listened with willing ears to advocates of resistance to their oppressors; they welcomed those who offered a hope of escape from the tyranny which made their lives a burden. These missionaries of revolt taught secretly in barracks and in prisons, as well as among the suffering and wretched peasantry. Runaway serfs, outlaws, escaped convicts, fugitives from Siberia, deserters fleeing from the terrible life-long military service, were received among them; they encouraged mendicancy as a meritorious profession, and to all vagabonds without papers, "brodiagi," as they were called, they offered a refuge from police pursuit.
This extreme sect, recruited among the dregs of the people, is the illustration and logical result of the Raskol pushed to its farthest limit; it is the final and most energetic expression of popular opposition to the exactions of an all-pervading despotism, to the worries of an insatiable, vexatious bureaucracy, to the dreaded military conscription, to hopeless servitude of body and soul. Its adherents could offer only passive resistance, but their exalted fanaticism welcomed punishment, and even death, in evidence of their determination and sincerity; like the martyrs of old, in a nobler cause, their blood and their sufferings were the seed of their faith.
Where rigor and severity have failed, reform, liberal measures, relief from cruel and crushing abuses, the abolition of serfdom and its attendant evils, with the consequent amelioration in the social and moral condition of the people, are gradually eradicating these extravagant and monstrous ideas by forcing their last refuge among the lowest and most degraded of the population.
The anomalous position of children born among Raskolniks, how to determine their civil rights and settle questions of property and inheritance, has long been a
