The Non-Fiction of Leo Tolstoy - Part 1

A Confession

Chapter 1

I was baptized and brought up in the Orthodox Christian faith. I was taught it in childhood and throughout my boyhood and youth. But when I abandoned the second course of the university at the age of eighteen I no longer believed any of the things I had been taught.

Judging by certain memories, I never seriously believed them, but had merely relied on what I was taught and on what was professed by the grown-up people around me, and that reliance was very unstable.

I remember that before I was eleven a grammar school pupil, Vladimir Milyutin (long since dead), visited us one Sunday and announced as the latest novelty a discovery made at his school. This discovery was that there is no God and that all we are taught about Him is a mere invention (this was in 1838). I remember how interested my elder brothers were in this information. They called me to their council and we all, I remember, became very animated, and accepted it as something very interesting and quite possible.

I remember also that when my elder brother, Dmitriy, who was then at the university, suddenly, in the passionate way natural to him, devoted himself to religion and began to attend all the Church services, to fast and to lead a pure and moral life, we all-even our elders-unceasingly held him up to ridicule and for some unknown reason called him “Noah”. I remember that Musin-Pushkin, the then Curator of Kazan University, when inviting us to dance at his home, ironically persuaded my brother (who was declining the invitation) by the argument that even David danced before the Ark. I sympathized with these jokes made by my elders, and drew from them the conclusion that though it is necessary to learn the catechism and go to church, one must not take such things too seriously. I remember also that I read Voltaire when I was very young, and that his raillery, far from shocking me, amused me very much.

My lapse from faith occurred as is usual among people on our level of education. In most cases, I think, it happens thus: a man lives like everybody else, on the basis of principles not merely having nothing in common with religious doctrine, but generally opposed to it; religious doctrine does not play a part in life, in intercourse with others it is never encountered, and in a man’s own life he never has to reckon with it. Religious doctrine is professed far away from life and independently of it. If it is encountered, it is only as an external phenomenon disconnected from life.

Then as now, it was and is quite impossible to judge by a man’s life and conduct whether he is a believer or not. If there be a difference between a man who publicly professes orthodoxy and one who denies it, the difference is not in favor of the former. Then as now, the public profession and confession of orthodoxy was chiefly met with among people who were dull and cruel and who considered themselves very important. Ability, honesty, reliability, good-nature and moral conduct, were often met with among unbelievers.

The schools teach the catechism and send the pupils to church, and government officials must produce certificates of having received communion. But a man of our circle who has finished his education and is not in the government service may even now (and formerly it was still easier for him to do so) live for ten or twenty years without once remembering that he is living among Christians and is himself reckoned a member of the orthodox Christian Church.

So that, now as formerly, religious doctrine, accepted on trust and supported by external pressure, thaws away gradually under the influence of knowledge and experience of life which conflict with it, and a man very often lives on, imagining that he still holds intact the religious doctrine imparted to him in childhood whereas in fact not a trace of it remains.

S., a clever and truthful man, once told me the story of how he ceased to believe. On a hunting expedition, when he was already twenty-six, he once, at the place where they put up for the night, knelt down in the evening to pray-a habit retained from childhood. His elder brother, who was at the hunt with him, was lying on some hay and watching him. When S. had finished and was settling down for the night, his brother said to him: “So you still do that?”

They said nothing more to one another. But from that day S. ceased to say his prayers or go to church. And now he has not prayed, received communion, or gone to church, for thirty years. And this not because he knows his brother’s convictions and has joined him in them, nor because he has decided anything in his own soul, but simply because the word spoken by his brother was like the push of a finger on a wall that was ready to fall by its own weight. The word only showed that where he thought there was faith, in reality there had long been an empty space, and that therefore the utterance of words and the making of signs of the cross and genuflections while praying were quite senseless actions. Becoming conscious of their senselessness he could not continue them.

So it has been and is, I think, with the great majority of people. I am speaking of people of our educational level who are sincere with themselves, and not of those who make the profession of faith a means of attaining worldly aims. (Such people are the most fundamental infidels, for if faith is for them a means of attaining any worldly aims, then certainly it is not faith.) these people of our education are so placed that the light of knowledge and life has caused an artificial erection to melt away, and they have either already noticed this and swept its place clear, or they have not yet noticed it.

The religious doctrine taught me from childhood disappeared in me as in others, but with this difference, that as from the age of fifteen I began to read philosophical works, my rejection of the doctrine became a conscious one at a very early age. From the time I was sixteen I ceased to say my prayers and ceased to go to church or to fast of my own volition. I did not believe what had been taught me in childhood but I believed in something. What it was I believed in I could not at all have said. I believed in a God, or rather I did not deny God-but I could not have said what sort of God. Neither did I deny Christ and his teaching, but what his teaching consisted in I again could not have said.

Looking back on that time, I now see clearly that my faith-my only real faith-that which apart from my animal instincts gave impulse to my life-was a belief in perfecting myself. But in what this perfecting consisted and what its object was, I could not have said. I tried to perfect myself mentally-I studied everything I could, anything life threw in my way; I tried to perfect my will, I drew up rules I tried to follow; I perfected myself physically, cultivating my strength and agility by all sorts of exercises, and accustoming myself to endurance and patience by all kinds of privations. And all this I considered to be the pursuit of perfection. the beginning of it all was of course moral perfection, but that was soon replaced by perfection in general: by the desire to be better not in my own eyes or those of God but in the eyes of other people. And very soon this effort again changed into a desire to be stronger than others: to be more famous, more important and richer than others.

Chapter 2

Some day I will narrate the touching and instructive history of my life during those ten years of my youth. I think very many people have had a like experience. With all my soul I wished to be good, but I was young, passionate and alone, completely alone when I sought goodness. Every time I tried to express my most sincere desire, which was to be morally good, I met with contempt and ridicule, but as soon as I yielded to low passions I was praised and encouraged.

Ambition, love of power, covetousness, lasciviousness, pride, anger, and revenge-were all respected.

Yielding to those passions I became like the grown-up folk and felt that they approved of me. The kind aunt with whom I lived, herself the purest of beings, always told me that there was nothing she so desired for me as that I should have relations with a married woman: ‘Rien ne forme un juene homme, comme une liaison avec une femme comme il faut’. [Footnote: Nothing so forms a young man as an intimacy with a woman of good breeding.] Another happiness she desired for me was that I should become an aide-de-camp, and if possible aide-de-camp to the Emperor. But the greatest happiness of all would be that I should marry a very rich girl and so become possessed of as many serfs as possible.

I cannot think of those years without horror, loathing and heartache. I killed men in war and challenged men to duels in order to kill them. I lost at cards, consumed the labor of the peasants, sentenced them to punishments, lived loosely, and deceived people. Lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, murder-there was no crime I did not commit, and in spite of that people praised my conduct and my contemporaries considered and consider me to be a comparatively moral man.

So I lived for ten years.

During that time I began to write from vanity, covetousness, and pride. In my writings I did the same as in my life. To get fame and money, for the sake of which I wrote, it was necessary to hide the good and to display the evil. And I did so. How often in my writings I contrived to hide under the guise of indifference, or even of banter, those strivings of mine towards goodness which gave meaning to my life! And I succeeded in this and was praised.

At twenty-six years of age [Footnote: He was in fact 27 at the time.] I returned to Petersburg after the war, and met the writers. They received me as one of themselves and flattered me. And before I had time to look round I had adopted the views on life of the set of authors I had come among, and these views completely obliterated all my former strivings to improve-they furnished a theory which justified the dissoluteness of my life.

The view of life of these people, my comrades in authorship, consisted in this: that life in general goes on developing, and in this development we-men of thought-have the chief part; and among men of thought it is we-artists and poets-who have the greatest influence. Our vocation is to teach mankind. And lest the simple question should suggest itself: What do I know, and what can I teach? It was explained in this theory that this need not be known, and that the artist and poet teach unconsciously. I was considered an admirable artist and poet, and therefore it was very natural for me to adopt this theory. I, artist and poet, wrote and taught without myself knowing what. For this I was paid money; I had excellent food, lodging, women, and society; and I had fame, which showed that what I taught was very good.

This faith in the meaning of poetry and in the development of life was a religion, and I was one of its priests. To be its priest was very pleasant and profitable. And I lived a considerable time in this faith without doubting its validity. But in the second and still more in the third year of this life I began to doubt the infallibility of this religion and to examine it. My first cause of doubt was that I began to notice that the priests of this religion were not all in accord among themselves. Some said: We are the best and most useful teachers; we teach what is needed, but the others teach wrongly. Others said: No! we are the real teachers, and you teach wrongly. and they disputed, quarrelled, abused, cheated, and tricked one another. There were also many among us who did not care who was right and who was wrong, but were simply bent on attaining their covetous aims by means of this activity of ours. All this obliged me to doubt the validity of our creed.

Moreover, having begun to doubt the truth of the authors’ creed itself, I also began to observe its priests more attentively, and I became convinced that almost all the priests of that religion, the writers, were immoral, and for the most part men of bad, worthless character, much inferior to those whom I had met in my former dissipated and military life; but they were self-confident and self-satisfied as only those can be who are quite holy or who do not know what holiness is. These people revolted me, I became revolting to myself, and I realized that that faith was a fraud.

But strange to say, though I understood this fraud and renounced it, yet I did not renounce the rank these people gave me: the rank of artist, poet, and teacher. I naively imagined that I was a poet and artist and could teach everybody without myself knowing what I was teaching, and I acted accordingly.

From my intimacy with these men I acquired a new vice: abnormally developed pride and an insane assurance that it was my vocation to teach men, without knowing what.

To remember that time, and my own state of mind and that of those men (though there are thousands like them today), is sad and terrible and ludicrous, and arouses exactly the feeling one experiences in a lunatic asylum.

We were all then convinced that it was necessary for us to speak, write, and print as quickly as possible and as much as possible, and that it was all wanted for the good of humanity. And thousands of us, contradicting and abusing one another, all printed and wrote-teaching others. And without noticing that we knew nothing, and that to the simplest of life’s questions: What is good and what is evil? we did not know how to reply, we all talked at the same time, not listening to one another, sometimes seconding and praising one another in order to be seconded and praised in turn, sometimes getting angry with one another-just as in a lunatic asylum.

Thousands of workmen laboured to the extreme limit of their strength day and night, setting the type and printing millions of words which the post carried all over Russia, and we still went on teaching and could in no way find time to teach enough, and were always angry that sufficient attention was not paid us.

It was terribly strange, but is now quite comprehensible. Our real innermost concern was to get as much money and praise as possible. To gain that end we could do nothing except write books and papers. So we did that. But in order to do such useless work and to feel assured that we were very important people we required a theory justifying our activity. And so among us this theory was devised: “All that exists is reasonable. All that exists develops. And it all develops by means of Culture. And Culture is measured by the circulation of books and newspapers. And we are paid money and are respected because we write books and newspapers, and therefore we are the most useful and the best of men.” This theory would have been all very well if we had been unanimous, but as every thought expressed by one of us was always met by a diametrically opposite thought expressed by another, we ought to have been driven to reflection. But we ignored this; people paid us money and those on our side praised us, so each of us considered himself justified.

It is now clear to me that this was just as in a lunatic asylum; but then I only dimly suspected this, and like all lunatics, simply called all men lunatics except myself.

Chapter 3

So I lived, abandoning myself to this insanity for another six years, till my marriage. During that time I went abroad. Life in Europe and my acquaintance with leading and learned Europeans [Footnote: Russians generally make a distinction between Europeans and Russians.-A.M.] confirmed me yet more in the faith of striving after perfection in which I believed, for I found the same faith among them. That faith took with me the common form it assumes with the majority of educated people of our day. It was expressed by the word “progress”. It then appeared to me that this word meant something. I did not as yet understand that, being tormented (like every vital man) by the question how it is best for me to live, in my answer, “Live in conformity with progress”, I was like a man in a boat who when carried along by wind and waves should reply to what for him is the chief and only question. “whither to steer”, by saying, “We are being carried somewhere”.

I did not then notice this. Only occasionally-not by reason but by instinct-I revolted against this superstition so common in our day, by which people hide from themselves their lack of understanding of life....So, for instance, during my stay in Paris, the sight of an execution revealed to me the instability of my superstitious belief in progress. When I saw the head part from the body and how they thumped separately into the box, I understood, not with my mind but with my whole being, that no theory of the reasonableness of our present progress could justify this deed; and that though everybody from the creation of the world had held it to be necessary, on whatever theory, I knew it to be unnecessary and bad; and therefore the arbiter of what is good and evil is not what people say and do, nor is it progress, but it is my heart and I. Another instance of a realization that the superstitious belief in progress is insufficient as a guide to life, was my brother’s death. Wise, good, serious, he fell ill while still a young man, suffered for more than a year, and died painfully, not understanding why he had lived and still less why he had to die. No theories could give me, or him, any reply to these questions during his slow and painful dying. But these were only rare instances of doubt, and I actually continued to live professing a faith only in progress. “Everything evolves and I evolve with it: and why it is that I evolve with all things will be known some day.” So I ought to have formulated my faith at that time.

On returning from abroad I settled in the country and chanced to occupy myself with peasant schools. This work was particularly to my taste because in it I had not to face the falsity which had become obvious to me and stared me in the face when I tried to teach people by literary means. Here also I acted in the name of progress, but I already regarded progress itself critically. I said to myself: “In some of its developments progress has proceeded wrongly, and with primitive peasant children one must deal in a spirit of perfect freedom, letting them choose what path of progress they please.” In reality I was ever revolving round one and the same insoluble problem, which was: How to teach without knowing what to teach. In the higher spheres of literary activity I had realized that one could not teach without knowing what, for I saw that people all taught differently, and by quarrelling among themselves only succeeded in hiding their ignorance from one another. But here, with peasant children, I thought to evade this difficulty by letting them learn what they liked. It amuses me now when I remember how I shuffled in trying to satisfy my desire to teach, while in the depth of my soul I knew very well that I could not teach anything needful for I did not know what was needful. After spending a year at school work I went abroad a second time to discover how to teach others while myself knowing nothing.

And it seemed to me that I had learnt this aborad, and in the year of the peasants’ emancipation (1861) I returned to Russia armed with all this wisdom, and having become an Arbiter [Footnote: To keep peace between peasants and owners.-A.M.] I began to teach, both the uneducated peasants in schools and the educated classes through a magazine I published. Things appeared to be going well, but I felt I was not quite sound mentally and that matters could not long continue in that way. And I should perhaps then have come to the state of despair I reached fifteen years later had there not been one side of life still unexplored by me which promised me happiness: that was my marriage.

For a year I busied myself with arbitration work, the schools, and the magazine; and I became so worn out-as a result especially of my mental confusion-and so hard was my struggle as Arbiter, so obscure the results of my activity in the schools, so repulsive my shuffling in the magazine (which always amounted to one and the same thing: a desire to teach everybody and to hide the fact that I did not know what to teach), that I fell ill, mentally rather than physically, threw up everything, and went away to the Bashkirs in the steppes, to breathe fresh air, drink kumys [Footnote: A fermented drink prepared from mare’s milk.-A. M.], and live a merely animal life.

Returning from there I married. The new conditions of happy family life completely diverted me from all search for the general meaning of life. My whole life was centred at that time in my family, wife and children, and therefore in care to increase our means of livelihood. My striving after self-perfection, for which I had already substituted a striving for perfection in general, i.e. progress, was now again replaced by the effort simply to secure the best possible conditions for myself and my family.

So another fifteen years passed. In spite of the fact that I now regarded authorship as of no importance-the temptation of immense monetary rewards and applause for my insignificant work-and I devoted myself to it as a means of improving my material position and of stifling in my soul all questions as to the meaning of my own life or life in general.

I wrote: teaching what was for me the only truth, namely, that one should live so as to have the best for oneself and one’s family.

So I lived; but five years ago something very strange began to happen to me. At first I experienced moments of perplexity and arrest of life, and though I did not know what to do or how to live; and I felt lost and became dejected. But this passed and I went on living as before. Then these moments of perplexity began to recur oftener and oftener, and always in the same form. They were always expressed by the questions: What is it for? What does it lead to?

At first it seemed to me that these were aimless and irrelevant questions. I thought that it was all well known, and that if I should ever wish to deal with the solution it would not cost me much effort; just at present I had no time for it, but when I wanted to I should be able to find the answer. The questions however began to repeat themselves frequently, and to demand replies more and more insistently; and like drops of ink always falling on one place they ran together into one black blot.

Then occurred what happens to everyone sickening with a mortal internal disease. At first trivial signs of indisposition appear to which the sick man pays no attention; then these signs reappear more and more often and merge into one uninterrupted period of suffering. The suffering increases, and before the sick man can look round, what he took for a mere indisposition has already become more important to him than anything else in the world-it is death!

That is what happened to me. I understood that it was no casual indisposition but something very important, and that if these questions constantly repeated themselves they would have to be answered. And I tried to answer them. The questions seemed such stupid, simple, childish ones; but as soon as I touched them and tried to solve them I at once became convinced, first, that they are not childish and stupid but the most important and profound of life’s questions; and secondly that, occupying myself with my Samara estate, the education of my son, or the writing of a book, I had to know why I was doing it. As long as I did not know why, I could do nothing and could not live. Amid the thoughts of estate management which greatly occupied me at that time, the question would suddenly occur: “Well, you will have 6,000 desyatinas [Footnote: The desyatina is about 2.75 acres.-A.M.] of land in Samara Government and 300 horses, and what then?” ... And I was quite disconcerted and did not know what to think. Or when considering plans for the education of my children, I would say to myself: “What for?” Or when considering how the peasants might become prosperous, I would suddenly say to myself: “But what does it matter to me?” Or when thinking of the fame my works would bring me, I would say to myself, “Very well; you will be more famous than Gogol or Pushkin or Shakespeare or Moliere, or than all the writers in the world-and what of it?” And I could find no reply at all. The questions would not wait, they had to be answered at once, and if I did not answer them it was impossible to live. But there was no answer.

I felt that what I had been standing on had collapsed and that I had nothing left under my feet. What I had lived on no longer existed, and there was nothing left.

Chapter 4

My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink, and sleep, and I could not help doing these things; but there was no life, for there were no wishes the fulfillment of which I could consider reasonable. If I desired anything, I knew in advance that whether I satisfied my desire or not, nothing would come of it. Had a fairy come and offered to fulfill my desires I should not have know what to ask. If in moments of intoxication I felt something which, though not a wish, was a habit left by former wishes, in sober moments I knew this to be a delusion and that there was really nothing to wish for. I could not even wish to know the truth, for I guessed of what it consisted. The truth was that life is meaningless. I had as it were lived, lived, and walked, walked, till I had come to a precipice and saw clearly that there was nothing ahead of me but destruction. It was impossible to stop, impossible to go back, and impossible to close my eyes or avoid seeing that there was nothing ahead but suffering and real death-complete annihilation.

It had come to this, that I, a healthy, fortunate man, felt I could no longer live: some irresistible power impelled me to rid myself one way or other of life. I cannot say I wished to kill myself. The power which drew me away from life was stronger, fuller, and more widespread than any mere wish. It was a force similar to the former striving to live, only in a contrary direction. All my strength drew me away from life. The thought of self-destruction now came to me as naturally as thoughts of how to improve my life had come formerly. and it was seductive that I had to be cunning with myself lest I should carry it out too hastily. I did not wish to hurry, because I wanted to use all efforts to disentangle the matter. “If I cannot unravel matters, there will always be time.” and it was then that I, a man favoured by fortune, hid a cord from myself lest I should hang myself from the crosspiece of the partition in my room where I undressed alone every evening, and I ceased to go out shooting with a gun lest I should be tempted by so easy a way of ending my life. I did not myself know what I wanted: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it.

