BAKUNIN THE APOSTLE OF NIHILISM. 243
lowing the unknown God of Destruction, and we stumble over
broken treasures, rolling confusedly amid the ashes and ruins
of all things. But even when the powder shall have blown up
the bourgeois world, after the smoke shall have cleared away
«tod the ashes shall have been removed, the world will appear
%ain, modified perhaps, but still bourgeois. And why ?
I^ecause we are not ready; because neither the constructive
^ind nor the new organization are sufficiently prepared.”
The character of the Russian Nihilists has been, as we know,
depicted in Turgenieff’s novel, “ Virgin Soil ; ” and afterwards
oiore closely in that of Tchernicheffski, “ What’s to be done ? ”
^ut Russian Nihilism must not be confounded with our western
^ype. M. Arnaudo, in his book on “Nihilism and the Nihilists ”
(1881), analyzes very clearly the elements which make up the
revolutionary party in Russia. It is at bottom only a bitter and
desperate protest against despotism, and, if we may believe the
Solemn manifesto published by the press of the Narodnaya
^olyia, on the 24th of March, after the tragical death of the
Emperor Alexander, what the Nihilists demand is the summon-
of a Constitutional Assembly, to the decisions of which
they promise to submit
In Western Europe neither revolutions, nor constituent
assemblies, nor republics change in the smallest degree the
capitalistic organization of Society ; it is, therefore, the social
prder itself that anarchism wishes to annihilate with all its
■ institutions and all its organs. But for that, there is wanted
inpre than the flames of petroleum and the explosions of dyna-
iiiite ; more even than the fire from heaven announced in the
Gospels ; it is the heart and mind of man that must be raised.
John Stuart Mill said in his “Chapters on Socialism,”
favourable as they are to the claims of the labouring classes,
every organization better than that which at present exists
fapposes, on the part of those who will be charged with putting
11 mto practice, a higher spirit of justice and a better apprecia
tion of their true interests than are commonly to be found
to-day.
