks of this readiness.
- ↑ In the "Poljarnaja Zvězda," from 1862 onwards, Herzen published the before-mentioned collection of documents relating to the raskolniki.