And all this befell me at a time when all around me I had what is considered complete good fortune. I was not yet fifty; I had a good wife who loved me and whom I loved, good children, and a large estate which without much effort on my part improved and increased. I was respected by my relations and acquaintances more than at any previous time. I was praised by others and without much self-deception could consider that my name was famous. And far from being insane or mentally diseased, I enjoyed on the contrary a strength of mind and body such as I have seldom met with among men of my kind; physically I could keep up with the peasants at mowing, and mentally I could work for eight and ten hours at a stretch without experiencing any ill results from such exertion. And in this situation I came to this-that I could not live, and, fearing death, had to employ cunning with myself to avoid taking my own life.

My mental condition presented itself to me in this way: my life is a stupid and spiteful joke someone has played on me. Though I did not acknowledge a “someone” who created me, yet such a presentation-that someone had played an evil and stupid joke on my by placing me in the world-was the form of expression that suggested itself most naturally to me.

Involuntarily it appeared to me that there, somewhere, was someone who amused himself by watching how I lived for thirty or forty years: learning, developing, maturing in body and mind, and how, having with matured mental powers reached the summit of life from which it all lay before me, I stood on that summit-like an arch-fool-seeing clearly that there is nothing in life, and that there has been and will be nothing. And he was amused. ...

But whether that “someone” laughing at me existed or not, I was none the better off. I could give no reasonable meaning to any single action or to my whole life. I was only surprised that I could have avoided understanding this from the very beginning-it has been so long known to all. Today or tomorrow sickness and death will come (they had come already) to those I love or to me; nothing will remain but stench and worms. Sooner or later my affairs, whatever they may be, will be forgotten, and I shall not exist. Then why go on making any effort? ... How can man fail to see this? And how go on living? That is what is surprising! One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud! That is precisely what it is: there is nothing either amusing or witty about it, it is simply cruel and stupid.

There is an Eastern fable, told long ago, of a traveller overtaken on a plain by an enraged beast. Escaping from the beast he gets into a dry well, but sees at the bottom of the well a dragon that has opened its jaws to swallow him. And the unfortunate man, not daring to climb out lest he should be destroyed by the enraged beast, and not daring to leap to the bottom of the well lest he should be eaten by the dragon, seizes s twig growing in a crack in the well and clings to it. His hands are growing weaker and he feels he will soon have to resign himself to the destruction that awaits him above or below, but still he clings on. Then he sees that two mice, a black one and a white one, go regularly round and round the stem of the twig to which he is clinging and gnaw at it. And soon the twig itself will snap and he will fall into the dragon’s jaws. The traveller sees this and knows that he will inevitably perish; but while still hanging he looks around, sees some drops of honey on the leaves of the twig, reaches them with his tongue and licks them. So I too clung to the twig of life, knowing that the dragon of death was inevitably awaiting me, ready to tear me to pieces; and I could not understand why I had fallen into such torment. I tried to lick the honey which formerly consoled me, but the honey no longer gave me pleasure, and the white and black mice of day and night gnawed at the branch by which I hung. I saw the dragon clearly and the honey no longer tasted sweet. I only saw the unescapable dragon and the mice, and I could not tear my gaze from them. and this is not a fable but the real unanswerable truth intelligible to all.

The deception of the joys of life which formerly allayed my terror of the dragon now no longer deceived me. No matter how often I may be told, “You cannot understand the meaning of life so do not think about it, but live,” I can no longer do it: I have already done it too long. I cannot now help seeing day and night going round and bringing me to death. That is all I see, for that alone is true. All else is false.

The two drops of honey which diverted my eyes from the cruel truth longer than the rest: my love of family, and of writing-art as I called it-were no longer sweet to me.

“Family”...said I to myself. But my family-wife and children-are also human. They are placed just as I am: they must either live in a lie or see the terrible truth. Why should they live? Why should I love them, guard them, bring them up, or watch them? That they may come to the despair that I feel, or else be stupid? Loving them, I cannot hide the truth from them: each step in knowledge leads them to the truth. And the truth is death.

“Art, poetry?”...Under the influence of success and the praise of men, I had long assured myself that this was a thing one could do though death was drawing near-death which destroys all things, including my work and its remembrance; but soon I saw that that too was a fraud. It was plain to me that art is an adornment of life, an allurement to life. But life had lost its attraction for me, so how could I attract others? As long as I was not living my own life but was borne on the waves of some other life-as long as I believed that life had a meaning, though one I could not express-the reflection of life in poetry and art of all kinds afforded me pleasure: it was pleasant to look at life in the mirror of art. But when I began to seek the meaning of life and felt the necessity of living my own life, that mirror became for me unnecessary, superfluous, ridiculous, or painful. I could no longer soothe myself with what I now saw in the mirror, namely, that my position was stupid and desperate. It was all very well to enjoy the sight when in the depth of my soul I believed that my life had a meaning. Then the play of lights-comic, tragic, touching, beautiful, and terrible-in life amused me. No sweetness of honey could be sweet to me when I saw the dragon and saw the mice gnawing away my support.

Nor was that all. Had I simply understood that life had no meaning I could have borne it quietly, knowing that that was my lot. But I could not satisfy myself with that. Had I been like a man living in a wood from which he knows there is no exit, I could have lived; but I was like one lost in a wood who, horrified at having lost his way, rushes about wishing to find the road. He knows that each step he takes confuses him more and more, but still he cannot help rushing about.

It was indeed terrible. And to rid myself of the terror I wished to kill myself. I experienced terror at what awaited me-knew that that terror was even worse than the position I was in, but still I could not patiently await the end. However convincing the argument might be that in any case some vessel in my heart would give way, or something would burst and all would be over, I could not patiently await that end. The horror of darkness was too great, and I wished to free myself from it as quickly as possible by noose or bullet. that was the feeling which drew me most strongly towards suicide.

Chapter 5

“But perhaps I have overlooked something, or misunderstood something?” said to myself several times. “It cannot be that this condition of despair is natural to man!” And I sought for an explanation of these problems in all the branches of knowledge acquired by men. I sought painfully and long, not from idle curiosity or listlessly, but painfully and persistently day and night-sought as a perishing man seeks for safety-and I found nothing.

I sought in all the sciences, but far from finding what I wanted, became convinced that all who like myself had sought in knowledge for the meaning of life had found nothing. And not only had they found nothing, but they had plainly acknowledged that the very thing which made me despair-namely the senselessness of life-is the one indubitable thing man can know.

I sought everywhere; and thanks to a life spent in learning, and thanks also to my relations with the scholarly world, I had access to scientists and scholars in all branches of knowledge, and they readily showed me all their knowledge, not only in books but also in conversation, so that I had at my disposal all that science has to say on this question of life.

I was long unable to believe that it gives no other reply to life’s questions than that which it actually does give. It long seemed to me, when I saw the important and serious air with which science announces its conclusions which have nothing in common with the real questions of human life, that there was something I had not understood. I long was timid before science, and it seemed to me that the lack of conformity between the answers and my questions arose not by the fault of science but from my ignorance, but the matter was for me not a game or an amusement but one of life and death, and I was involuntarily brought to the conviction that my questions were the only legitimate ones, forming the basis of all knowledge, and that I with my questions was not to blame, but science if it pretends to reply to those questions.

My question-that which at the age of fifty brought me to the verge of suicide-was the simplest of questions, lying in the soul of every man from the foolish child to the wisest elder: it was a question without an answer to which one cannot live, as I had found by experience. It was: “What will come of what I am doing today or shall do tomorrow? What will come of my whole life?”

Differently expressed, the question is: “Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything?” It can also be expressed thus: “Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?”

To this one question, variously expressed, I sought an answer in science. And I found that in relation to that question all human knowledge is divided as it were into two opposite hemispheres at the ends of which are two poles: the one a negative and the other a positive; but that neither at the one nor the other pole is there an answer to life’s questions.

The one series of sciences seems not to recognize the question, but replies clearly and exactly to its own independent questions: that is the series of experimental sciences, and at the extreme end of it stands mathematics. The other series of sciences recognizes the question, but does not answer it; that is the series of abstract sciences, and at the extreme end of it stands metaphysics.

From early youth I had been interested in the abstract sciences, but later the mathematical and natural sciences attracted me, and until I put my question definitely to myself, until that question had itself grown up within me urgently demanding a decision, I contented myself with those counterfeit answers which science gives.

Now in the experimental sphere I said to myself: “Everything develops and differentiates itself, moving towards complexity and perfection, and there are laws directing this movement. You are a part of the whole. Having learnt as far as possible the whole, and having learnt the law of evolution, you will understand also your place in the whole and will know yourself.” Ashamed as I am to confess it, there wa a time when I seemed satisfied with that. It was just the time when I was myself becoming more complex and was developing. My muscles were growing and strengthening, my memory was being enriched, my capacity to think and understand was increasing, I was growing and developing; and feeling this growth in myself it was natural for me to think that such was the universal law in which I should find the solution of the question of my life. But a time came when the growth within me ceased. I felt that I was not developing, but fading, my muscles were weakening, my teeth falling out, and I saw that the law not only did not explain anything to me, but that there never had been or could be such a law, and that I had taken for a law what I had found in myself at a certain period of my life. I regarded the definition of that law more strictly, and it became clear to me that there could be no law of endless development; it became clear that to say, “in infinite space and time everything develops, becomes more perfect and more complex, is differentiated”, is to say nothing at all. These are all words with no meaning, for in the infinite there is neither complex nor simple, neither forward nor backward, nor better or worse.

Above all, my personal question, “What am I with my desires?” remained quite unanswered. And I understood that those sciences are very interesting and attractive, but that they are exact and clear in inverse proportion to their applicability to the question of life: the less their applicability to the question of life, the more exact and clear they are, while the more they try to reply to the question of life, the more obscure and unattractive they become. If one turns to the division of sciences which attempt to reply to the questions of life-to physiology, psychology, biology, sociology-one encounters an appalling poverty of thought, the greatest obscurity, a quite unjustifiable pretension to solve irrelevant question, and a continual contradiction of each authority by others and even by himself. If one turns to the branches of science which are not concerned with the solution of the questions of life, but which reply to their own special scientific questions, one is enraptured by the power of man’s mind, but one knows in advance that they give no reply to life’s questions. Those sciences simply ignore life’s questions. They say: “To the question of what you are and why you live we have no reply, and are not occupied with that; but if you want to know the laws of light, of chemical combinations, the laws of development of organisms, if you want to know the laws of bodies and their form, and the relation of numbers and quantities, if you want to know the laws of your mind, to all that we have clear, exact and unquestionable replies.”

In general the relation of the experimental sciences to life’s question may be expressed thus: Question: “Why do I live?” Answer: “In infinite space, in infinite time, infinitely small particles change their forms in infinite complexity, and when you have under stood the laws of those mutations of form you will understand why you live on the earth.”

Then in the sphere of abstract science I said to myself: “All humanity lives and develops on the basis of spiritual principles and ideals which guide it. Those ideals are expressed in religions, in sciences, in arts, in forms of government. Those ideals become more and more elevated, and humanity advances to its highest welfare. I am part of humanity, and therefore my vocation is to forward the recognition and the realization of the ideals of humanity.” And at the time of my weak-mindedness I was satisfied with that; but as soon as the question of life presented itself clearly to me, those theories immediately crumbled away. Not to speak of the unscrupulous obscurity with which those sciences announce conclusions formed on the study of a small part of mankind as general conclusions; not to speak of the mutual contradictions of different adherents of this view as to what are the ideals of humanity; the strangeness, not to say stupidity, of the theory consists in the fact that in order to reply to the question facing each man: “What am I?” or “Why do I live?” or “What must I do?” one has first to decide the question: “What is the life of the whole?” (which is to him unknown and of which he is acquainted with one tiny part in one minute period of time. To understand what he is, one man must first understand all this mysterious humanity, consisting of people such as himself who do not understand one another.

I have to confess that there was a time when I believed this. It was the time when I had my own favourite ideals justifying my own caprices, and I was trying to devise a theory which would allow one to consider my caprices as the law of humanity. But as soon as the question of life arose in my soul in full clearness that reply at once few to dust. And I understood that as in the experimental sciences there are real sciences, and semi-sciences which try to give answers to questions beyond their competence, so in this sphere there is a whole series of most diffused sciences which try to reply to irrelevant questions. Semi-sciences of that kind, the juridical and the social-historical, endeavour to solve the questions of a man’s life by pretending to decide each in its own way, the question of the life of all humanity.

But as in the sphere of man’s experimental knowledge one who sincerely inquires how he is to live cannot be satisfied with the reply-”Study in endless space the mutations, infinite in time and in complexity, of innumerable atoms, and then you will understand your life”-so also a sincere man cannot be satisfied with the reply: “Study the whole life of humanity of which we cannot know either the beginning or the end, of which we do not even know a small part, and then you will understand your own life.” And like the experimental semi-sciences, so these other semi-sciences are the more filled with obscurities, inexactitudes, stupidities, and contradictions, the further they diverge from the real problems. The problem of experimental science is the sequence of cause and effect in material phenomena. It is only necessary for experimental science to introduce the question of a final cause for it to become nonsensical. The problem of abstract science is the recognition of the primordial essence of life. It is only necessary to introduce the investigation of consequential phenomena (such as social and historical phenomena) and it also becomes nonsensical.

Experimental science only then gives positive knowledge and displays the greatness of the human mind when it does not introduce into its investigations the question of an ultimate cause. And, on the contrary, abstract science is only then science and displays the greatness of the human mind when it puts quite aside questions relating to the consequential causes of phenomena and regards man solely in relation to an ultimate cause. Such in this realm of science-forming the pole of the sphere-is metaphysics or philosophy. That science states the question clearly: “What am I, and what is the universe? And why do I exist, and why does the universe exist?” And since it has existed it has always replied in the same way. Whether the philosopher calls the essence of life existing within me, and in all that exists, by the name of “idea”, or “substance”, or “spirit”, or “will”, he says one and the same thing: that this essence exists and that I am of that same essence; but why it is he does not know, and does not say, if he is an exact thinker. I ask: “Why should this essence exist? What results from the fact that it is and will be?” ... And philosophy not merely does not reply, but is itself only asking that question. And if it is real philosophy all its labour lies merely in trying to put that question clearly. And if it keeps firmly to its task it cannot reply to the question otherwise than thus: “What am I, and what is the universe?” “All and nothing”; and to the question “Why?” by “I do not know”.

So that however I may turn these replies of philosophy, I can never obtain anything like an answer-and not because, as in the clear experimental sphere, the reply does not relate to my question, but because here, though all the mental work is directed just to my question, there is no answer, but instead of an answer one gets the same question, only in a complex form.

Chapter 6

In my search for answers to life’s questions I experienced just what is felt by a man lost in a forest.

He reaches a glade, climbs a tree, and clearly sees the limitless distance, but sees that his home is not and cannot be there; then he goes into the dark wood and sees the darkness, but there also his home is not.

So I wandered n that wood of human knowledge, amid the gleams of mathematical and experimental science which showed me clear horizons but in a direction where there could be no home, and also amid the darkness of the abstract sciences where I was immersed in deeper gloom the further I went, and where I finally convinced myself that there was, and could be, no exit.

Yielding myself to the bright side of knowledge, I understood that I was only diverting my gaze from the question. However alluringly clear those horizons which opened out before me might be, however alluring it might be to immerse oneself in the limitless expanse of those sciences, I already understood that the clearer they were the less they met my need and the less they applied to my question.

“I know,” said I to myself, “what science so persistently tries to discover, and along that road there is no reply to the question as to the meaning of my life.” In the abstract sphere I understood that notwithstanding the fact, or just because of the fact, that the direct aim of science is to reply to my question, there is no reply but that which I have myself already given: “What is the meaning of my life?” “There is none.” Or: “What will come of my life?” “Nothing.” Or: “Why does everything exist that exists, and why do I exist?” “Because it exists.”

Inquiring for one region of human knowledge, I received an innumerable quantity of exact replies concerning matters about which I had not asked: about the chemical constituents of the stars, about the movement of the sun towards the constellation Hercules, about the origin of species and of man, about the forms of infinitely minute imponderable particles of ether; but in this sphere of knowledge the only answer to my question, “What is the meaning of my life?” was: “You are what you call your ‘life’; you are a transitory, casual cohesion of particles. The mutual interactions and changes of these particles produce in you what you call your “life”. That cohesion will last some time; afterwards the interaction of these particles will cease and what you call “life” will cease, and so will all your questions. You are an accidentally united little lump of something. that little lump ferments. The little lump calls that fermenting its ‘life’. The lump will disintegrate and there will be an end of the fermenting and of all the questions.” So answers the clear side of science and cannot answer otherwise if it strictly follows its principles.

From such a reply one sees that the reply does not answer the question. I want to know the meaning of my life, but that it is a fragment of the infinite, far from giving it a meaning destroys its every possible meaning. The obscure compromises which that side of experimental exact science makes with abstract science when it says that the meaning of life consists in development and in cooperation with development, owing to their inexactness and obscurity cannot be considered as replies.

The other side of science-the abstract side-when it holds strictly to its principles, replying directly to the question, always replies, and in all ages has replied, in one and the same way: “The world is something infinite and incomprehensible part of that incomprehensible ‘all’.” Again I exclude all those compromises between abstract and experimental sciences which supply the whole ballast of the semi-sciences called juridical, political, and historical. In those semi-sciences the conception of development and progress is again wrongly introduced, only with this difference, that there it was the development of everything while here it is the development of the life of mankind. The error is there as before: development and progress in infinity can have no aim or direction, and, as far as my question is concerned, no answer is given.

In truly abstract science, namely in genuine philosophy-not in that which Schopenhauer calls “professorial philosophy” which serves only to classify all existing phenomena in new philosophic categories and to call them by new names-where the philosopher does not lose sight of the essential question, the reply is always one and the same-the reply given by Socrates, Schopenhauer, Solomon, and buddha.

“We approach truth only inasmuch as we depart from life”, said Socrates when preparing for death. “For what do we, who love truth, strive after in life? To free ourselves from the body, and from all the evil that is caused by the life of the body! If so, then how can we fail to be glad when death comes to us?

“The wise man seeks death all his life and therefore death is not terrible to him.”

And Schopenhauer says:

“Having recognized the inmost essence of the world as will, and all its phenomena-from the unconscious working of the obscure forces of Nature up to the completely conscious action of man-as only the objectivity of that will, we shall in no way avoid the conclusion that together with the voluntary renunciation and self-destruction of the will all those phenomena also disappear, that constant striving and effort without aim or rest on all the stages of objectivity in which and through which the world exists; the diversity of successive forms will disappear, and together with the form all the manifestations of will, with its most universal forms, space and time, and finally its most fundamental form-subject and object. Without will there is no concept and no world. Before us, certainly, nothing remains. But what resists this transition into annihilation, our nature, is only that same wish to live-Wille zum Leben-which forms ourselves as well as our world. That we are so afraid of annihilation or, what is the same thing, that we so wish to live, merely means that we are ourselves nothing else but this desire to live, and know nothing but it. And so what remains after the complete annihilation of the will, for us who are so full of the will, is, of course, nothing; but on the other hand, for those in whom the will has turned and renounced itself, this so real world of ours with all its suns and milky way is nothing.”

