Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 2.pdf/182

156 vinced defender of serfdom; he favoured political freedom, but defended the monarchy, because liberalism pushed him onwards toward republican forms. The liberal bourgeois was delighted with Darwin's doctrine, because it enabled him to adduce scientific proof in support of his inward conviction that inequality was a most useful institution.

In Russia during the forties the social question was brought to the front with the appearance of "the aristocrat doing penance" (the phrase is Mihailovskii's own). Isolated specimens had appeared at an earlicr date, but in the epoch of the forties he first appeared on the historic stage as a mass phenomenon. During the sixties aristocrats of this type became a notable historical factor, mingling with the raznočincy, that is to say, with men from the lower strata of society belonging to the most varied professional classes and differing greatly in the extent of their possessions, who had been called to social activity by the reforms.

The modern Russian woman is for Mihailovskii a notable sign of the times. Mihailovskii warns us against regarding the woman's question as the principal question of the fifties and the sixties; the new women, he says, are among the "aristocrats doing penance"; the new women take their places among the new men. Mihailovskii insists that there were no raznočincy among the new women, and that the ideas of the raznočincy had but little influence upon new women.

Mihailovskii is very serious and extremely definite in the enunciation of his views concerning love and marriage. Off-spring, he says, are not the aim of marriage, but merely one of its consequences. Love, he contends, has physical roots, but psychological blossoms. A successful marriage will not interfere with the aspiration for individuality.

IHAILOVSKII rejects economic liberalism because doctrine leads in the end to Stirner's egoistic individualism, to social atomism. He is not unsympathetic towards certain representatives of the ethical trend of political economy and towards some of the so-called professorial socialists, but