The natural gentleness of his character, and the horror of violence with which his three years' campaigning had filled him, caused him rather to draw back from his new companions, who, dreaming of hecatombs from dynamite and the dagger to reform the world, obliged him to accept these new doctrines through fear.

No; he believed in the strength of the "idea," and in the innocent evolution of humanity; he had only to work like the first apostles of Christianity certain of the future, but without hurrying, to see his ideas realised; he had only to fix his eyes on the day's work, without thinking of the long years and centuries before it would bear its fruit.
The ardour of his proselytising made him leave Paris at the end of five years.

He was anxious to see the world, to study for himself all these social miseries, so as to judge what forces these disinherited could command for their great transformation.

Besides, he began to find himself incommoded by the vigilance of the French police, on account of his intimacy with the Russian students of the Quartier Latin--young men with cold eyes and limp and dishevelled hair who were endeavouring to implant in Paris the vengeances of Nihilism.

In London he came to know a young Englishwoman of weak health, but burning like himself with all the ardour of revolutionary propaganda, who would walk from morning till night in the lanes and surroundings of workshops and laboratories, distributing pamphlets and printed leaflets that she kept in a band-box that was always hanging on her arm.