words. Every effort, for well-nigh two hundred years, had proved futile, but a solution of this grave problem was reached at last during the troubled revolutionary period towards the middle of the present century, and it came from a quarter as strange as it was unexpected.
These old Muscovites, the most conservative and reactionary of the population, "Russians, sons of Russians," were, by a singular contradiction, indebted for it to men with whom they had nothing in common, who were bitterly opposed to what they held in deepest reverence. Their new auxiliaries were, primarily, political exiles from Russia, who were in open revolt against their sovereign. They were aided by the emissaries of radicalism and revolution throughout Europe, who saw in the Russian emperor the chief opponent of their schemes.
The Raskol seemed to offer a fertile field for their operations; its multitudinous ramifications and hidden affiliations all over the land afforded every opportunity for secret plotting and intrigue. Its millions of adepts, although intelligent and prosperous, were ignorant and credulous, enthusiastic and easily excited; they were, for the most part, from precept and education, at heart hostile to the government, and would, if their sympathies could be aroused, prove a terrible foe to the authoritative and autocratic principle personified by the tsar. Actuated by these ideas, the revolutionary leaders endeavored to unite the liberal progressive party of young Russia with the old Muscovite conservatives, but these antagonistic elements could not harmonize; they were too widely at variance; the modern scepticism, or atheism, of the radicals shocked the profoundly religious sentiments of the Old Believers; while, from a political point of view, they could never agree, and the attempt failed. The effort was, however, suggestive, and shortly
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