“Vanity of vanities”, says Solomon-”vanity of vanities-all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation commeth: but the earth abideth for ever....The thing that hath been, is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us. there is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after. I the Preacher was King over Israel in Jerusalem. And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all that is done under heaven: this sore travail hath God given to the sons of man to be exercised therewith. I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit....I communed with my own heart, saying, Lo, I am come to great estate, and have gotten more wisdom than all they that have been before me over Jerusalem: yea, my heart hath great experience of wisdom and knowledge. And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

“I said in my heart, Go to now, I will prove thee with mirth, therefore enjoy pleasure: and behold this also is vanity. I said of laughter, It is mad: and of mirth, What doeth it? I sought in my heart how to cheer my flesh with wine, and while my heart was guided by wisdom, to lay hold on folly, till I might see what it was good for the sons of men that they should do under heaven the number of the days of their life. I made me great works; I builded me houses; I planted me vineyards; I made me gardens and orchards, and I planted trees in them of all kinds of fruits: I made me pools of water, to water therefrom the forest where trees were reared: I got me servants and maidens, and had servants born in my house; also I had great possessions of herds and flocks above all that were before me in Jerusalem: I gathered me also silver and gold and the peculiar treasure from kings and from the provinces: I got me men singers and women singers; and the delights of the sons of men, as musical instruments and all that of all sorts. So I was great, and increased more than all that were before me in Jerusalem: also my wisdom remained with me. And whatever mine eyes desired I kept not from them. I withheld not my heart from any joy....Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit from them under the sun. And I turned myself to behold wisdom, and madness, and folly.... But I perceived that one even happeneth to them all. Then said I in my heart, As it happeneth to the fool, so it happeneth even to me, and why was I then more wise? then I said in my heart, that this also is vanity. For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. And how dieth the wise man? as the fool. Therefore I hated life; because the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous unto me: for all is vanity and vexation of spirit. Yea, I hated all my labour which I had taken under the sun: seeing that I must leave it unto the man that shall be after me.... For what hath man of all his labour, and of the vexation of his heart, wherein he hath laboured under the sun? For all his days are sorrows, and his travail grief; yea, even in the night his heart taketh no rest. this is also vanity. Man is not blessed with security that he should eat and drink and cheer his soul from his own labour.... All things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous and to the wicked; to the good and to the evil; to the clean and to the unclean; to him that sacrificeth and to him that sacrificeth not; as is the good, so is the sinner; and he that sweareth, as he that feareth an oath. This is an evil in all that is done under the sun, that there is one event unto all; yea, also the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead. For him that is among the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun.”

So said Solomon, or whoever wrote those words. [Footnote: Tolstoy’s version differs slightly in a few places from our own Authorized or Revised version. I have followed his text, for in a letter to Fet, quoted on p. 18, vol. ii, of my “Life of Tolstoy,” he says that “The Authorized English version [of Ecclesiastes] is bad.”-A.M.]

And this is what the Indian wisdom tells:

Sakya Muni, a young, happy prince, from whom the existence of sickness, old age, and death had been hidden, went out to drive and saw a terrible old man, toothless and slobbering. the prince, from whom till then old age had been concealed, was amazed, and asked his driver what it was, and how that man had come to such a wretched and disgusting condition, and when he learnt that this was the common fate of all men, that the same thing inevitably awaited him-the young prince-he could not continue his drive, but gave orders to go home, that he might consider this fact. So he shut himself up alone and considered it. and he probably devised some consolation for himself, for he subsequently again went out to drive, feeling merry and happy. But this time he saw a sick man. He saw an emaciated, livid, trembling man with dim eyes. The prince, from whom sickness had been concealed, stopped and asked what this was. And when he learnt that this was sickness, to which all men are liable, and that he himself-a healthy and happy prince-might himself fall ill tomorrow, he again was in no mood to enjoy himself but gave orders to drive home, and again sought some solace, and probably found it, for he drove out a third time for pleasure. But this third time he saw another new sight: he saw men carrying something. ‘What is that?’ ‘A dead man.’ ‘What does dead mean?’ asked the prince. He was told that to become dead means to become like that man. The prince approached the corpse, uncovered it, and looked at it. ‘What will happen to him now?’ asked the prince. He was told that the corpse would be buried in the ground. ‘Why?’ ‘Because he will certainly not return to life, and will only produce a stench and worms.’ ‘And is that the fate of all men? Will the same thing happen to me? Will they bury me, and shall I cause a stench and be eaten by worms?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Home! I shall not drive out for pleasure, and never will so drive out again!’

And Sakya Muni could find no consolation in life, and decided that life is the greatest of evils; and he devoted all the strength of his soul to free himself from it, and to free others; and to do this so that, even after death, life shall not be renewed any more but be completely destroyed at its very roots. So speaks all the wisdom of India.

These are the direct replies that human wisdom gives when it replies to life’s question.

“The life of the body is an evil and a lie. Therefore the destruction of the life of the body is a blessing, and we should desire it,” says Socrates.

“Life is that which should not be-an evil; and the passage into Nothingness is the only good in life,” says Schopenhauer.

“All that is in the world-folly and wisdom and riches and poverty and mirth and grief-is vanity and emptiness. Man dies and nothing is left of him. And that is stupid,” says Solomon.

“To life in the consciousness of the inevitability of suffering, of becoming enfeebled, of old age and of death, is impossible-we must free ourselves from life, from all possible life,” says Buddha.

And what these strong minds said has been said and thought and felt by millions upon millions of people like them. And I have thought it and felt it.

So my wandering among the sciences, far from freeing me from my despair, only strengthened it. One kind of knowledge did not reply to life’s question, the other kind replied directly confirming my despair, indicating not that the result at which I had arrived was the fruit of error or of a diseased state of my mind, but on the contrary that I had thought correctly, and that my thoughts coincided with the conclusions of the most powerful of human minds.

It is no good deceiving oneself. It is all-vanity! Happy is he who has not been born: death is better than life, and one must free oneself from life.

Chapter 7

Not finding an explanation in science I began to seek for it in life, hoping to find it among the people around me. And I began to observe how the people around me-people like myself-lived, and what their attitude was to this question which had brought me to despair.

And this is what I found among people who were in the same position as myself as regards education and manner of life.

I found that for people of my circle there were four ways out of the terrible position in which we are all placed.

The first was that of ignorance. It consists in not knowing, not understanding, that life is an evil and an absurdity. People of this sort-chiefly women, or very young or very dull people-have not yet understood that question of life which presented itself to Schopenhauer, Solomon, and Buddha. They see neither the dragon that awaits them nor the mice gnawing the shrub by which they are hanging, and they lick the drops of honey. but they lick those drops of honey only for a while: something will turn their attention to the dragon and the mice, and there will be an end to their licking. From them I had nothing to learn-one cannot cease to know what one does know.

The second way out is epicureanism. It consists, while knowing the hopelessness of life, in making use meanwhile of the advantages one has, disregarding the dragon and the mice, and licking the honey in the best way, especially if there is much of it within reach. Solomon expresses this way out thus: “Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry: and that this should accompany him in his labour the days of his life, which God giveth him under the sun.

“Therefore eat thy bread with joy and drink thy wine with a merry heart.... Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity...for this is thy portion in life and in thy labours which thou takest under the sun.... Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, for there is not work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.”

That is the way in which the majority of people of our circle make life possible for themselves. Their circumstances furnish them with more of welfare than of hardship, and their moral dullness makes it possible for them to forget that the advantage of their position is accidental, and that not everyone can have a thousand wives and palaces like Solomon, that for everyone who has a thousand wives there are a thousand without a wife, and that for each palace there are a thousand people who have to build it in the sweat of their brows; and that the accident that has today made me a Solomon may tomorrow make me a Solomon’s slave. The dullness of these people’s imagination enables them to forget the things that gave Buddha no peace-the inevitability of sickness, old age, and death, which today or tomorrow will destroy all these pleasures.

So think and feel the majority of people of our day and our manner of life. The fact that some of these people declare the dullness of their thoughts and imaginations to be a philosophy, which they call Positive, does not remove them, in my opinion, from the ranks of those who, to avoid seeing the question, lick the honey. I could not imitate these people; not having their dullness of imagination I could not artificially produce it in myself. I could not tear my eyes from the mice and the dragon, as no vital man can after he has once seen them.

The third escape is that of strength and energy. It consists in destroying life, when one has understood that it is an evil and an absurdity. A few exceptionally strong and consistent people act so. Having understood the stupidity of the joke that has been played on them, and having understood that it is better to be dead than to be alive, and that it is best of all not to exist, they act accordingly and promptly end this stupid joke, since there are means: a rope round one’s neck, water, a knife to stick into one’s heart, or the trains on the railways; and the number of those of our circle who act in this way becomes greater and greater, and for the most part they act so at the best time of their life, when the strength of their mind is in full bloom and few habits degrading to the mind have as yet been acquired.

I saw that this was the worthiest way of escape and I wished to adopt it.

The fourth way out is that of weakness. It consists in seeing the truth of the situation and yet clinging to life, knowing in advance that nothing can come of it. People of this kind know that death is better than life, but not having the strength to act rationally-to end the deception quickly and kill themselves-they seem to wait for something. This is the escape of weakness, for if I know what is best and it is within my power, why not yield to what is best? ... I found myself in that category.

So people of my class evade the terrible contradiction in four ways. Strain my attention as I would, I saw no way except those four. One way was not to understand that life is senseless, vanity, and an evil, and that it is better not to live. I could not help knowing this, and when I once knew it could not shut my eyes to it. the second way was to use life such as it is without thinking of the future. And I could not do that. I, like Sakya Muni, could not ride out hunting when I knew that old age, suffering, and death exist. My imagination was too vivid. Nor could I rejoice in the momentary accidents that for an instant threw pleasure to my lot. The third way, having under stood that life is evil and stupid, was to end it by killing oneself. I understood that, but somehow still did not kill myself. The fourth way was to live like Solomon and Schopenhauer-knowing that life is a stupid joke played upon us, and still to go on living, washing oneself, dressing, dining, talking, and even writing books. This was to me repulsive and tormenting, but I remained in that position.

I see now that if I did not kill myself it was due to some dim consciousness of the invalidity of my thoughts. However convincing and indubitable appeared to me the sequence of my thoughts and of those of the wise that have brought us to the admission of the senselessness of life, there remained in me a vague doubt of the justice of my conclusion.

It was like this: I, my reason, have acknowledged that life is senseless. If there is nothing higher than reason (and there is not: nothing can prove that there is), then reason is the creator of life for me. If reason did not exist there would be for me no life. How can reason deny life when it is the creator of life? Or to put it the other way: were there no life, my reason would not exist; therefore reason is life’s son. Life is all. Reason is its fruit yet reason rejects life itself! I felt that there was something wrong here.

Life is a senseless evil, that is certain, said I to myself. Yet I have lived and am still living, and all mankind lived and lives. How is that? Why does it live, when it is possible not to live? Is it that only I and Schopenhauer are wise enough to understand the senselessness and evil of life?

The reasoning showing the vanity of life is not so difficult, and has long been familiar to the very simplest folk; yet they have lived and still live. How is it they all live and never think of doubting the reasonableness of life?

My knowledge, confirmed by the wisdom of the sages, has shown me that everything on earth-organic and inorganic-is all most cleverly arranged-only my own position is stupid. and those fools-the enormous masses of people-know nothing about how everything organic and inorganic in the world is arranged; but they live, and it seems to them that their life is very wisely arranged! ...

And it struck me: “But what if there is something I do not yet know? Ignorance behaves just in that way. Ignorance always says just what I am saying. When it does not know something, it says that what it does not know is stupid. Indeed, it appears that there is a whole humanity that lived and lives as if it understood the meaning of its life, for without understanding it could not live; but I say that all this life is senseless and that I cannot live.

“Nothing prevents our denying life by suicide. well then, kill yourself, and you won’t discuss. If life displeases you, kill yourself! You live, and cannot understand the meaning of life-then finish it, and do not fool about in life, saying and writing that you do not understand it. You have come into good company where people are contented and know what they are doing; if you find it dull and repulsive-go away!”

Indeed, what are we who are convinced of the necessity of suicide yet do not decide to commit it, but the weakest, most inconsistent, and to put it plainly, the stupidest of men, fussing about with our own stupidity as a fool fusses about with a painted hussy? For our wisdom, however indubitable it may be, has not given us the knowledge of the meaning of our life. But all mankind who sustain life-millions of them-do not doubt the meaning of life.

Indeed, from the most distant time of which I know anything, when life began, people have lived knowing the argument about the vanity of life which has shown me its senselessness, and yet they lived attributing some meaning to it.

From the time when any life began among men they had that meaning of life, and they led that life which has descended to me. All that is in me and around me, all, corporeal and incorporeal, is the fruit of their knowledge of life. Those very instruments of thought with which I consider this life and condemn it were all devised not be me but by them. I myself was born, taught, and brought up thanks to them. They dug out the iron, taught us to cut down the forests, tamed the cows and horses, taught us to sow corn and to live together, organized our life, and taught me to think and speak. And I, their product, fed, supplied with drink, taught by them, thinking with their thoughts and words, have argued that they are an absurdity! “There is something wrong,” said I to myself. “I have blundered somewhere.” But it was a long time before I could find out where the mistake was.

Chapter 8

All these doubts, which I am now able to express more or less systematically, I could not then have expressed. I then only felt that however logically inevitable were my conclusions concerning the vanity of life, confirmed as they were by the greatest thinkers, there was something not right about them. Whether it was in the reasoning itself or in the statement of the question I did not know-I only felt that the conclusion was rationally convincing, but that that was insufficient. All these conclusions could not so convince me as to make me do what followed from my reasoning, that is to say, kill myself. And I should have told an untruth had I, without killing myself, said that reason had brought me to the point I had reached. Reason worked, but something else was also working which I can only call a consciousness of life. A force was working which compelled me to turn my attention to this and not to that; and it was this force which extricated me from my desperate situation and turned my mind in quite another direction. This force compelled me to turn my attention to the fact that I and a few hundred similar people are not the whole of mankind, and that I did not yet know the life of mankind.

Looking at the narrow circle of my equals, I saw only people who had not understood the question, or who had understood it and drowned it in life’s intoxication, or had understood it and ended their lives, or had understood it and yet from weakness were living out their desperate life. And I saw no others. It seemed to me that that narrow circle of rich, learned, and leisured people to which I belonged formed the whole of humanity, and that those milliards of others who have lived and are living were cattle of some sort-not real people.

Strange, incredibly incomprehensible as it now seems to me that I could, while reasoning about life, overlook the whole life of mankind that surrounded me on all sides; that I could to such a degree blunder so absurdly as to think that my life, and Solomon’s and Schopenhauer’s, is the real, normal life, and that the life of the milliards is a circumstance undeserving of attention-strange as this now is to me, I see that so it was. In the delusion of my pride of intellect it seemed to me so indubitable that I and Solomon and Schopenhauer had stated the question so truly and exactly that nothing else was possible-so indubitable did it seem that all those milliards consisted of men who had not yet arrived at an apprehension of all the profundity of the question-that I sought for the meaning of my life without it once occurring to me to ask: “But what meaning is and has been given to their lives by all the milliards of common folk who live and have lived in the world?”

I long lived in this state of lunacy, which, in fact if not in words, is particularly characteristic of us very liberal and learned people. But thanks either to the strange physical affection I have for the real labouring people, which compelled me to understand them and to see that they are not so stupid as we suppose, or thanks to the sincerity of my conviction that I could know nothing beyond the fact that the best I could do was to hang myself, at any rate I instinctively felt that if I wished to live and understand the meaning of life, I must seek this meaning not among those who have lost it and wish to kill themselves, but among those milliards of the past and the present who make life and who support the burden of their own lives and of ours also. And I considered the enormous masses of those simple, unlearned, and poor people who have lived and are living and I saw something quite different. I saw that, with rare exceptions, all those milliards who have lived and are living do not fit into my divisions, and that I could not class them as not understanding the question, for they themselves state it and reply to it with extraordinary clearness. Nor could I consider them epicureans, for their life consists more of privations and sufferings than of enjoyments. Still less could I consider them as irrationally dragging on a meaningless existence, for every act of their life, as well as death itself, is explained by them. To kill themselves they consider the greatest evil. It appeared that all mankind had a knowledge, unacknowledged and despised by me, of the meaning of life. It appeared that reasonable knowledge does not give the meaning of life, but excludes life: while the meaning attributed to life by milliards of people, by all humanity, rests on some despised pseudo-knowledge.

Rational knowledge presented by the learned and wise, denies the meaning of life, but the enormous masses of men, the whole of mankind receive that meaning in irrational knowledge. And that irrational knowledge is faith, that very thing which I could not but reject. It is God, One in Three; the creation in six days; the devils and angels, and all the rest that I cannot accept as long as I retain my reason.

My position was terrible. I knew I could find nothing along the path of reasonable knowledge except a denial of life; and there-in faith-was nothing but a denial of reason, which was yet more impossible for me than a denial of life. From rational knowledge it appeared that life is an evil, people know this and it is in their power to end life; yet they lived and still live, and I myself live, though I have long known that life is senseless and an evil. By faith it appears that in order to understand the meaning of life I must renounce my reason, the very thing for which alone a meaning is required.

Chapter 9

A contradiction arose from which there were two exits. Either that which I called reason was not so rational as I supposed, or that which seemed to me irrational was not so irrational as I supposed. And I began to verify the line of argument of my rational knowledge.

Verifying the line of argument of rational knowledge I found it quite correct. The conclusion that life is nothing was inevitable; but I noticed a mistake. The mistake lay in this, that my reasoning was not in accord with the question I had put. The question was: “Why should I live, that is to say, what real, permanent result will come out of my illusory transitory life-what meaning has my finite existence in this infinite world?” And to reply to that question I had studied life.

The solution of all the possible questions of life could evidently not satisfy me, for my question, simple as it at first appeared, included a demand for an explanation of the finite in terms of the infinite, and vice versa.

I asked: “What is the meaning of my life, beyond time, cause, and space?” And I replied to quite another question: “What is the meaning of my life within time, cause, and space?” With the result that, after long efforts of thought, the answer I reached was: “None.”

In my reasonings I constantly compared (nor could I do otherwise) the finite with the finite, and the infinite with the infinite; but for that reason I reached the inevitable result: force is force, matter is matter, will is will, the infinite is the infinite, nothing is nothing-and that was all that could result.

It was something like what happens in mathematics, when thinking to solve an equation, we find we are working on an identity. the line of reasoning is correct, but results in the answer that a equals a, or x equals x, or o equals o. the same thing happened with my reasoning in relation to the question of the meaning of my life. The replies given by all science to that question only result in-identity.

And really, strictly scientific knowledge-that knowledge which begins, as Descartes’s did, with complete doubt about everything-rejects all knowledge admitted on faith and builds everything afresh on the laws of reason and experience, and cannot give any other reply to the question of life than that which I obtained: an indefinite reply. Only at first had it seemed to me that knowledge had given a positive reply-the reply of Schopenhauer: that life has no meaning and is an evil. But on examining the matter I understood that the reply is not positive, it was only my feeling that so expressed it. Strictly expressed, as it is by the Brahmins and by Solomon and Schopenhauer, the reply is merely indefinite, or an identity: o equals o, life is nothing. So that philosophic knowledge denies nothing, but only replies that the question cannot be solved by it-that for it the solution remains indefinite.

