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Rh revolutionary parties which were now coming into existence. As Bělinskii had done in 1837, Herzen condemned secret propaganda as an obsolete method, however radical its aim. In 1853 he expressed his contempt for the propaganda. So decisively did he condemn Karakozov's attempt upon the tsar (1866), so adverse was he to political assassination in general, that the leaders of the revolutionary groups were moved to protest.

At length, in 1869, Herzen comes to grips with the revolution in his Letters to an Old Comrade (Bakunin).

Herzen agrees with Bakunin as to the goal, which is the transformation of the bourgeois state into a folk-state, but he considers that the revolutionaries are mistaken in their tactics. The folk, the entire people, the masses, cannot be educated for the folk-state by a coup d'état or by a coup de tête. Property, the family, the church, and the state have been and still are means for the education of mankind towards freedom—freedom in rationality.

Society evolves, moves gradually forward. The state is doubtless a transitional form, but its function is not yet superseded.

Herzen does not now believe that history advances by leaps; he desires to move step by step; he has no faith in the old, the obsolete, revolutionary method; above all, he expects nothing from force or from terrorism. Nor does he believe in the vigorous agitation advocated by Bakunin. He holds that men can be outwardly enfranchised only in so far as they are inwardly free.

Herzen does not dread the objection that he is a mere progressive, that he is an advocate of compromise. He who is unwilling that civilisation should be founded on the knout must not endeavour to secure liberty through the instrumentality of the guillotine. No honourable man can desire to play the role of Attila. "Let every conscientious person ask himself whether he is ready. Let him ask himself whether the new organisation towards which we are advancing presents itself as clearly to his mind as do the generalised ideals of collective property and of solidarity. Has he conceived the process (apart from simple destruction) by which the transformation of the old forms into the new is to be effected? If he be personally content with himself, let him tell us whether the environment is ready, that environment upon which,