with his subordinates. They were not tried until the following May, when Barrett was condemned to death, and hanged in Newgate, his accomplices (with the exception of Desmond, who was acquitted) being sentenced to various terms of penal servitude. Burke was convicted of complicity in the Fenian conspiracy, and sentenced to fifteen years' penal servitude; but the prosecution of Casey was abandoned.

About a week after the Clerkenwell affair, the Martello tower at Fota, one of the minor defences of the Lee, was surprised on a dark night by a band of armed men, with blackened faces, who were supposed to have landed on the beach. Only two soldiers being in the tower, the marauders carried off the arms and ammunition, and then disappeared in the darkness. On the 31st, a more daring band, but consisting of eight men only, entered a gunsmith's shop in one of the principal streets of Cork in daylight, and carried off sixty revolvers and fifteen hundred cartridges, five of the party holding revolvers at the heads of the gunsmith and his assistants while their companions collected the plunder. No clue to the men concerned in these audacious enterprises was ever obtained by the police.

These exploits were, however, the expiring beams of the Fenian "sun-burst" on this hemisphere. The executive reverted to the original plan of an incursion into Canada, from which country, when revolutionised, a descent could be made, it was thought, upon Ireland more advantageously than from the ports of the United States. Accordingly, on the 25th of May, 1870, two hundred Fenians crossed the frontier near

Franklyn, from Vermont, under the command of General O'Neill, and advanced upon Williamstown, where they were met and repulsed by a battalion of Canadian volunteers and a company of regular infantry, commanded by General Lindsay.

The Government of the United States had received early warning of the movement, and General Meade started from Philadelphia on the same day with Federal troops, who confronted the Fenians in their retreat across the border, and compelled them to surrender. Two days later another body of Fenians crossed the frontier near Malone, under the direction of a leader named Gleeson; but they were repulsed as readily as the others, and driven back upon the Federal forces, which surrounded and disarmed them. O'Neill, Gleeson, and others were tried and convicted by an American tribunal, but, being recommended to mercy, the sentences passed upon them were remitted.

The British Government had, in the meantime, granted an amnesty, on the condition of the convicted men undertaking to leave the country, and never return to any part of the United Kingdom. O'Donovan proceeded to New York, and became the chief director of the movement, which was then, however, almost extinct. In the following summer a small body of Fenians made a raid into Manitoba from Minnesota, hoping to revive the revolt of that territory; but, being followed by Federal troops, they surrendered without having fired a shot, or attempted any hostile act. The leaders were arrested, but, there being no evidence of illegal acts committed within the juris

diction of the United States, they were released. O'Donovan Rossa afterwards retired from the movement, and exchanged the strife of politics for the more solid gains of the wine trade; and the Fenian organisation, deserted by its ablest leaders, while its funds were exhausted and the rank and file discouraged by failure, subsided into insignificance.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE NIHILISTS.

THE secret Society which, during the last few years, has spread its ramifications over the greater part of Russia on this side of the Ural range is, like the religious societies commonly denominated Quakers, Moravians, Shakers, and Mormons, not known to the outer world by the name which distinguishes it in the lodges of the initiated. The designation applied to its members by M. Turguenief in the novel of "Fathers and Sons," and the appropriateness of which seemed to be shown by the declaration of its principles which was produced on the trial of Cherkésoff and others in 1871, has been generally adopted, however, in the absence of better authenticated information.

It was known, nearly thirty years ago, to those who are in the way of learning the direction of the under-currents of opinion, that the general principles of Socialism, without the distinctive formulas of any of the schools of societary science, had begun to be disseminated among the masses of the Russian population, not yet emancipated from serfdom, but just beginning to think, and to dream of something far beyond that condition. There were a few Russians in the Polish section of the Fraternal Democrats at

that time, and, though the Russian police and customs' officers make vigorous searches for prohibited publications among the luggage of persons arriving from foreign countries, their almost universal accessibility to corrupt influences rendered the exclusion of such publications, difficult everywhere, there impracticable.

Nearly twenty years ago, I was informed of an instance in which, while one Englishman, on landing at St. Petersburg, had his Murray confiscated, another was allowed to retain a copy of Paine's works. An organisation for the purpose of introducing into Russia publications prohibited by the censorship is not likely, in such a state of things, to experience much difficulty; and no surprise can be felt, therefore, at the extent to which such publications have of late years been introduced into Russia from London and Geneva, and the circulation of the Kolokol and Vpered in that country, in spite of the interdict of the Government.

The Society known as the Nihilists has been in existence several years. It originated in the spring of 1869 with a gentleman named Netchaief, who had adopted the views of social organisation which have found expression in the works of Proudhon and the Abbé Constant, and found able and earnest fellowworkers in their dissemination in Dolgoff, Orloff, and Ikatscheff, all young men, and members of the most educated section of Muscovite society.

The right of association and the freedom of the press being non-existent in Russia, a secret organisation affords in that country the only means by which novel principles, whether political, religious, or social, can be promulgated; and Netchaief proceeded, there