Having understood this, I understood that it was not possible to seek in rational knowledge for a reply to my question, and that the reply given by rational knowledge is a mere indication that a reply can only be obtained by a different statement of the question and only when the relation of the finite to the infinite is included in the question. And I understood that, however irrational and distorted might be the replies given by faith, they have this advantage, that they introduce into every answer a relation between the finite and the infinite, without which there can be no solution.

In whatever way I stated the question, that relation appeared in the answer. How am I to live?-According to the law of God. What real result will come of my life?-Eternal torment or eternal bliss. What meaning has life that death does not destroy?-Union with the eternal God: heaven.

So that besides rational knowledge, which had seemed to me the only knowledge, I was inevitably brought to acknowledge that all live humanity has another irrational knowledge-faith which makes it possible to live. Faith still remained to me as irrational as it was before, but I could not but admit that it alone gives mankind a reply to the questions of life, and that consequently it makes life possible. Reasonable knowledge had brought me to acknowledge that life is senseless-my life had come to a halt and I wished to destroy myself. Looking around on the whole of mankind I saw that people live and declare that they know the meaning of life. I looked at myself-I had lived as long as I knew a meaning of life and had made life possible.

Looking again at people of other lands, at my contemporaries and at their predecessors, I saw the same thing. Where there is life, there since man began faith has made life possible for him, and the chief outline of that faith is everywhere and always identical.

Whatever the faith may be, and whatever answers it may give, and to whomsoever it gives them, every such answer gives to the finite existence of man an infinite meaning, a meaning not destroyed by sufferings, deprivations, or death. This means that only in faith can we find for life a meaning and a possibility. What, then, is this faith? And I understood that faith is not merely “the evidence of things not seen”, etc., and is not a revelation (that defines only one of the indications of faith, is not the relation of man to God (one has first to define faith and then God, and not define faith through God); it not only agreement with what has been told one (as faith is most usually supposed to be), but faith is a knowledge of the meaning of human life in consequence of which man does not destroy himself but lives. Faith is the strength of life. If a man lives he believes in something. If he did not believe that one must live for something, he would not live. If he does not see and recognize the illusory nature of the finite, he believes in the finite; if he understands the illusory nature of the finite, he must believe in the infinite. Without faith he cannot live.

And I recalled the whole course of my mental labour and was horrified. It was now clear to me that for man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite. Such an explanation I had had; but as long as I believed in the finite I did not need the explanation, and I began to verify it by reason. And in the light of reason the whole of my former explanation flew to atoms. But a time came when I ceased to believe in the finite. And then I began to build up on rational foundations, out of what I knew, an explanation which would give a meaning to life; but nothing could I build. Together with the best human intellects I reached the result that o equals o, and was much astonished at that conclusion, though nothing else could have resulted.

What was I doing when I sought an answer in the experimental sciences? I wished to know why I live, and for this purpose studied all that is outside me. Evidently I might learn much, but nothing of what I needed.

What was I doing when I sought an answer in philosophical knowledge? I was studying the thoughts of those who had found themselves in the same position as I, lacking a reply to the question “why do I live?” Evidently I could learn nothing but what I knew myself, namely that nothing can be known.

What am I?-A part of the infinite. In those few words lies the whole problem.

Is it possible that humanity has only put that question to itself since yesterday? And can no one before me have set himself that question-a question so simple, and one that springs to the tongue of every wise child?

Surely that question has been asked since man began; and naturally for the solution of that question since man began it has been equally insufficient to compare the finite with the finite and the infinite with the infinite, and since man began the relation of the finite to the infinite has been sought out and expressed.

All these conceptions in which the finite has been adjusted to the infinite and a meaning found for life-the conception of God, of will, of goodness-we submit to logical examination. And all those conceptions fail to stand reason’s criticism.

Were it not so terrible it would be ludicrous with what pride and self-satisfaction we, like children, pull the watch to pieces, take out the spring, make a toy of it, and are then surprised that the watch does not go.

A solution of the contradiction between the finite and the infinite, and such a reply to the question of life as will make it possible to live, is necessary and precious. And that is the only solution which we find everywhere, always, and among all peoples: a solution descending from times in which we lose sight of the life of man, a solution so difficult that we can compose nothing like it-and this solution we light-heartedly destroy in order again to set the same question, which is natural to everyone and to which we have no answer.

The conception of an infinite god, the divinity of the soul, the connexion of human affairs with God, the unity and existence of the soul, man’s conception of moral goodness and evil-are conceptions formulated in the hidden infinity of human thought, they are those conceptions without which neither life nor I should exist; yet rejecting all that labour of the whole of humanity, I wished to remake it afresh myself and in my own manner.

I did not then think like that, but the germs of these thoughts were already in me. I understood, in the first place, that my position with Schopenhauer and Solomon, notwithstanding our wisdom, was stupid: we see that life is an evil and yet continue to live. That is evidently stupid, for if life is senseless and I am so fond of what is reasonable, it should be destroyed, and then there would be no one to challenge it. Secondly, I understood that all one’s reasonings turned in a vicious circle like a wheel out of gear with its pinion. However much and however well we may reason we cannot obtain a reply to the question; and o will always equal o, and therefore our path is probably erroneous. Thirdly, I began to understand that in the replies given by faith is stored up the deepest human wisdom and that I had no right to deny them on the ground of reason, and that those answers are the only ones which reply to life’s question.

Chapter 10

I understood this, but it made matters no better for me. I was now ready to accept any faith if only it did not demand of me a direct denial of reason-which would be a falsehood. And I studied Buddhism and Mohammedanism from books, and most of all I studied Christianity both from books and from the people around me.

Naturally I first of all turned to the orthodox of my circle, to people who were learned: to Church theologians, monks, to theologians of the newest shade, and even to Evangelicals who profess salvation by belief in the Redemption. And I seized on these believers and questioned them as to their beliefs and their understanding of the meaning of life.

But though I made all possible concessions, and avoided all disputes, I could not accept the faith of these people. I saw that what they gave out as their faith did not explain the meaning of life but obscured it, and that they themselves affirm their belief not to answer that question of life which brought me to faith, but for some other aims alien to me.

I remember the painful feeling of fear of being thrown back into my former state of despair, after the hope I often and often experienced in my intercourse with these people.

The more fully they explained to me their doctrines, the more clearly did I perceive their error and realized that my hope of finding in their belief an explanation of the meaning of life was vain.

It was not that in their doctrines they mixed many unnecessary and unreasonable things with the Christian truths that had always been near to me: that was not what repelled me. I was repelled by the fact that these people’s lives were like my own, with only this difference-that such a life did not correspond to the principles they expounded in their teachings. I clearly felt that they deceived themselves and that they, like myself found no other meaning in life than to live while life lasts, taking all one’s hands can seize. I saw this because if they had had a meaning which destroyed the fear of loss, suffering, and death, they would not have feared these things. But they, these believers of our circle, just like myself, living in sufficiency and superfluity, tried to increase or preserve them, feared privations, suffering, and death, and just like myself and all of us unbelievers, lived to satisfy their desires, and lived just as badly, if not worse, than the unbelievers.

No arguments could convince me of the truth of their faith. Only deeds which showed that they saw a meaning in life making what was so dreadful to me-poverty, sickness, and death-not dreadful to them, could convince me. And such deeds I did not see among the various believers in our circle. On the contrary, I saw such deeds done [Footnote: this passage is noteworthy as being one of the few references made by Tolstoy at this period to the revolutionary or “Back-to-the-People” movement, in which many young men and women were risking and sacrificing home, property, and life itself from motives which had much in common with his own perception that the upper layers of Society are parasitic and prey on the vitals of the people who support them.-A.M.] by people of our circle who were the most unbelieving, but never by our so-called believers.

And I understood that the belief of these people was not the faith I sought, and that their faith is not a real faith but an epicurean consolation in life.

I understood that that faith may perhaps serve, if not for a consolation at least for some distraction for a repentant Solomon on his death-bed, but it cannot serve for the great majority of mankind, who are called on not to amuse themselves while consuming the labour of others but to create life.

For all humanity to be able to live, and continue to live attributing a meaning to life, they, those milliards, must have a different, a real, knowledge of faith. Indeed, it was not the fact that we, with Solomon and Schopenhauer, did not kill ourselves that convinced me of the existence of faith, but the fact that those milliards of people have lived and are living, and have borne Solomon and us on the current of their lives.

And I began to draw near to the believers among the poor, simple, unlettered folk: pilgrims, monks, sectarians, and peasants. The faith of these common people was the same Christian faith as was professed by the pseudo-believers of our circle. Among them, too, I found a great deal of superstition mixed with the Christian truths; but the difference was that the superstitions of the believers of our circle were quite unnecessary to them and were not in conformity with their lives, being merely a kind of epicurean diversion; but the superstitions of the believers among the labouring masses conformed so with their lives that it was impossible to imagine them to oneself without those superstitions, which were a necessary condition of their life. the whole life of believers in our circle was a contradiction of their faith, but the whole life of the working-folk believers was a confirmation of the meaning of life which their faith gave them. And I began to look well into the life and faith of these people, and the more I considered it the more I became convinced that they have a real faith which is a necessity to them and alone gives their life a meaning and makes it possible for them to live. In contrast with what I had seen in our circle-where life without faith is possible and where hardly one in a thousand acknowledges himself to be a believer-among them there is hardly one unbeliever in a thousand. In contrast with what I had seen in our circle, where the whole of life is passed in idleness, amusement, and dissatisfaction, I saw that the whole life of these people was passed in heavy labour, and that they were content with life. In contradistinction to the way in which people of our circle oppose fate and complain of it on account of deprivations and sufferings, these people accepted illness and sorrow without any perplexity or opposition, and with a quiet and firm conviction that all is good. In contradistinction to us, who the wiser we are the less we understand the meaning of life, and see some evil irony in the fact that we suffer and die, these folk live and suffer, and they approach death and suffering with tranquillity and in most cases gladly. In contrast to the fact that a tranquil death, a death without horror and despair, is a very rare exception in our circle, a troubled, rebellious, and unhappy death is the rarest exception among the people. and such people, lacking all that for us and for Solomon is the only good of life and yet experiencing the greatest happiness, are a great multitude. I looked more widely around me. I considered the life of the enormous mass of the people in the past and the present. And of such people, understanding the meaning of life and able to live and to die, I saw not two or three, or tens, but hundreds, thousands, and millions. and they all-endlessly different in their manners, minds, education, and position, as they were-all alike, in complete contrast to my ignorance, knew the meaning of life and death, laboured quietly, endured deprivations and sufferings, and lived and died seeing therein not vanity but good.

And I learnt to love these people. The more I came to know their life, the life of those who are living and of others who are dead of whom I read and heard, the more I loved them and the easier it became for me to live. So I went on for about two years, and a change took place in me which had long been preparing and the promise of which had always been in me. It came about that the life of our circle, the rich and learned, not merely became distasteful to me, but lost all meaning in my eyes. All our actions, discussions, science and art, presented itself to me in a new light. I understood that it is all merely self-indulgence, and the to find a meaning in it is impossible; while the life of the whole labouring people, the whole of mankind who produce life, appeared to me in its true significance. I understood that that is life itself, and that the meaning given to that life is true: and I accepted it.

Chapter 11

And remembering how those very beliefs had repelled me and had seemed meaningless when professed by people whose lives conflicted with them, and how these same beliefs attracted me and seemed reasonable when I saw that people lived in accord with them, I understood why I had then rejected those beliefs and found them meaningless, yet now accepted them and found them full of meaning. I understood that I had erred, and why I erred. I had erred not so much because I thought incorrectly as because I lived badly. I understood that it was not an error in my thought that had hid truth from me as much as my life itself in the exceptional conditions of epicurean gratification of desires in which I passed it. I understood that my question as to what my life is, and the answer-and evil-was quite correct. The only mistake was that the answer referred only to my life, while I had referred it to life in general. I asked myself what my life is, and got the reply: An evil and an absurdity. and really my life-a life of indulgence of desires-was senseless and evil, and therefore the reply, “Life is evil and an absurdity”, referred only to my life, but not to human life in general. I understood the truth which I afterwards found in the Gospels, “that men loved darkness rather than the light, for their works were evil. For everyone that doeth ill hateth the light, and cometh not to the light, lest his works should be reproved.” I perceived that to understand the meaning of life it is necessary first that life should not be meaningless and evil, then we can apply reason to explain it. I understood why I had so long wandered round so evident a truth, and that if one is to think and speak of the life of mankind, one must think and speak of that life and not of the life of some of life’s parasites. That truth was always as true as that two and two are four, but I had not acknowledged it, because on admitting two and two to be four I had also to admit that I was bad; and to feel myself to be good was for me more important and necessary than for two and two to be four. I came to love good people, hated myself, and confessed the truth. Now all became clear to me.

What if an executioner passing his whole life in torturing people and cutting off their heads, or a hopeless drunkard, or a madman settled for life in a dark room which he has fouled and imagines that he would perish if he left-what if he asked himself: “What is life?” Evidently he could not other reply to that question than that life is the greatest evil, and the madman’s answer would be perfectly correct, but only as applied to himself. What if I am such a madman? What if all we rich and leisured people are such madmen? and I understood that we really are such madmen. I at any rate was certainly such.

And indeed a bird is so made that it must fly, collect food, and build a nest, and when I see that a bird does this I have pleasure in its joy. A goat, a hare, and a wolf are so made that they must feed themselves, and must breed and feed their family, and when they do so I feel firmly assured that they are happy and that their life is a reasonable one. then what should a man do? He too should produce his living as the animals do, but with this difference, that he will perish if he does it alone; he must obtain it not for himself but for all. And when he does that, I have a firm assurance that he is happy and that his life is reasonable. But what had I done during the whole thirty years of my responsible life? Far from producing sustenance for all, I did not even produce it for myself. I lived as a parasite, and on asking myself, what is the use of my life? I got the reply: “No use.” If the meaning of human life lies in supporting it, how could I-who for thirty years had been engaged not on supporting life but on destroying it in myself and in others-how could I obtain any other answer than that my life was senseless and an evil? ... It was both senseless and evil.

The life of the world endures by someone’s will-by the life of the whole world and by our lives someone fulfills his purpose. To hope to understand the meaning of that will one must first perform it by doing what is wanted of us. But if I will not do what is wanted of me, I shall never understand what is wanted of me, and still less what is wanted of us all and of the whole world.

If a naked, hungry beggar has been taken from the cross-roads, brought into a building belonging to a beautiful establishment, fed, supplied with drink, and obliged to move a handle up and down, evidently, before discussing why he was taken, why he should move the handle, and whether the whole establishment is reasonably arranged-the begger should first of all move the handle. If he moves the handle he will understand that it works a pump, that the pump draws water and that the water irrigates the garden beds; then he will be taken from the pumping station to another place where he will gather fruits and will enter into the joy of his master, and, passing from lower to higher work, will understand more and more of the arrangements of the establishment, and taking part in it will never think of asking why he is there, and will certainly not reproach the master.

So those who do his will, the simple, unlearned working folk, whom we regard as cattle, do not reproach the master; but we, the wise, eat the master’s food but do not do what the master wishes, and instead of doing it sit in a circle and discuss: “Why should that handle be moved? Isn’t it stupid?” So we have decided. We have decided that the master is stupid, or does not exist, and that we are wise, only we feel that we are quite useless and that we must somehow do away with ourselves.

Chapter 12

The consciousness of the error in reasonable knowledge helped me to free myself from the temptation of idle ratiocination. the conviction that knowledge of truth can only be found by living led me to doubt the rightness of my life; but I was saved only by the fact that I was able to tear myself from my exclusiveness and to see the real life of the plain working people, and to understand that it alone is real life. I understood that if I wish to understand life and its meaning, I must not live the life of a parasite, but must live a real life, and-taking the meaning given to live by real humanity and merging myself in that life-verify it.

During that time this is what happened to me. During that whole year, when I was asking myself almost every moment whether I should not end matters with a noose or a bullet-all that time, together with the course of thought and observation about which I have spoken, my heart was oppressed with a painful feeling, which I can only describe as a search for God.

I say that that search for God was not reasoning, but a feeling, because that search proceeded not from the course of my thoughts-it was even directly contrary to them-but proceeded from the heart. It was a feeling of fear, orphanage, isolation in a strange land, and a hope of help from someone.

Though I was quite convinced of the impossibility of proving the existence of a Deity (Kant had shown, and I quite understood him, that it could not be proved), I yet sought for god, hoped that I should find Him, and from old habit addressed prayers to that which I sought but had not found. I went over in my mind the arguments of Kant and Schopenhauer showing the impossibility of proving the existence of a God, and I began to verify those arguments and to refute them. Cause, said I to myself, is not a category of thought such as are Time and Space. If I exist, there must be some cause for it, and a cause of causes. And that first cause of all is what men have called “God”. And I paused on that thought, and tried with all my being to recognize the presence of that cause. And as soon as I acknowledged that there is a force in whose power I am, I at once felt that I could live. But I asked myself: What is that cause, that force? How am I to think of it? What are my relations to that which I call “God”? And only the familiar replies occurred to me: “He is the Creator and Preserver.” This reply did not satisfy me, and I felt I was losing within me what I needed for my life. I became terrified and began to pray to Him whom I sought, that He should help me. But the more I prayed the more apparent it became to me that He did not hear me, and that there was no one to whom to address myself. And with despair in my heart that there is no God at all, I said: “Lord, have mercy, save me! Lord, teach me!” But no one had mercy on me, and I felt that my life was coming to a standstill.

But again and again, from various sides, I returned to the same conclusion that I could not have come into the world without any cause or reason or meaning; I could not be such a fledgling fallen from its nest as I felt myself to be. Or, granting that I be such, lying on my back crying in the high grass, even then I cry because I know that a mother has borne me within her, has hatched me, warmed me, fed me, and loved me. Where is she-that mother? If I have been deserted, who has deserted me? I cannot hide from myself that someone bored me, loving me. Who was that someone? Again “God”? He knows and sees my searching, my despair, and my struggle.”

“He exists,” said I to myself. And I had only for an instant to admit that, and at once life rose within me, and I felt the possibility and joy of being. But again, from the admission of the existence of a God I went on to seek my relation with Him; and again I imagined that God-our Creator in Three Persons who sent His Son, the Saviour-and again that God, detached from the world and from me, melted like a block of ice, melted before my eyes, and again nothing remained, and again the spring of life dried up within me, and I despaired and felt that I had nothing to do but to kill myself. And the worst of all was, that I felt I could not do it.

Not twice or three times, but tens and hundreds of times, I reached those conditions, first of joy and animation, and then of despair and consciousness of the impossibility of living.

I remember that it was in early spring: I was alone in the wood listening to its sounds. I listened and thought ever of the same thing, as I had constantly done during those last three years. I was again seeking God.

“Very well, there is no God,” said I to myself; “there is no one who is not my imagination but a reality like my whole life. He does not exist, and no miracles can prove His existence, because the miracles would be my imagination, besides being irrational.

“But my perception of God, of Him whom I seek,” I asked myself, “where has that perception come from?” And again at this thought the glad waves of life rose within me. All that was around me came to life and received a meaning. But my joy did not last long. My mind continued its work.

