THE SOCIALISM OF TO-DAY. 
196 
Origen. I visited at St. Petersburg, near the corn-market, a 
street almost exclusively inhabited by small bankers belonging 
to this eccentric sect. The determination, the self-forgetful 
ness, the audacity of the Nihilists, compared with whose con 
spiracies the plots of Carbonarism are merely child’s play, are 
a fact so foreign to our nature that we can hardly understand it 
Yet it is with these sentiments, which seem so contrary to nature, 
that Bakunin has succeeded in inspiring his partisans, as well in 
western countries as in his native land. Is it not strange that 
this Muscovite, whose intelligence and learning are by no 
means remarkable, should have succeeded in originating a 
movement of ideas which plays so important a rôle in the 
march of contemporary events? Not only is he the father of 
Nihilism in Russia, but he has been the apostle of International 
Anarchic Socialism throughout the south of Europe, and it is 
the substance of his doctrines that we meet in those of the 
Paris Revolution of the i8th of March. 
Michael Bakunin was born in 1814, in the government of 
Twer, near Moscow. His family belongs to the Russian aris 
tocracy. One of his uncles had been an ambassador under 
Catherine II., and he was cousin by marriage of the General 
Muravieff, whom the Poles call “ the hangman of Poland.’ 
He studied at the School of Artillery in St. Petersburg, and 
entered the service as an officer. Quartered with his battery 
in the Polish provinces, the sight of the régime of absolute 
repression to which these provinces were subjected filled his 
heart with the hatred of despotism. He resigned his com 
mission and went to reside at Moscow, where he studied 
philosophy with Belinski. Towards 1846 he went to Germany, 
where Hegelian ideas captivated him, and he threw himself 
into the extreme left of that school of thought in which a 
powerful revolutionary leaven was then fermenting. In 1847 
he went to Paris, where he met George Sand and 1 roudhon ; 
but he was soon expelled from France, probably on account of 
the violence of his speeches. Returning to Germany, he took 
an active part in the insurrections which at that time burst forth 
in many places, and in the spring of 1849 he was one of the 
leaders of the rising at Dresden, when the revolutionary party