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THE SOCIALISM OF TO-DAY. 
Herzen we can perceive better than anywhere else the nexus 
of ideas that leads to Nihilism. Before 1848, after escaping 
from Russia, he was intoxicated with aspirations after equality. 
When the revolution of February, which had seemed about to 
realize his aspirations, also became as bourgeois as that of 1830, 
he raised a cry of rage against Society in a writing entitled 
Aprh la tempête. “Perish the old world! Welcome Chaos 
and Destruction. Give place to the future.” * 
In another publication, also dating from the close of 1848, 
“ The Republic One and Indivisible,” he shows that the new 
form of government is “ the last dream of the old world,” and 
that it will do nothing towards realizing the grand principle of 
social justice, namely, that the labourer ought not and cannot 
work for another. “ The end of cannibalism is at hand. What 
delays it is that the working man is not conscious of his strength, 
and the peasant is still more behindhand. But when peasant 
and working man join hands, then good-bye to your luxury, to 
your civilization; then the exploitation of the masses for the 
profit of the few shall have seen its last days. Already now the 
exploitation of man by man is drawing to a close, for nobody 
any longer believes it just” He hoped then that, as in the 
palingenesis, on the ruins of the condemned social structure a 
new humanity would arise free and happy. “ The s¡)ring-time 
will come. A fresh young life will grow on the tombs of the 
dead generations, the victims of iniquity. Peoples full of 
energy, incoherent indeed, but healthy, will arise, and a new 
volume of the world’s history will be opened.” Towards the 
close of his life, Herzen understood that it was not enough to 
destroy institutions or reduce the monuments of the past to 
ashes, but that it was men’s sentiments that must be changed. 
In the last letter that he wrote to Bakunin, he disputed the 
formula which they had both formerly believed true. Die zerstö 
rende Lust ist eine schaffende Lust (“ The spirit of destruction is 
the spirit of reconstruction”). “We dash forward,” he said, “ foi' 
* The bitter contrast to be met with in Paris between the expansion of 
wealth and the sufferings of poverty inspired Hegesippe Moreau, as early 
as 1833, with a paroxysm of savage hatred, which made him desire to see 
the great capital given over to the flames. See his poem entitled L'lltveff 
(See also an article by M. Mangin, Econ. Français, 22nd of April, 1882.)