“The conception of God is not God,” said I to myself. “The conception is what takes place within me. The conception of God is something I can evoke or can refrain from evoking in myself. That is not what I seek. I seek that without which there can be no life.” And again all around me and within me began to die, and again I wished to kill myself.

But then I turned my gaze upon myself, on what went on within me, and I remembered all those cessations of life and reanimations that recurred within me hundreds of times. I remembered that I only lived at those times when I believed in God. As it was before, so it was now; I need only be aware of God to live; I need only forget Him, or disbelieve Him, and I died.

What is this animation and dying? I do not live when I lose belief in the existence of God. I should long ago have killed myself had I not had a dim hope of finding Him. I live, really live, only when I feel Him and seek Him. “What more do you seek?” exclaimed a voice within me. “This is He. He is that without which one cannot live. To know God and to live is one and the same thing. God is life.”

“Live seeking God, and then you will not live without God.” And more than ever before, all within me and around me lit up, and the light did not again abandon me.

And I was saved from suicide. When and how this change occurred I could not say. As imperceptibly and gradually the force of life in me had been destroyed and I had reached the impossibility of living, a cessation of life and the necessity of suicide, so imperceptibly and gradually did that force of life return to me. And strange to say the strength of life which returned to me was not new, but quite old-the same that had borne me along in my earliest days.

I quite returned to what belonged to my earliest childhood and youth. I returned to the belief in that Will which produced me and desires something of me. I returned to the belief that the chief and only aim of my life is to be better, i.e. to live in accord with that Will. and I returned to the belief that I can find the expression of that Will in what humanity, in the distant past hidden from, has produced for its guidance: that is to say, I returned to a belief in God, in moral perfection, and in a tradition transmitting the meaning of life. There was only this difference, that then all this was accepted unconsciously, while now I knew that without it I could not live.

What happened to me was something like this: I was put into a boat (I do not remember when) and pushed off from an unknown shore, shown the direction of the opposite shore, had oars put into my unpractised hands, and was left alone. I rowed as best I could and moved forward; but the further I advanced towards the middle of the stream the more rapid grew the current bearing me away from my goal and the more frequently did I encounter others, like myself, borne away by the stream. There were a few rowers who continued to row, there were others who had abandoned their oars; there were large boats and immense vessels full of people. Some struggled against the current, others yielded to it. And the further I went the more, seeing the progress down the current of all those who were adrift, I forgot the direction given me. In the very centre of the stream, amid the crowd of boats and vessels which were being borne down stream, I quite lost my direction and abandoned my oars. Around me on all sides, with mirth and rejoicing, people with sails and oars were borne down the stream, assuring me and each other that no other direction was possible. And I believed them and floated with them. And I was carried far; so far that I heard the roar of the rapids in which I must be shattered, and I saw boats shattered in them. And I recollected myself. I was long unable to understand what had happened to me. I saw before me nothing but destruction, towards which I was rushing and which I feared. I saw no safety anywhere and did not know what to do; but, looking back, I perceived innumerable boats which unceasingly and strenuously pushed across the stream, and I remembered about the shore, the oars, and the direction, and began to pull back upwards against the stream and towards the shore.

That shore was God; that direction was tradition; the oars were the freedom given me to pull for the shore and unite with God. And so the force of life was renewed in me and I again began to live.

Chapter 13

I turned from the life of our circle, acknowledging that ours is not life but a simulation of life-that the conditions of superfluity in which we live deprive us of the possibility of understanding life, and that in order to understand life I must understand not an exceptional life such as our who are parasites on life, but the life of the simple labouring folk-those who make life-and the meaning which they attribute to it. The simplest labouring people around me were the Russian people, and I turned to them and to the meaning of life which they give. That meaning, if one can put it into words, was as follows: Every man has come into this world by the will of God. And God has so made man that every man can destroy his soul or save it. The aim of man in life is to save his soul, and to save his soul he must live “godly” and to live “godly” he must renounce all the pleasures of life, must labour, humble himself, suffer, and be merciful. That meaning the people obtain from the whole teaching of faith transmitted to them by their pastors and by the traditions that live among the people. This meaning was clear to me and near to my heart. But together with this meaning of the popular faith of our non-sectarian folk, among whom I live, much was inseparably bound up that revolted me and seemed to me inexplicable: sacraments, Church services, fasts, and the adoration of relics and icons. The people cannot separate the one from the other, nor could I. And strange as much of what entered into the faith of these people was to me, I accepted everything, and attended the services, knelt morning and evening in prayer, fasted, and prepared to receive the Eucharist: and at first my reason did not resist anything. The very things that had formerly seemed to me impossible did not now evoke in me any opposition.

My relations to faith before and after were quite different. Formerly life itself seemed to me full of meaning and faith presented itself as the arbitrary assertion of propositions to me quite unnecessary, unreasonable, and disconnected from life. I then asked myself what meaning those propositions had and, convinced that they had none, I rejected them. Now on the contrary I knew firmly that my life otherwise has, and can have, no meaning, and the articles of faith were far from presenting themselves to me as unnecessary-on the contrary I had been led by indubitable experience to the conviction that only these propositions presented by faith give life a meaning. formerly I looked on them as on some quite unnecessary gibberish, but now, if I did not understand them, I yet knew that they had a meaning, and I said to myself that I must learn to understand them.

I argued as follows, telling myself that the knowledge of faith flows, like all humanity with its reason, from a mysterious source. That source is God, the origin both of the human body and the human reason. As my body has descended to me from God, so also has my reason and my understanding of life, and consequently the various stages of the development of that understanding of life cannot be false. All that people sincerely believe in must be true; it may be differently expressed but it cannot be a lie, and therefore if it presents itself to me as a lie, that only means that I have not understood it. Furthermore I said to myself, the essence of every faith consists in its giving life a meaning which death does not destroy. Naturally for a faith to be able to reply to the questions of a king dying in luxury, of an old slave tormented by overwork, of an unreasoning child, of a wise old man, of a half-witted old woman, of a young and happy wife, of a youth tormented by passions, of all people in the most varied conditions of life and education-if there is one reply to the one eternal question of life: “Why do I live and what will result from my life?”-the reply, though one in its essence, must be endlessly varied in its presentation; and the more it is one, the more true and profound it is, the more strange and deformed must it naturally appear in its attempted expression, conformably to the education and position of each person. But this argument, justifying in my eyes the queerness of much on the ritual side of religion, did not suffice to allow me in the one great affair of life-religion-to do things which seemed to me questionable. With all my soul I wished to be in a position to mingle with the people, fulfilling the ritual side of their religion; but I could not do it. I felt that I should lie to myself and mock at what was sacred to me, were I to do so. At this point, however, our new Russian theological writers came to my rescue.

According to the explanation these theologians gave, the fundamental dogma of our faith is the infallibility of the Church. From the admission of that dogma follows inevitably the truth of all that is professed by the Church. The Church as an assembly of true believers united by love and therefore possessed of true knowledge became the basis of my belief. I told myself that divine truth cannot be accessible to a separate individual; it is revealed only to the whole assembly of people united by love. To attain truth one must not separate, and in order not to separate one must love and must endure things one may not agree with.

Truth reveals itself to love, and if you do not submit to the rites of the Church you transgress against love; and by transgressing against love you deprive yourself of the possibility of recognizing the truth. I did not then see the sophistry contained in this argument. I did not see that union in love may give the greatest love, but certainly cannot give us divine truth expressed in the definite words of the Nicene Creed. I also did not perceive that love cannot make a certain expression of truth an obligatory condition of union. I did not then see these mistakes in the argument and thanks to it was able to accept and perform all the rites of the Orthodox Church without understanding most of them. I then tried with all strength of my soul to avoid all arguments and contradictions, and tried to explain as reasonably as possible the Church statements I encountered.

When fulfilling the rites of the Church I humbled my reason and submitted to the tradition possessed by all humanity. I united myself with my forefathers: the father, mother, and grandparents I loved. They and all my predecessors believed and lived, and they produced me. I united myself also with the missions of the common people whom I respected. Moveover, those actions had nothing bad in themselves (“bad” I considered the indulgence of one’s desires). When rising early for Church services I knew I was doing well, if only because I was sacrificing my bodily ease to humble my mental pride, for the sake of union with my ancestors and contemporaries, and for the sake of finding the meaning of life. It was the same with my preparations to receive Communion, and with the daily reading of prayers with genuflections, and also with the observance of all the fasts. However insignificant these sacrifices might be I made them for the sake of something good. I fasted, prepared for Communion, and observed the fixed hours of prayer at home and in church. During Church service I attended to every word, and gave them a meaning whenever I could. In the Mass the most important words for me were: “Let us love one another in conformity!” The further words, “In unity we believe in the Father, the Son, and Holy Ghost”, I passed by, because I could not understand them.

Chapter 14

In was then so necessary for me to believe in order to live that I unconsciously concealed from myself the contradictions and obscurities of theology. but this reading of meanings into the rites had its limits. If the chief words in the prayer for the Emperor became more and more clear to me, if I found some explanation for the words “and remembering our Sovereign Most-Holy Mother of God and all the Saints, ourselves and one another, we give our whole life to Christ our God”, if I explained to myself the frequent repetition of prayers for the Tsar and his relations by the fact that they are more exposed to temptations than other people and therefore are more in need of being prayed for-the prayers about subduing our enemies and evil under our feet (even if one tried to say that sin was the enemy prayed against), these and other prayers, such as the “cherubic song” and the whole sacrament of oblation, or “the chosen Warriors”, etc.-quite two-thirds of all the services-either remained completely incomprehensible or, when I forced an explanation into them, made me feel that I was lying, thereby quite destroying my relation to God and depriving me of all possibility of belief.

I felt the same about the celebration of the chief holidays. To remember the Sabbath, that is to devote one day to God, was something I could understand. But the chief holiday was in commemoration of the Resurrection, the reality of which I could not picture to myself or understand. And that name of “Resurrection” was also given the weekly holiday. [Footnote: In Russia Sunday was called Resurrection-day.-A. M.] And on those days the Sacrament of the Eucharist was administered, which was quite unintelligible to me. The rest of the twelve great holidays, except Christmas, commemorated miracles-the things I tried not to think about in order not to deny: the Ascension, Pentecost, Epiphany, the Feast of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin, etc. At the celebration of these holidays, feeling that importance was being attributed to the very things that to me presented a negative importance, I either devised tranquillizing explanations or shut my eyes in order not to see what tempted me.

Most of all this happened to me when taking part in the most usual Sacraments, which are considered the most important: baptism and communion. There I encountered not incomprehensible but fully comprehensible doings: doings which seemed to me to lead into temptation, and I was in a dilemma-whether to lie or to reject them.

Never shall I forge the painful feeling I experienced the day I received the Eucharist for the first time after many years. The service, confession, and prayers were quite intelligible and produced in me a glad consciousness that the meaning of life was being revealed to me. The Communion itself I explained as an act performed in remembrance of Christ, and indicating a purification from sin and the full acceptance of Christ’s teaching. If that explanation was artificial I did not notice its artificiality: so happy was I at humbling and abasing myself before the priest-a simple, timid country clergyman-turning all the dirt out of my soul and confessing my vices, so glad was I to merge in thought with the humility of the fathers who wrote the prayers of the office, so glad was I of union with all who have believed and now believe, that I did not notice the artificiality of my explanation. But when I approached the altar gates, and the priest made me say that I believed that what I was about to swallow was truly flesh and blood, I felt a pain in my heart: it was not merely a false note, it was a cruel demand made by someone or other who evidently had never known what faith is.

I now permit myself to say that it was a cruel demand, but I did not then think so: only it was indescribably painful to me. I was no longer in the position in which I had been in youth when I thought all in life was clear; I had indeed come to faith because, apart from faith, I had found nothing, certainly nothing, except destruction; therefore to throw away that faith was impossible and I submitted. And I found in my soul a feeling which helped me to endure it. This was the feeling of self-abasement and humility. I humbled myself, swallowed that flesh and blood without any blasphemous feelings and with a wish to believe. But the blow had been struck and, knowing what awaited me, I could not go a second time.

I continued to fulfil the rites of the Church and still believed that the doctrine I was following contained the truth, when something happened to me which I now understand but which then seemed strange.

I was listening to the conversation of an illiterate peasant, a pilgrim, about God, faith, life, and salvation, when a knowledge of faith revealed itself to me. I drew near to the people, listening to their opinions of life and faith, and I understood the truth more and more. So also was it when I read the Lives of Holy men, which became my favourite books. Putting aside the miracles and regarding them as fables illustrating thoughts, this reading revealed to me life’s meaning. There were the lives of Makarius the Great, the story of Buddha, there were the words of St. John Chrysostom, and there were the stories of the traveller in the well, the monk who found some gold, and of Peter the publican. There were stories of the martyrs, all announcing that death does not exclude life, and there were the stories of ignorant, stupid men, who knew nothing of the teaching of the Church but who yet were saves.

But as soon as I met learned believers or took up their books, doubt of myself, dissatisfaction, and exasperated disputation were roused within me, and I felt that the more I entered into the meaning of these men’s speech, the more I went astray from truth and approached an abyss.

Chapter 15

How often I envied the peasants their illiteracy and lack of learning! Those statements in the creeds which to me were evident absurdities, for them contained nothing false; they could accept them and could believe in the truth-the truth I believed in. Only to me, unhappy man, was it clear that with truth falsehood was interwoven by finest threads, and that I could not accept it in that form.

So I lived for about three years. At first, when I was only slightly associated with truth as a catechumen and was only scenting out what seemed to me clearest, these encounters struck me less. When I did not understand anything, I said, “It is my fault, I am sinful”; but the more I became imbued with the truths I was learning, the more they became the basis of my life, the more oppressive and the more painful became these encounters and the sharper became the line between what I do not understand because I am not able to understand it, and what cannot be understood except by lying to oneself.

In spite of my doubts and sufferings I still clung to the Orthodox Church. But questions of life arose which had to be decided; and the decision of these questions by the Church-contrary to the very bases of the belief by which I lived-obliged me at last to renounce communion with Orthodoxy as impossible. These questions were: first the relation of the Orthodox Eastern Church to other Churches-to the Catholics and to the so-called sectarians. At that time, in consequence of my interest in religion, I came into touch with believers of various faiths: Catholics, protestants, Old-Believers, Molokans [Footnote: A sect that rejects sacraments and ritual.], and others. And I met among them many men of lofty morals who were truly religious. I wished to be a brother to them. And what happened? That teaching which promised to unite all in one faith and love-that very teaching, in the person of its best representatives, told me that these men were all living a lie; that what gave them their power of life was a temptation of the devil; and that we alone possess the only possible truth. And I saw that all who do not profess an identical faith with themselves are considered by the Orthodox to be heretics, just as the Catholics and others consider the Orthodox to be heretics. And i saw that the Orthodox (though they try to hide this) regard with hostility all who do not express their faith by the same external symbols and words as themselves; and this is naturally so; first, because the assertion that you are in falsehood and I am in truth, is the most cruel thing one man can say to another; and secondly, because a man loving his children and brothers cannot help being hostile to those who wish to pervert his children and brothers to a false belief. And that hostility is increased in proportion to one’s greater knowledge of theology. And to me who considered that truth lay in union by love, it became self-evident that theology was itself destroying what it ought to produce.

This offence is so obvious to us educated people who have lived in countries where various religions are professed and have seen the contempt, self-assurance, and invincible contradiction with which Catholics behave to the Orthodox Greeks and to the Protestants, and the Orthodox to Catholics and Protestants, and the Protestants to the two others, and the similar attitude of Old-Believers, Pashkovites (Russian Evangelicals), Shakers, and all religions-that the very obviousness of the temptation at first perplexes us. One says to oneself: it is impossible that it is so simple and that people do not see that if two assertions are mutually contradictory, then neither of them has the sole truth which faith should possess. There is something else here, there must be some explanation. I thought there was, and sought that explanation and read all I could on the subject, and consulted all whom I could. And no one gave me any explanation, except the one which causes the Sumsky Hussars to consider the Sumsky Hussars the best regiment in the world, and the Yellow Uhlans to consider that the best regiment in the world is the Yellow Uhlans. The ecclesiastics of all the different creeds, through their best representatives, told me nothing but that they believed themselves to have the truth and the others to be in error, and that all they could do was to pray for them. I went to archimandrites, bishops, elders, monks of the strictest orders, and asked them; but none of them made any attempt to explain the matter to me except one man, who explained it all and explained it so that I never asked any one any more about it. I said that for every unbeliever turning to a belief (and all our young generation are in a position to do so) the question that presents itself first is, why is truth not in Lutheranism nor in Catholicism, but in Orthodoxy? Educated in the high school he cannot help knowing what the peasants do not know-that the Protestants and Catholics equally affirm that their faith is the only true one. Historical evidence, twisted by each religion in its own favour, is insufficient. Is it not possible, said I, to understand the teaching in a loftier way, so that from its height the differences should disappear, as they do for one who believes truly? Can we not go further along a path like the one we are following with the Old-Believers? They emphasize the fact that they have a differently shaped cross and different alleluias and a different procession round the altar. We reply: You believe in the Nicene Creed, in the seven sacraments, and so do we. Let us hold to that, and in other matters do as you pease. We have united with them by placing the essentials of faith above the unessentials. Now with the Catholics can we not say: You believe in so and so and in so and so, which are the chief things, and as for the Filioque clause and the Pope-do as you please. Can we not say the same to the Protestants, uniting with them in what is most important?

My interlocutor agreed with my thoughts, but told me that such conceptions would bring reproach o the spiritual authorities for deserting the faith of our forefathers, and this would produce a schism; and the vocation of the spiritual authorities is to safeguard in all its purity the Greco-Russian Orthodox faith inherited from our forefathers.

And I understood it all. I am seeking a faith, the power of life; and they are seeking the best way to fulfil in the eyes of men certain human obligations. and fulfilling these human affairs they fulfil them in a human way. However much they may talk of their pity for their erring brethren, and of addressing prayers for them to the throne of the Almighty-to carry out human purposes violence is necessary, and it has always been applied and is and will be applied. If of two religions each considers itself true and the other false, then men desiring to attract others to the truth will preach their own doctrine. And if a false teaching is preached to the inexperienced sons of their Church-which as the truth-then that Church cannot but burn the books and remove the man who is misleading its sons. What is to be done with a sectarian-burning, in the opinion of the Orthodox, with the fire of false doctrine-who in the most important affair of life, in faith, misleads the sons of the Church? What can be done with him except to cut off his head or to incarcerate him? Under the Tsar Alexis Mikhaylovich people were burned at the stake, that is to say, the severest method of punishment of the time was applied, and in our day also the severest method of punishment is applied-detention in solitary confinement. [Footnote: At the time this was written capital punishment was considered to be abolished in Russia.-A.M.]

The second relation of the Church to a question of life was with regard to war and executions.

At that time Russia was at war. And Russians, in the name of Christian love, began to kill their fellow men. It was impossible not to think about this, and not to see that killing is an evil repugnant to the first principles of any faith. Yet prayers were said in the churches for the success of our arms, and the teachers of the Faith acknowledged killing to be an act resulting from the Faith. And besides the murders during the war, I saw, during the disturbances which followed the war, Church dignitaries and teachers and monks of the lesser and stricter orders who approved the killing of helpless, erring youths. And I took note of all that is done by men who profess Christianity, and I was horrified.

