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  summonof
  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  dynaiiiite
  ;  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  appreciation ­
  of  their  true  interests  than  are  commonly  to  be  found
to-day.