peasants and city workers, who were the soul of the revolutionary movement.
There were, broadly speaking, two great divisions of social life with which
the Revolution was concerned--the political and the economic. With regard
to the first there was practical unanimity; he would be a blind slave to
theoretical formulæ who sought to maintain the thesis that class interests
divided masses and classes here. All classes, with the exception of the
bureaucracy, wanted the abolition of Czarism and Absolutism and the
establishment of a constitutional government, elected by the people on a
basis of universal suffrage, and directly responsible to the electorate.

Upon the economic issue there was less agreement, though all parties and
classes recognized the need of extensive change. It was universally
recognized that some solution of the land question must be found. There can
never be social peace or political stability in Russia until that problem
is settled. Now, it was easy for the Socialist groups, on the one hand, and
the moderate groups, upon the other, to unite in demanding that the large
estates be divided among the peasants. But while the Socialist
groups--those of the peasants as well as those of city workers--demanded
that the land be taken without compensation, the bourgeois elements,
especially the leaders of the zemstvos, insisted that the state should pay
compensation for the land taken. Judgment upon this vital question has long
been embittered by the experience of the peasants with the "redemption
payments" which were established when serfdom was abolished. During the
period of greatest intensity, the summer of 1905, a federation of the
various revolutionary peasants' organizations was formed and based its
policy upon the middle ground of favoring the payment of compensation _in
some cases_.

All through this trying period the Czar and his advisers were temporizing
and attempting to obtain peace by means of petty concessions. A greater