Chapter 16

And I ceased to doubt, and became fully convinced that not all was true in the religion I had joined. Formerly I should have said that it was all false, but I could not say so now. The whole of the people possessed a knowledge of the truth, for otherwise they could not have lived. Moreover, that knowledge was accessible to me, for I had felt it and had lived by it. But I no longer doubted that there was also falsehood in it. And all that had previously repelled me now presented itself vividly before me. And though I saw that among the peasants there was a smaller admixture of the lies that repelled me than among the representatives of the Church, I still saw that in the people’s belief also falsehood was mingled with the truth.

But where did the truth and where did the falsehood come from? Both the falsehood and the truth were contained in the so-called holy tradition and in the Scriptures. Both the falsehood and the truth had been handed down by what is called the Church.

And whether I liked or not, I was brought to the study and investigation of these writings and traditions-which till now I had been so afraid to investigate.

And I turned to the examination of that same theology which I had once rejected with such contempt as unnecessary. Formerly it seemed to me a series of unnecessary absurdities, when on all sides I was surrounded by manifestations of life which seemed to me clear and full of sense; now I should have been glad to throw away what would not enter a health head, but I had nowhere to turn to. On this teaching religious doctrine rests, or at least with it the only knowledge of the meaning of life that I have found is inseparably connected. However wild it may seem too my firm old mind, it was the only hope of salvation. It had to be carefully, attentively examined in order to understand it, and not even to understand it as I understand the propositions of science: I do not seek that, nor can I seek it, knowing the special character of religious knowledge. I shall not seek the explanation of everything. I know that the explanation of everything, like the commencement of everything, must be concealed in infinity. But I wish to understand in a way which will bring me to what is inevitably inexplicable. I wish to recognize anything that is inexplicable as being so not because the demands of my reason are wrong (they are right, and apart from them I can understand nothing), but because I recognize the limits of my intellect. I wish to understand in such a way that everything that is inexplicable shall present itself to me as being necessarily inexplicable, and not as being something I am under an arbitrary obligation to believe.

That there is truth in the teaching is to me indubitable, but it is also certain that there is falsehood in it, and I must find what is true and what is false, and must disentangle the one from the other. I am setting to work upon this task. What of falsehood I have found in the teaching and what I have found of truth, and to what conclusions I came, will form the following parts of this work, which if it be worth it and if anyone wants it, will probably some day be printed somewhere.

Conclusion The foregoing was written by me some three years ago, and will be printed.

Now a few days ago, when revising it and returning to the line of thought and to the feelings I had when I was living through it all, I had a dream. This dream expressed in condensed form all that I had experienced and described, and I think therefore that, for those who have understood me, a description of this dream will refresh and elucidate and unify what has been set forth at such length in the foregoing pages. The dream was this:

I saw that I was lying on a bed. I was neither comfortable nor uncomfortable: I was lying on my back. But I began to consider how, and on what, I was lying-a question which had not till then occurred to me. And observing my bed, I saw I was lying on plaited string supports attached to its sides: my feet were resting on one such support, by calves on another, and my legs felt uncomfortable. I seemed to know that those supports were movable, and with a movement of my foot I pushed away the furthest of them at my feet — it seemed to me that it would be more comfortable so. But I pushed it away too far and wished to reach it again with my foot, and that movement caused the next support under my calves to slip away also, so that my legs hung in the air. I made a movement with my whole body to adjust myself, fully convinced that I could do so at once; but the movement caused the other supports under me to slip and to become entangled, and I saw that matters were going quite wrong: the whole of the lower part of my body slipped and hung down, though my feet did not reach the ground. I was holding on only by the upper part of my back, and not only did it become uncomfortable but I was even frightened. And then only did I ask myself about something that had not before occurred to me. I asked myself: Where am I and what am I lying on? and I began to look around and first of all to look down in the direction which my body was hanging and whiter I felt I must soon fall. I looked down and did not believe my eyes. I was not only at a height comparable to the height of the highest towers or mountains, but at a height such as I could never have imagined.

I could not even make out whether I saw anything there below, in that bottomless abyss over which I was hanging and whiter I was being drawn. My heart contracted, and I experienced horror. To look thither was terrible. If I looked thither I felt that I should at once slip from the last support and perish. And I did not look. But not to look was still worse, for I thought of what would happen to me directly I fell from the last support. And I felt that from fear I was losing my last supports, and that my back was slowly slipping lower and lower. Another moment and I should drop off. And then it occurred to me that this cannot be real. It is a dream. Wake up! I try to arouse myself but cannot do so. What am I to do? What am I to do? I ask myself, and look upwards. Above, there is also an infinite space. I look into the immensity of sky and try to forget about the immensity below, and I really do forget it. The immensity below repels and frightens me; the immensity above attracts and strengthens me. I am still supported above the abyss by the last supports that have not yet slipped from under me; I know that I am hanging, but I look only upwards and my fear passes. As happens in dreams, a voice says: “Notice this, this is it!” And I look more and more into the infinite above me and feel that I am becoming calm. I remember all that has happened, and remember how it all happened; how I moved my legs, how I hung down, how frightened I was, and how I was saved from fear by looking upwards. And I ask myself: Well, and now am I not hanging just the same? And I do not so much look round as experience with my whole body the point of support on which I am held. I see that I no longer hang as if about to fall, but am firmly held. I ask myself how I am held: I feel about, look round, and see that under me, under the middle of my body, there is one support, and that when I look upwards I lie on it in the position of securest balance, and that it alone gave me support before. And then, as happens in dreams, I imagined the mechanism by means of which I was held; a very natural intelligible, and sure means, though to one awake that mechanism has no sense. I was even surprised in my dream that I had not understood it sooner. It appeared that at my head there was a pillar, and the security of that slender pillar was undoubted though there was nothing to support it. From the pillar a loop hung very ingeniously and yet simply, and if one lay with the middle of one’s body in that loop and looked up, there could be no question of falling. This was all clear to me, and I was glad and tranquil. And it seemed as if someone said to me: “See that you remember.”

And I awoke.

KINGDOM OF GOD IS WITHIN YOU

Translated by Constance Garnett 1894

Chapter 1: Doctrine of Non-resistance to Evil by Force Has Been Professed by a Minority of Men From the Very Foundation of Christianity

Of the Book “What I Believe” — The Correspondence Evoked by it — Letters from Quakers — Garrison’s Declaration — Adin Ballou, his Works, his Catechism — Helchitsky’s “Net of Faith” — The Attitude of the World to Works Elucidating Christ’s Teaching — Dymond’s Book “On War” — Musser’s “Non-resistance Asserted” — Attitude of the Government in 1818 to Men who Refused to Serve in the Army — Hostile Attitude of Governments Generally and of Liberals to Those who Refuse to Assist in Acts of State Violence, and their Conscious Efforts to Silence and Suppress these Manifestations of Christian Non-resistance.

Among the first responses some letters called forth by my book were some letters from American Quakers. In these letters, expressing their sympathy with my views on the unlawfulness for a Christian of war and the use of force of any kind, the Quakers gave me details of their own so-called sect, which for more than two hundred years has actually professed the teaching of Christ on non-resistance to evil by force, and does not make use of weapons in self-defense. The Quakers sent me books, from which I learnt how they had, years ago, established beyond doubt the duty for a Christian of fulfilling the command of non-resistance to evil by force, and had exposed the error of the Church’s teaching in allowing war and capital punishment.

In a whole series of arguments and texts showing that war — that is, the wounding and killing of men — is inconsistent with a religion founded on peace and good will toward men, the Quakers maintain and prove that nothing has contributed so much to the obscuring of Christian truth in the eyes of the heathen, and has hindered so much the diffusion of Christianity through the world, as the disregard of this command by men calling themselves Christians, and the permission of war and violence to Christians.

“Christ’s teaching, which came to be known to men, not by means of violence and the sword,” they say, “but by means of non-resistance to evil, gentleness, meekness, and peaceableness, can only be diffused through the world by the example of peace, harmony, and love among its followers.”

“A Christian, according to the teaching of God himself, can act only peaceably toward all men, and therefore there can be no authority able to force the Christian to act in opposition to the teaching of God and to the principal virtue of the Christian in his relation with his neighbors.”

“The law of state necessity,” they say, “can force only those to change the law of God who, for the sake of earthly gains, try to reconcile the irreconcilable; but for a Christian who sincerely believes that following Christ’s teaching will give him salvation, such considerations of state can have no force.”

Further acquaintance with the labors of the Quakers and their works — with Fox, Penn, and especially the work of Dymond (published in 1827) — showed me not only that the impossibility of reconciling Christianity with force and war had been recognized long, long ago, but that this irreconcilability had been long ago proved so clearly and so indubitably that one could only wonder how this impossible reconciliation of Christian teaching with the use of force, which has been, and is still, preached in the churches, could have been maintained in spite of it.

In addition to what I learned from the Quakers I received about the same time, also from America, some information on the subject from a source perfectly distinct and previously unknown to me.

The son of William Lloyd Garrison, the famous champion of the emancipation of the negroes, wrote to me that he had read my book, in which he found ideas similar to those expressed by his father in the year 1838, and that, thinking it would be interesting to me to know this, he sent me a declaration or proclamation of “non-resistance” drawn up by his father nearly fifty years ago.

This declaration came about under the following circumstances: William Lloyd Garrison took part in a discussion on the means of suppressing war in the Society for the Establishment of Peace among Men, which existed in 1838 in America. He came to the conclusion that the establishment of universal peace can only be founded on the open profession of the doctrine of non-resistance to evil by violence (Matt. v. 39), in its full significance, as understood by the Quakers, with whom Garrison happened to be on friendly relations. Having come to this conclusion, Garrison thereupon composed and laid before the society a declaration, which was signed at the time — in 1838 — by many members.

”DECLARATION OF SENTIMENTS ADOPTED BY PEACE CONVENTION.

”Boston, 1838.

“We the undersigned, regard it as due to ourselves, to the cause which we love, to the country in which we live, to publish a declaration expressive of the purposes we aim to accomplish and the measures we shall adopt to carry forward the work of peaceful universal reformation.

“We do not acknowledge allegiance to any human government. We recognize but one King and Lawgiver, one Judge and Ruler of mankind. Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind. We love the land of our nativity only as we love all other lands. The interests and rights of American citizens are not dearer to us than those of the whole human race. Hence we can allow no appeal to patriotism to revenge any national insult or injury…

“We conceive that a nation has no right to defend itself against foreign enemies or to punish its invaders, and no individual possesses that right in his own case, and the unit cannot be of greater importance than the aggregate. If soldiers thronging from abroad with intent to commit rapine and destroy life may not be resisted by the people or the magistracy, then ought no resistance to be offered to domestic troublers of the public peace or of private security.

“The dogma that all the governments of the world are approvingly ordained of God, and that the powers that be in the United States, in Russia, in Turkey, are in accordance with his will, is no less absurd than impious. It makes the impartial Author of our existence unequal and tyrannical. It cannot be affirmed that the powers that be in any nation are actuated by the spirit or guided by the example of Christ in the treatment of enemies; therefore they cannot be agreeable to the will of God, and therefore their overthrow by a spiritual regeneration of their subjects is inevitable.

“We regard as unchristian and unlawful not only all wars, whether offensive or defensive, but all preparations for war; every naval ship, every arsenal, every fortification, we regard as unchristian and unlawful; the existence of any kind of standing army, all military chieftains, all monuments commemorative of victory over a fallen foe, all trophies won in battle, all celebrations in honor of military exploits, all appropriations for defense by arms; we regard as unchristian and unlawful every edict of government requiring of its subjects military service.

“Hence we deem it unlawful to bear arms, and we cannot hold any office which imposes on its incumbent the obligation to compel men to do right on pain of imprisonment or death. We therefore voluntarily exclude ourselves from every legislative and judicial body, and repudiate all human politics, worldly honors, and stations of authority. If we cannot occupy a seat in the legislature or on the bench, neither can we elect others to act as our substitutes in any such capacity. It follows that we cannot sue any man at law to force him to return anything he may have wrongly taken from us; if he has seized our coat, we shall surrender him our cloak also rather than subject him to punishment.

“We believe that the penal code of the old covenant — an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth — has been abrogated by Jesus Christ, and that under the new covenant the forgiveness instead of the punishment of enemies has been enjoined on all his disciples in all cases whatsoever. To extort money from enemies, cast them into prison, exile or execute them, is obviously not to forgive but to take retribution.

“The history of mankind is crowded with evidences proving that physical coercion is not adapted to moral regeneration, and that the sinful dispositions of men can be subdued only by love; that evil can be exterminated only by good; that it is not safe to rely upon the strength of an arm to preserve us from harm; that there is great security in being gentle, long-suffering, and abundant in mercy; that it is only the meek who shall inherit the earth; for those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword.

“Hence as a measure of sound policy — of safety to property, life, and liberty — of public quietude and private enjoyment — as well as on the ground of allegiance to Him who is King of kings and Lord of lords, we cordially adopt the non-resistance principle, being confident that it provides for all possible consequences, is armed with omnipotent power, and must ultimately triumph over every assailing force.

“We advocate no Jacobinical doctrines. The spirit of Jacobinism is the spirit of retaliation, violence, and murder. It neither fears God nor regards man. We would be filled with the spirit of Christ. If we abide evil by our fundamental principle of not opposing evil by evil we cannot participate in sedition, treason, or violence. We shall submit to every ordinance and every requirement of government, except such as are contrary to the commands of the Gospel, and in no case resist the operation of law, except by meekly submitting to the penalty of disobedience.

“But while we shall adhere to the doctrine of non-resistance and passive submission to enemies, we purpose, in a moral and spiritual sense, to assail iniquity in high places and in low places, to apply our principles to all existing evil, political, legal, and ecclesiastical institutions, and to hasten the time when the kingdoms of this world will have become the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ. It appears to us a self-evident truth that whatever the Gospel is designed to destroy at any period of the world, being contrary to it, ought now to be abandoned. If, then, the time is predicted when swords shall be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, and men shall not learn the art of war any more, it follows that all who manufacture, sell, or wield these deadly weapons do thus array themselves against the peaceful dominion of the Son of God on earth.

“Having thus stated our principles, we proceed to specify the measures we propose to adopt in carrying our object into effect.

“We expect to prevail through the Foolishness of Preaching. We shall endeavor to promulgate our views among all persons, to whatever nation, sect, or grade of society they may belong. Hence we shall organize public lectures, circulate tracts and publications, form societies, and petition every governing body. It will be our leading object to devise ways and means for effecting a radical change in the views, feelings, and practices of society respecting the sinfulness of war and the treatment of enemies.

“In entering upon the great work before us, we are not unmindful that in its prosecution we may be called to test our sincerity even as in a fiery ordeal. It may subject us to insult, outrage, suffering, yea, even death itself. We anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and calumny. Tumults may arise against us. The proud and pharisaical, the ambitious and tyrannical, principalities and powers, may combine to crush us. So they treated the Messiah whose example we are humbly striving to imitate. We shall not be afraid of their terror. Our confidence is in the Lord Almighty and not in man. Having withdrawn from human protection, what can sustain us but that faith which overcomes the world? We shall not think it strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try us, but rejoice inasmuch as we are partakers of Christ’s sufferings.

“Wherefore we commit the keeping of our souls to God. For every one that forsakes houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands for Christ’s sake, shall receive a hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life.

“Firmly relying upon the certain and universal triumph of the sentiments contained in this declaration, however formidable may be the opposition arrayed against them, we hereby affix our signatures to it; commending it to the reason and conscience of mankind, and resolving, in the strength of the Lord God, to calmly and meekly abide the issue.”

Immediately after this declaration a Society for Nonresistance was founded by Garrison, and a journal called the NON-RESISTANT, in which the doctrine of non-resistance was advocated in its full significance and in all its consequences, as it had been expounded in the declaration. Further information as to the ultimate destiny of the society and the journal I gained from the excellent biography of W. L. Garrison, the work of his son.

The society and the journal did not exist for long. The greater number of Garrison’s fellow-workers in the movement for the liberation of the slaves, fearing that the too radical programme of the journal, the NON-RESISTANT, might keep people away from the practical work of negro-emancipation, gave up the profession of the principle of non-resistance as it had been expressed in the declaration, and both society and journal ceased to exist.

This declaration of Garrison’s gave so powerful and eloquent an expression of a confession of faith of such importance to men, that one would have thought it must have produced a strong impression on people, and have become known throughout the world and the subject of discussion on every side. But nothing of the kind occurred. Not only was it unknown in Europe, even the Americans, who have such a high opinion of Garrison, hardly knew of the declaration.

Another champion of non-resistance has been overlooked in the same way — the American Adin Ballou, who lately died, after spending fifty years in preaching this doctrine. Lord God, to calmly and meekly abide the doctrine. How great the ignorance is of everything relating to the question of non-resistance may be seen from the fact that Garrison the son, who has written an excellent biography of his father in four great volumes, in answer to my inquiry whether there are existing now societies for non-resistance, and adherents of the doctrine, told me that as far as he knew that society had broken up, and that there were no adherents of that doctrine, while at the very time when he was writing to me there was living, at Hopedale in Massachusetts, Adin Ballou, who had taken part in the labors of Garrison the father, and had devoted fifty years of his life to advocating, both orally and in print, the doctrine of nonresistance. Later on I received a letter from Wilson, a pupil and colleague of Ballou’s, and entered into correspondence with Ballou himself. I wrote to Ballou, and he answered me and sent me his works. Here is the summary of some extracts from them:

“Jesus Christ is my Lord and teacher,” says Ballou in one of his essays exposing the inconsistency of Christians who allowed a right of self-defense and of warfare. “I have promised leaving all else, to follow good and through evil, to death itself. But I am a citizen of the democratic republic of the United States; and in allegiance to it I have sworn to defend the Constitution of my country, if need be, with my life. Christ requires of me to do unto others as I would they should do unto me. The Constitution of the United States requires of me to do unto two millions of slaves [at that time there were slaves; now one might venture to substitute the word ‘laborers’] the very opposite of what I would they should do unto me — that is to help to keep them in their present condition of slavery. And, in spite of this, I continue to elect or be elected, I propose to vote, I am even ready to be appointed to any office under government. That will not hinder me from being a Christian. I shall still profess Christianity, and shall find no difficulty in carrying out my covenant with Christ and with the government.

“Jesus Christ forbids me to resist evil doers, and to take from them an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, bloodshed for bloodshed, and life for life.

“My government demands from me quite the opposite, and bases a system of self-defense on gallows, musket, and sword, to be used against its foreign and domestic foes. And the land is filled accordingly with gibbets, prisons, arsenals, ships of war, and soldiers.

“In the maintenance and use of these expensive appliances for murder, we can very suitably exercise to the full the virtues of forgiveness to those who injure us, love toward our enemies, blessings to those who curse us, and doing good to those who hate us.

“For this we have a succession of Christian priests to pray for us and beseech the blessing of Heaven on the holy work of slaughter.

“I see all this (i.e., the contradiction between profession and practice), and I continue to profess religion and take part in government, and pride myself on being at the same time a devout Christian and a devoted servant of the government. I do not want to agree with these senseless notions of non-resistance. I cannot renounce my authority and leave only immoral men in control of the government. The Constitution says the government has the right to declare war, and I assent to this and support it, and swear that I will support it. And I do not for that cease to be a Christian. War, too, is a Christian duty. Is it not a Christian duty to kill hundreds of thousands of one’s fellow-men, to outrage women, to raze and burn towns, and to practice every possible cruelty? It is time to dismiss all these false sentimentalities. It is the truest means of forgiving injuries and loving enemies. If we only do it in the spirit of love, nothing can be more Christian than such murder.”

In another pamphlet, entitled “How many Men are Necessary to Change a Crime into a Virtue?” he says: “One man may not kill. If he kills a fellow-creature, he is a murderer. If two, ten, a hundred men do so, they, too, are murderers. But a government or a nation may kill as many men as it chooses, and that will not be murder, but a great and noble action. Only gather the people together on a large scale, and a battle of ten thousand men becomes an innocent action. But precisely how many people must there be to make it so? — that is the question. One man cannot plunder and pillage, but a whole nation can. But precisely how many are needed to make it permissible? Why is it that one man, ten, a hundred, may not break the law of God, but a great number may?”

And here is a version of Ballou’s catechism composed for his flock:

CATECHISM OF NON-RESISTANCE.

Q. Whence is the word “non-resistance” derived?

A. From the command, “Resist not evil.” (M. v. 39.)

Q. What does this word express?

A. It expresses a lofty Christian virtue enjoined on us by

Christ.

Q. Ought the word “non-resistance” to be taken in its widest sense — that is to say, as intending that we should not offer any resistance of any kind to evil?

A. No; it ought to be taken in the exact sense of our Saviour’s teaching — that is, not repaying evil for evil. We ought to oppose evil by every righteous means in our power, but not by evil.

Q. What is there to show that Christ enjoined non-resistance in that sense?

A. It is shown by the words he uttered at the same time. He said: “Ye have heard, it was said of old, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But I say unto you Resist not evil. But if one smites thee on the right cheek, turn him the other also; and if one will go to law with thee to take thy coat from thee, give him thy cloak also.”

Q. Of whom was he speaking in the words, “Ye have heard it was

said of old”?

A. Of the patriarchs and the prophets, contained in the Old

Testament, which the Hebrews ordinarily call the Law and the

Prophets.

Q. What utterances did Christ refer to in the words, “It was

said of old”?

A. The utterances of Noah, Moses, and the other prophets, in which they admit the right of doing bodily harm to those who inflict harm, so as to punish and prevent evil deeds.

Q. Quote such utterances.

A. “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.” — GEN. ix. 6.

“He that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall be surely put to death…And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” — Ex. xxi. 12 and 23-25.

“He that killeth any man shall surely be put to death. And if a man cause a blemish in his neighbor, as he hath done, so shall it be done unto him: breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.” — LEV. xxiv. 17, 19, 20.

“Then the judges shall make diligent inquisition; and behold, if the witness be a false witness, and hath testified falsely against his brother, then shall ye do unto him as he had thought to have done unto his brother…And thine eye shall not pity; but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.” — DEUT. xix. 18, 21.

Noah, Moses, and the Prophets taught that he who kills, maims, or injures his neighbors does evil. To resist such evil, and to prevent it, the evil doer must be punished with death, or maiming, or some physical injury. Wrong must be opposed by wrong, murder by murder, injury by injury, evil by evil. Thus taught Noah, Moses, and the Prophets. But Christ rejects all this. “I say unto you,” is written in the Gospel, “resist not evil,” do not oppose injury with injury, but rather bear repeated injury from the evil doer. What was permitted is forbidden. When we understand what kind of resistance they taught, we know exactly what resistance Christ forbade.

Q. Then the ancients allowed the resistance of injury by injury?

A. Yes. But Jesus forbids it. The Christian has in no case the right to put to death his neighbor who has done him evil, or to do him injury in return.

Q. May he kill or maim him in self-defense?

A. No.

Q. May he go with a complaint to the judge that he who has

wronged him may be punished?

A. No. What he does through others, he is in reality doing

himself.

Q. Can he fight in conflict with foreign enemies or disturbers

of the peace?

A. Certainly not. He cannot take any part in war or in preparations for war. He cannot make use of a deadly weapon. He cannot oppose injury to injury, whether he is alone or with others, either in person or through other people.

Q. Can he voluntarily vote or furnish soldiers for the

government?

A. He can do nothing of that kind if he wishes to be faithful

to Christ’s law.

Q. Can he voluntarily give money to aid a government resting on

military force, capital punishment, and violence in general?

A. No, unless the money is destined for some special object,

right in itself, and good both in aim and means.

Q. Can he pay taxes to such a government?

A. No; he ought not voluntarily to pay taxes, but he ought not to resist the collecting of taxes. A tax is levied by the government, and is exacted independently of the will of the subject. It is impossible to resist it without having recourse to violence of some kind. Since the Christian cannot employ violence, he is obliged to offer his property at once to the loss by violence inflicted on it by the authorities.

Q. Can a Christian give a vote at elections, or take part in

government or law business?

A. No; participation in election, government, or law business

is participation in government by force.

Q. Wherein lies the chief significance of the doctrine of

non-resistance?

A. In the fact that it alone allows of the possibility of eradicating evil from one’s own heart, and also from one’s neighbor’s. This doctrine forbids doing that whereby evil has endured for ages and multiplied in the world. He who attacks another and injures him, kindles in the other a feeling of hatred, the root of every evil. To injure another because he has injured us, even with the aim of overcoming evil, is doubling the harm for him and for oneself; it is begetting, or at least setting free and inciting, that evil spirit which we should wish to drive out. Satan can never be driven out by Satan. Error can never be corrected by error, and evil cannot be vanquished by evil.

True non-resistance is the only real resistance to evil. It is crushing the serpent’s head. It destroys and in the end extirpates the evil feeling.

Q. But if that is the true meaning of the rule of non-resistance, can it always put into practice?

A. It can be put into practice like every virtue enjoined by the law of God. A virtue cannot be practiced in all circumstances without self-sacrifice, privation, suffering, and in extreme cases loss of life itself. But he who esteems life more than fulfilling the will of God is already dead to the only true life. Trying to save his life he loses it. Besides, generally speaking, where non-resistance costs the sacrifice of a single life or of some material welfare, resistance costs a thousand such sacrifices.

Non-resistance is Salvation; Resistance is Ruin.

It is incomparably less dangerous to act justly than unjustly, to submit to injuries than to resist them with violence, less dangerous even in one’s relations to the present life. If all men refused to resist evil by evil our world would be happy.

Q. But so long as only a few act thus, what will happen to them?

A. If only one man acted thus, and all the rest agreed to crucify him, would it not be nobler for him to die in the glory of non-resisting love, praying for his enemies, than to live to wear the crown of Caesar stained with the blood of the slain? However, one man, or a thousand men, firmly resolved not to oppose evil by evil are far more free from danger by violence than those who resort to violence, whether among civilized or savage neighbors. The robber, the murderer, and the cheat will leave them in peace, sooner than those who oppose them with arms, and those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword, but those who seek after peace, and behave kindly and harmlessly, forgiving and forgetting injuries, for the most part enjoy peace, or, if they die, they die blessed. In this way, if all kept the ordinance of non-resistance, there would obviously be no evil nor crime. If the majority acted thus they would establish the rule of love and good will even over evil doers, never opposing evil with evil, and never resorting to force. If there were a moderately large minority of such men, they would exercise such a salutary moral influence on society that every cruel punishment would be abolished, and violence and feud would be replaced by peace and love. Even if there were only a small minority of them, they would rarely experience anything worse than the world’s contempt, and meantime the world, though unconscious of it, and not grateful for it, would be continually becoming wiser and better for their unseen action on it. And if in the worst case some members of the minority were persecuted to death, in dying for the truth they would have left behind them their doctrine, sanctified by the blood of their martyrdom. Peace, then, to all who seek peace, and may overruling love be the imperishable heritage of every soul who obeys willingly Christ’s word, “Resist not evil.”

ADIN BALLOU.

For fifty years Ballou wrote and published books dealing principally with the question of non-resistance to evil by force. In these works, which are distinguished by the clearness of their thought and eloquence of exposition, the question is looked at from every possible side, and the binding nature of this command on every Christian who acknowledges the Bible as the revelation of God is firmly established. All the ordinary objections to the doctrine of non-resistance from the Old and New Testaments are brought forward, such as the expulsion of the moneychangers from the Temple, and so on, and arguments follow in disproof of them all. The practical reasonableness of this rule of conduct is shown independently of Scripture, and all the objections ordinarily made against its practicability are stated and refuted. Thus one chapter in a book of his treats of non-resistance in exceptional cases, and he owns in this connection that if there were cases in which the rule of non-resistance were impossible of application, it would prove that the law was not universally authoritative. Quoting these cases, he shows that it is precisely in them that the application of the rule is both necessary and reasonable. There is no aspect of the question, either on his side or on his opponents’, which he has not followed up in his writings. I mention all this to show the unmistakable interest which such works ought to have for men who make a profession of Christianity, and because one would have thought Ballou’s work would have been well known, and the ideas expressed by him would lave been either accepted or refuted; but such has not been the case.

The work of Garrison, the father, in his foundation of the Society of Non-resistants and his Declaration, even more than my correspondence with the Quakers, convinced me of the fact that the departure of the ruling form of Christianity from the law of Christ on non-resistance by force is an error that has long been observed and pointed out, and that men have labored, and are still laboring, to correct. Ballou’s work confirmed me still more in this view. But the fate of Garrison, still more that of Ballou, in being completely unrecognized in spite of fifty years of obstinate and persistent work in the same direction, confirmed me in the idea that there exists a kind of tacit but steadfast conspiracy of silence about all such efforts.

Ballou died in August, 1890, and there was as obituary notice of him in an American journal of Christian views (RELIGIO-PHILOSOPHICAL JOURNAL, August 23). In this laudatory notice it is recorded that Ballou was the spiritual director of a parish, that he delivered from eight to nine thousand sermons, married one thousand couples, and wrote about five hundred articles; but there is not a single word said of the object to which he devoted his life; even the word “non-resistance” is not mentioned. Precisely as it was with all the preaching of the Quakers for two hundred years and, too, with the efforts of Garrison the father, the foundation of his society and journal, and his Declaration, so it is with the life-work of Ballou. It seems just as though it did not exist and never had existed.

We have an astounding example of the obscurity of works which aim at expounding the doctrine of non-resistance to evil by force, and at confuting those who do not recognize this commandment, in the book of the Tsech Helchitsky, which has only lately been noticed and has not hitherto been printed.

Soon after the appearance of my book in German, I received a letter from Prague, from a professor of the university there, informing me of the existence of a work, never yet printed, by Helchitsky, a Tsech of the fifteenth century, entitled “The Net of Faith.” In this work, the professor told me, Helchitsky expressed precisely the same view as to true and false Christianity as I had expressed in my book “What I Believe.” The professor wrote to me that Helchitsky’s work was to be published for the first time in the Tsech language in the JOURNAL OF THE PETERSBURG ACADEMY OF SILENCE. Since I could not obtain the book itself, I tried to make myself acquainted with what was known of Helchitsky, and I gained the following information from a German book sent me by the Prague professor and from Pypin’s history of Tsech literature. This was Pypin’s account:

“‘The Net of Faith’ is Christ’s teaching, which ought to draw man up out of the dark depths of the sea of worldliness and his own iniquity. True faith consists in believing God’s Word; but now a time has come when men mistake the true faith for heresy, and therefore it is for the reason to point out what the true faith consists in, if anyone does not know this. It is hidden in darkness from men, and they do not recognize the true law of Christ.

“To make this law plain, Helchitsky points to the primitive organization of Christian society — the organization which, he says, is now regarded in the Roman Church as an abominable heresy. This Primitive Church was his special ideal of social organization, founded on equality, liberty, and fraternity. Christianity, in Helchitsky’s view, still preserves these elements, and it is only necessary for society to return to its pure doctrine to render unnecessary every other form of social order in which kings and popes are essential; the law of love would alone be sufficient in every case.

“Historically, Helchitsky attributes the degeneration of Christianity to the times of Constantine the Great, whom he Pope Sylvester admitted into the Christian Church with all his heathen morals and life. Constantine, in his turn, endowed the Pope with worldly riches and power. From that time forward these two ruling powers were constantly aiding one another to strive for nothing but outward glory. Divines and ecclesiastical dignitaries began to concern themselves only about subduing the whole world to their authority, incited men against one another to murder and plunder, and in creed and life reduced Christianity to a nullity. Helchitsky denies completely the right to make war and to inflict the punishment of death; every soldier, even the ‘knight,’ is only a violent evil doer — a murderer.”

The same account is given by the German book, with the addition of a few biographical details and some extracts from Helchitsky’s writings.

Having learnt the drift of Helchitsky’s teaching in this way, I awaited all the more impatiently the appearance of “The Net of Faith” in the journal of the Academy. But one year passed, then two and three, and still the book did appear. It was only in 1888 that I learned that the printing of the book, which had been begun, was stopped. I obtained the proofs of what had been printed and read them through. It is a marvelous book from every point of view.

Its general tenor is given with perfect accuracy by Pypin. Helchitsky’s fundamental idea is that Christianity, by allying itself with temporal power in the days of Constantine, and by continuing to develop in such conditions, has become completely distorted, and has ceased to be Christian altogether. Helchitsky gave the title “The Net of Faith” to his book, taking as his motto the verse of the Gospel about the calling of the disciples to be fishers of men; and, developing this metaphor, he says:

“Christ, by means of his disciples, would have caught all the world in his net of faith, but the greater fishes broke the net and escaped out of it, and all the rest have slipped through the holes made by the greater fishes, so that the net has remained quite empty. The greater fishes who broke the net are the rulers, emperors, popes, kings, who have not renounced power, and instead of true Christianity have put on what is simply a mask of it.”

Helchitsky teaches precisely what has been and is taught in these days by the non-resistant Mennonites and Quakers, and in former tunes by the Bogomilites, Paulicians, and many others. He teaches that Christianity, expecting from its adherents gentleness, meekness, peaceableness, forgiveness of injuries, turning the other cheek when one is struck, and love for enemies, is inconsistent with the use of force, which is an indispensable condition of authority.

The Christian, according to Helchitsky’s reasoning, not only cannot be a ruler or a soldier; he cannot take any part in government nor in trade, or even be a landowner; he can only be an artisan or a husbandman.

This book is one of the few works attacking official Christianity which has escaped being burned. All such so-called heretical works were burned at the stake, together with their authors, so that there are few ancient works exposing the errors of official Christianity. The book has a special interest for this reason alone. But apart from its interest from every point of view, it is one of the most remarkable products of thought for its depth of aim, for the astounding strength and beauty of the national language in which it is written, and for its antiquity. And yet for more than four centuries it has remained unprinted, and is still unknown, except to a few learned specialists.

One would have thought that all such works, whether of the Quakers, of Garrison, of Ballou, or of Helchitsky, asserting and proving as they do, on the principles of the Gospel, that our modern world takes a false view of Christ’s teaching, would have awakened interest, excitement, talk, and discussion among spiritual teachers and their flocks alike.

Works of this kind, dealing with the very essence of Christian doctrine, ought, one would have thought, to have been examined and accepted as true, or refuted and rejected. But nothing of the kind has occurred, and the same fate has been repeated with all those works. Men of the most diverse views, believers, and, what is surprising, unbelieving liberals also, as though by agreement, all preserve the same persistent silence about them, and all that has been done by people to explain the true meaning of Christ’s doctrine remains either ignored or forgotten.

But it is still more astonishing that two other books, of which I heard on the appearance of my book, should be so little known, I mean Dymond’s book “On War,” published for the first time in London in 1824, and Daniel Musser’s book on “Non-resistance,” written in 1864. It is particularly astonishing that these books should be unknown, because, apart from their intrinsic merits, both books treat not so much of the theory as of the practical application of the theory to life, of the attitude of Christianity to military service, which is especially important and interesting now in these clays of universal conscription.

People will ask, perhaps: How ought a subject to behave who believes that war is inconsistent with his religion while the government demands from him that he should enter military service?

This question is, I think, a most vital one, and the answer to it is specially important in these days of universal conscription. All — or at least the great majority of the people — are Christians, and all men are called upon for military service. How ought a man, as a Christian, to meet this demand? This is the gist of Dymond’s answer:

“His duty is humbly but steadfastly to refuse to serve.”

There are some people, who, without any definite reasoning about it, conclude straightway that the responsibility of government measures rests entirely on those who resolve on them, or that the governments and sovereigns decide the question of what is good or bad for their subjects, and the duty of the subjects is merely to obey. I think that arguments of this kind only obscure men’s conscience. I cannot take part in the councils of government, and therefore I am not responsible for its misdeeds.. Indeed, but we are responsible for our own misdeeds. And the misdeeds of our rulers become our own, if we, knowing that they are misdeeds, assist in carrying, them out. Those who suppose that they are bound to obey the government, and that the responsibility for the misdeeds they commit is transferred from them to their rulers, deceive themselves. They say: “We give our acts up to the will of others, and our acts cannot be good or bad; there is no merit in what is good nor responsibility for what is evil in our actions, since they are not done of our own will.”

It is remarkable that the very same thing is said in the instructions to soldiers which they make them learn — that is, that the officer is alone responsible for the consequences of his command. But this is not right. A man cannot get rid of the responsibility, for his own actions. And that is clear from the following example. If your officer commands you to kill your neighbor’s child, to kill your father or your mother, would you obey? If you would not obey, the whole argument falls to the ground, for if you can disobey the governors in one case, where do you draw the line up to which you can obey them? There is no line other than that laid down by Christianity, and that line is both reasonable and practicable.

And therefore we consider it the duty of every man who thinks war inconsistent with Christianity, meekly but firmly to refuse to serve in the army. And let those whose lot it is to act thus, remember that the fulfillment of a great duty rests with them. The destiny of humanity in the world depends, so far as it depends on men at all, on their fidelity to their religion. Let them confess their conviction, and stand up for it, and not in words alone, but in sufferings too, if need be. If you believe that Christ forbade murder, pay no heed to the arguments nor to the commands of those who call on you to bear a hand in it. By such a steadfast refusal to make use of force, you call down on yourselves the blessing promised to those “who hear these sayings and do them,” and the time will come when the world will recognize you as having aided in the reformation of mankind.

Musser’s book is called “Non-resistance Asserted,” or “Kingdom of Christ and Kingdoms of this World Separated.” This book is devoted to the same question, and was written when the American Government was exacting military service from its citizens at the time of the Civil War. And it has, too, a value for all time, dealing with the question how, in such circumstances, people should and can refuse to eater military service. Here is the tenor of the author’s introductory remarks:

“It is well known that there are many persons in the United States who refuse to fight on grounds of conscience. They are called the ‘defenseless,’ or ‘non-resistant’ Christians. These Christians refuse to defend their country, to bear arms, or at the call of government to make war on its enemies. Till lately this religious scruple seemed a valid excuse to the government, and those who urged it were let off service. But at the beginning of our Civil War public opinion was agitated on this subject. It was natural that persons who considered it their duty to bear all the hardships and dangers of war in defense of their country should feel resentment against those persons who had for long shared with them the advantages of the protection of government, and who now in time of need and danger would not share in bearing the labors and dangers of its defense. It was even natural that they should declare the attitude of such men monstrous, irrational, and suspicious.”

A host of orators and writers, our author tells us, arose to oppose this attitude, and tried to prove the sinfulness of non-resistance, both from Scripture and on common-sense grounds. And this was perfectly natural, and in many cases the authors were right — right, that is, in regard to persons who did not renounce the benefits they received from the government and tried to avoid the hardships of military service, but not right in regard to the principle of non-resistance itself. Above all, our author proves the binding nature of the rule of non-resistance for a Christian, pointing out that this command is perfectly clear, and is enjoined upon every Christian by Christ without possibility of misinterpretation. “Bethink yourselves whether it is righteous to obey man more than God,” said Peter and John. And this is precisely what ought to be the attitude to every man who wishes to be Christian to the claim on him for military service, when Christ has said, “Resist not evil by force.” As for the question of the principle itself, the author regards that as decided. As to the second question, whether people have the right to refuse to serve in the army who have not refused the benefits conferred by a government resting on force, the author considers it in detail, and arrives at the conclusion that a Christian following the law of Christ, since he does not go to war, ought not either to take advantage of any institutions of government, courts of law, or elections, and that in his private concerns he must not have recourse to the authorities, the police, or the law. Further on in the book he treats of the relation of the Old Testament to the New, the value of government for those who are Christians, and makes some observations on the doctrine of non-resistance and the attacks made on it. The author concludes his book by saying: “Christians do not need government, and therefore they cannot either obey it in what is contrary to Christ’s teaching nor, still less, take part in it.” Christ took his disciples out of the world, he says. They do not expect worldly blessings and worldly happiness, but they expect eternal life. The Spirit in whom they live makes them contented and happy in every position. If the world tolerates them, they are always happy. If the world will not leave them in peace, they will go elsewhere, since they are pilgrims on the earth and they have no fixed place of habitation. They believe that “the dead may bury their dead.” One thing only is needful for them, “to follow their Master.”

Even putting aside the question as to the principle laid down in these two books as to the Christian’s duty in his attitude to war, one cannot help perceiving the practical importance and the urgent need of deciding the question.

There are people, hundreds of thousands of Quakers, Mennonites, all our Douhobortsi, Molokani, and others who do not belong to any definite sect, who consider that the use of force — and, consequently, military service — is inconsistent with Christianity. Consequently there are every year among us in Russia some men called upon for military service who refuse to serve on the ground of their religious convictions. Does the government let them off then? No. Does it compel them to go, and in case of disobedience punish them? No. This was how the government treated them in 1818. Here is an extract from the diary of Nicholas Myravyov of Kars, which was not passed by the censor, and is not known in Russia:

“Tiflis, October 2, 1818.

“In the morning the commandant told me that five peasants belonging to a landowner in the Tamboff government had lately been sent to Georgia. These men had been sent for soldiers, but they would not serve; they had been several times flogged and made to run the gauntlet, but they would submit readily to the cruelest tortures, and even to death, rather than serve. ‘Let us go,’ they said, ‘and leave us alone; we will not hurt anyone; all men are equal, and the Tzar is a man like us; why should we pay him tribute; why should I expose my life to danger to kill in battle some man who has done me no harm? You can cut us to pieces and we will not be soldiers. He who has compassion on us will give us charity, but as for the government rations, we have not had them and we do not want to have them’ These were the words of those peasants, who declare that there are numbers like them Russia. They brought them four times before the Committee of Ministers, and at last decided to lay the matter before the Tzar who gave orders that they should be taken to Georgia for correction, and commanded the commander-in-chief to send him a report every month of their gradual success in bringing these peasants to a better mind.”

How the correction ended is not known, as the whole episode indeed was unknown, having been kept in profound secrecy.

This was how the government behaved seventy-five years ago — this is how it has behaved in a great cumber of cases, studiously concealed from the people. And this is how the government behaves now, except in the case of the German Mennonites, living in the province of Kherson, whose plea against military service is considered well grounded. They are made to work off their term of service in labor in the forests.

But in the recent cases of refusal on the part of Mennonites to serve in the army on religious grounds, the government authorities have acted in the following manner:

To begin with, they have recourse to every means of coercion used in our times to “correct” the culprit and bring him to “a better mind,” and these measures are carried out with the greatest secrecy. I know that in the case of one man who declined to serve in 1884 in Moscow, the official correspondence on the subject had two months after his refusal accumulated into a big folio, and was kept absolutely secret among the Ministry.

They usually begin by sending the culprit to the priests, and the latter, to their shame be it said, always exhort him to obedience. But since the exhortation in Christ’s name to forswear Christ is for the most part unsuccessful, after he has received the admonitions of the spiritual authorities, they send him to the gendarmes, and the latter, finding, as a rule, no political cause for offense in him, dispatch him back again, and then he is sent to the learned men, to the doctors, and to the madhouse. During all these vicissitudes he is deprived of liberty and has to endure every kind of humiliation and suffering as a convicted criminal. (All this has been repeated in four cases.) The doctors let him out of the madhouse, and then every kind of secret shift is employed to prevent him from going free — whereby others would be encouraged to refuse to serve as he has done — and at the same time to avoid leaving him among the soldiers, for fear they too should learn from him that military service is not at all their duty by the law of God, as they are assured, but quite contrary to it.

The most convenient thing for the government would be to kill the non-resistant by flogging him to death or some other means, as was done in former days. But to put a man openly to death because he believes in the creed we all confess is impossible. To let a man alone who has refused obedience is also impossible. And so the government tries either to compel the man by ill-treatment to renounce Christ, or in some way or other to get rid of him unobserved, without openly putting him to death, and to hide somehow both the action and the man himself from other people. And so all kinds of shifts and wiles and cruelties are set on foot against him. They either send him to the frontier or provoke him to insubordination, and then try him for breach of discipline and shut him up in the prison of the disciplinary battalion, where they can ill treat him freely unseen by anyone, or they declare him mad, and lock him up in a lunatic asylum. They sent one man in this way to Tashkend — that is, they pretended to transfer to the Tashkend army; another to Omsk; a third him they convicted of insubordination and shut up in prison; a fourth they sent to a lunatic asylum.

Everywhere the same story is repeated. Not only the government, but the great majority of liberal, advanced people, as they are called, studiously turn away from everything that has been said, written, or done, or is being done by men to prove the incompatibility of force in its most awful, gross, and glaring form — in the form, that is, of an army of soldiers prepared to murder anyone, whoever it may be — with the teachings of Christianity, or even of the humanity which society professes as its creed.

So that the information I have gained of the attitude of the higher ruling classes, not only in Russia but in Europe and America, toward the elucidation of this question has convinced me that there exists in these ruling classes a consciously hostile attitude to true Christianity, which is shown pre-eminently in their reticence in regard to all manifestations of it.

Chapter 2: Criticisms of the Doctrine of Non-resistance to Evil by Force on the Part of Believers and of Unbelievers

Fate of the Book “What I Believe” — Evasive Character of Religious Criticisms of Principles of my Book — 1st Reply: Use of Force not Opposed to Christianity — 2d Reply: Use of Force Necessary to Restrain Evil Doers — 3d Reply: Duty of Using Force in Defense of One’s Neighbor — 4th Reply: The Breach of the Command of Nonresistance to be Regarded Simply as a Weakness — 5th Reply: Reply Evaded by Making Believe that the Question has long been Decided — To Devise such Subterfuges and to take Refuge Behind the Authority of the Church, of Antiquity, and of Religion is all that Ecclesiastical Critics can do to get out of the Contradiction between Use of Force and Christianity in Theory and in Practice — General Attitude of the Ecclesiastical World and of the Authorities to Profession of True Christianity — General Character of Russian Freethinking Critics — Foreign Freethinking Critics — Mistaken Arguments of these Critics the Result of Misunderstanding the True Meaning of Christ’s Teaching.

The impression I gained of a desire to conceal, to hush up, what I had tried to express in my book, led me to judge the book itself afresh.

On its appearance it had, as I had anticipated, been forbidden, and ought therefore by law to have been burnt. But, at the same time, it was discussed among officials, and circulated in a great number of manuscript and lithograph copies, and in translations printed abroad.

And very quickly after the book, criticisms, both religious and secular in character, made their appearance, and these the government tolerated, and even encouraged. So that the refutation of a book which no one was supposed to know anything about was even chosen as the subject for theological dissertations in the academies.

The criticisms of my book, Russian and foreign alike, fall under two general divisions — the religious criticisms of men who regard themselves as believers, and secular criticisms, that is, those of freethinkers.

I will begin with the first class. In my book I made it an accusation against the teachers of the Church that their teaching is opposed to Christ’s commands clearly and definitely expressed in the Sermon on the Mount, and opposed in especial to his command in regard to resistance to evil, and that in this way they deprive Christ’s teaching of all value. The Church authorities accept the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount on non-resistance to evil by force as divine revelation; and therefore one would have thought that if they felt called upon to write about my book at all, they would have found it inevitable before everything else to reply to the principal point of my charge against them, and to say plainly, do they or do they not admit the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount and the commandment of non-resistance to evil as binding on a Christian. And they were bound to answer this question, not after the usual fashion (i. e., “that although on the one side one cannot absolutely deny, yet on the other side one cannot main fully assent, all the more seeing that,” etc., etc.). No; they should have answered the question as plainly as it was put in my book — Did Christ really demand from his disciples that they should carry out what he taught them in the Sermon on the Mount? And can a Christian, then, or can he not, always remaining a Christian, go to law or make any use of the law, or seek his own protection in the law? And can the Christian, or can he not, remaining a Christian, take part in the administration of government, using compulsion against his neighbors? And — the most important question hanging over the heads of all of us in these days of universal military service — can the Christian, or can he not, remaining a Christian, against Christ’s direct prohibition, promise obedience in future actions directly opposed to his teaching? And can he, by taking his share of service in the army, prepare himself to murder men, and even actually murder them?

These questions were put plainly and directly, and seemed to require a plain and direct answer; but in all the criticisms of my book there was no such plain and direct answer. No; my book received precisely the same treatment as all the attacks upon the teachers of the Church for their defection from the Law of Christ of which history from the days of Constantine is full.

A very great deal was said in connection with my book of my having incorrectly interpreted this and other passages of the Gospel, of my being in error in not recognizing the Trinity, the redemption, and the immortality of the soul. A very great deal was said, but not a word about the one thing which for every Christian is the most essential question in life — how to reconcile the duty of forgiveness, meekness, patience, and love for all, neighbors and enemies alike, which is so clearly expressed in the words of our teacher, and in the heart of each of us — how to reconcile this duty with the obligation of using force in war upon men of our own or a foreign people.

All that are worth calling answers to this question can be brought under the following five heads. I have tried to bring together in this connection all I could, not only from the criticisms on my book, but from what has been written in past times on this theme.

The first and crudest form of reply consists in the bold assertion that the use of force is not opposed by the teaching of Christ; that it is permitted, and even enjoined, on the Christian by the Old and New Testaments.

Assertions of this kind proceed, for the most part, from men who have attained the highest ranks in the governing or ecclesiastical hierarchy, and who are consequently perfectly assured that no one will dare to contradict their assertion, and that if anyone does contradict it they will hear nothing of the contradiction. These men have, for the most part, through the intoxication of power, so lost the right idea of what that Christianity is in the name of which they hold their position that what is Christian in Christianity presents itself to them as heresy, while everything in the Old and New Testaments which can be distorted into an antichristian and heathen meaning they regard as the foundation of Christianity. In support of their assertion that Christianity is not opposed to the use of force, these men usually, with the greatest audacity, bring together all the most obscure passages from the Old and New Testaments, interpreting them in the most unchristian way — the punishment of Ananias and Sapphira, of Simon the Sorcerer, etc. They quote all those sayings of Christ’s which can possibly be interpreted as justification of cruelty: the expulsion from the Temple; “It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom than for this city,” etc., etc. According to these people’s notions, a Christian government is not in the least bound to be guided by the spirit of peace, forgiveness of injuries, and love for enemies.

To refute such an assertion is useless, because the very people who make this assertion refute themselves, or, rather, renounce Christ, inventing a Christianity and a Christ of their own in the place of him in whose name the Church itself exists, as well as their office in it. If all men were to learn that the Church professes to believe in a Christ of punishment and warfare, not of forgiveness, no one would believe in the Church and it could not prove to anyone what it is trying to prove.

The second, somewhat less gross, form of argument consists in declaring that, though Christ did indeed preach that we should turn the left cheek, and give the cloak also, and this is the highest moral duty, yet that there are wicked men in the world, and if these wicked men mere not restrained by force, the whole world and all good men would come to ruin through them. This argument I found for the first time in John Chrysostom, and I slow how he is mistaken in my book “What I believe.”

This argument is ill grounded, because if we allow ourselves to regard any men as intrinsically wicked men, then in the first place we annul, by so doing, the whole idea of the Christian teaching, according to which we are all equals and brothers, as sons of one father in heaven. Secondly, it is ill founded, because even if to use force against wicked men had been permitted by God, since it is impossible to find a perfect and unfailing distinction by which one could positively know the wicked from the good, so it would come to all individual men and societies of men mutually regarding each other as wicked men, as is the case now. Thirdly, even if it were possible to distinguish the wicked from the good unfailingly, even then it would be impossible to kill or injure or shut up in prison these wicked men, because there would be no one in a Christian society to carry out such punishment, since every Christian, as a Christian, has been commanded to use no force against the wicked.

The third kind of answer, still more subtle than the preceding, consists in asserting that though the command of non-resistance to evil by force is binding on the Christian when the evil is directed against himself personally, it ceases to be binding when the evil is directed against his neighbors, and that then the Christian is not only not bound to fulfill the commandment, but is even bound to act in opposition to it in defense of his neighbors, and to use force against transgressors by force. This assertion is an absolute assumption, and one cannot find in all Christ’s teaching any confirmation of such an argument. Such an argument is not only a limitation, but a direct contradiction and negation of the commandment. If every man has the right to have recourse to force in face of a danger threatening an other, the question of the use of force is reduced to a question of the definition of danger for another. If my private judgment is to decide the question of what is danger for another, there is no occasion for the use of force which could not be justified on the ground of danger threatening some other man. They killed and burnt witches, they killed aristocrats and girondists, they killed their enemies because those who were in authority regarded them as dangerous for the people.

If this important limitation, which fundamentally undermines the whole value of the commandment, had entered into Christ’s meaning, there must have been mention of it somewhere. This restriction is made nowhere in our Saviour’s life or preaching. On the contrary, warning is given precisely against this treacherous and scandalous restriction which nullifies the commandment. The error and impossibility of such a limitation is shown in the Gospel with special clearness in the account of the judgment of Caiaphas, who makes precisely this distinction. He acknowledged that it was wrong to punish the innocent Jesus, but he saw in him a source of danger not for himself, but for the whole people, and therefore he said: It is better for one man to die, that the whole people perish not. And the erroneousness of such a limitation is still more clearly expressed in the words spoken to Peter when he tried to resist by force evil directed against Jesus (Matt. xxvi. 52). Peter was not defending himself, but his beloved and heavenly Master. And Christ at once reproved him for this, saying, that he who takes up the sword shall perish by the sword.

Besides, apologies for violence used against one’s neighbor in defense of another neighbor from greater violence are always untrustworthy, because when force is used against one who has not yet carried out his evil intent, I can never know which would be greater — the evil of my act of violence or of the act I want to prevent. We kill the criminal that society may be rid of him, and we never know whether the criminal of to-day would not have been a changed man tomorrow, and whether our punishment of him is not useless cruelty. We shut up the dangerous — as we think — member of society, but the next day this man might cease to be dangerous and his imprisonment might be for nothing. I see that a man I know to be a ruffian is pursuing a young girl. I have a gun in my hand — I kill the ruffian and save the girl. But the death or the wounding of the ruffian has positively taken place, while what would have happened if this had not been I cannot know. And what an immense mass of evil must result, and indeed does result, from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen. Ninety-nine per cent of the evil of the world is founded on this reasoning — from the Inquisition to dynamite bombs, and the executions or punishments of tens of thousands of political criminals.

A fourth, still more refined, reply to the question, What ought to be the Christian’s attitude to Christ’s command of non-resistance to evil by force? consists in declaring that they do not deny the command of non-resisting evil, but recognize it; but they only do not ascribe to this command the special exclusive value attached to it by sectarians. To regard this command as the indispensable condition of Christian life, as Garrison, Ballou, Dymond, the Quakers, the Mennonites and the Shakers do now, and as the Moravian brothers, the Waldenses, the Albigenses, the Bogomilites, and the Paulicians did in the past, is a one-sided heresy. This command has neither more nor less value than all the other commands, and the man who through weakness transgresses any command whatever, the command of non-resistance included, does not cease to be a Christian if he hold the true faith. This is a very skillful device, and many people who wish to be deceived are easily deceived by it. The device consists in reducing a direct conscious denial of a command to a casual breach of it. But one need only compare the attitude of the teachers of the Church to this and to other commands which they really do recognize, to be convinced that their attitude to this is completely different from their attitude to other duties.

The command against fornication they do really recognize, and consequently they do not admit that in any case fornication can cease to be wrong. The Church preachers never point out cases in which the command against fornication can be broken, and always teach that we must avoid seductions which lead to temptation to fornication. But not so with the command of non-resistance. All church preachers recognize cases in which that command can be broken, and teach the people accordingly. And they not only do not teach teat we should avoid temptations to break it, chief of which is the military oath, but they themselves administer it. The preachers of the Church never in any other case advocate the breaking of any other commandment. But in connection with the commandment of non-resistance they openly teach that we must not understand it too literally, but that there are conditions and circumstances in which we must do the direct opposite, that is, go to law, fight, punish. So that occasions for fulfilling the commandment of nonresistance to evil by force are taught for the most part as occasions for not fulfilling it. The fulfillment of this command, they say, is very difficult and pertains only to perfection. And how can it not be difficult, when the breach of it is not only not forbidden, but law courts, prisons, cannons, guns, armies, and wars are under the immediate sanction of the Church? It cannot be true, then, that this command is recognized by the preachers of the Church as on a level with other commands.

The preachers of the Church clearly, do not recognize it; only not daring to acknowledge this, they try to conceal their not recognizing it.

So much for the fourth reply.

The fifth kind of answer, which is the subtlest, the most often used, and the most effective, consists in avoiding answering, in making believe that this question is one which has long ago been decided perfectly clearly and satisfactorily, and that it is not worth while to talk about it. This method of reply is employed by all the more or less cultivated religious writers, that is to say, those who feel the laws of Christ binding for themselves. Knowing that the contradiction existing between the teaching of Christ which we profess with our lips and the whole order of our lives cannot be removed by words, and that touching upon it can only make it more obvious, they, with more or less ingenuity, evade it, pretending that the question of reconciling Christianity with the use of force has been decided already, or does not exist at all.

[Footnote: I only know one work which differs somewhat from this general definition, and that is not a criticism in the precise meaning of the word, but an article treating of the same subject and having my book in view. I mean the pamphlet of Mr. Troizky (published at Kazan), “A Sermon for the People.” The author obviously accepts Christ’s teaching in its true meaning. He says that the prohibition of resistance to evil by force means exactly what it does mean; and the same with the prohibition of swearing. He does not, as others do, deny the meaning of Christ’s teaching, but unfortunately he does not draw from this admission the inevitable deductions which present themselves spontaneously in our life when we understand Christ’s teaching in that way. If we must not oppose evil by force, nor swear, everyone naturally asks, “How, then, about military service? and the oath of obedience?” To this question the author gives no reply; but it must be answered. And if he cannot answer, then he would do better no to speak on the subject at all, as such silence leads to error.

The majority of religious critics of my book use this fifth method of replying to it. I could quote dozens of such critics, in all of whom, without exception, we find the same thing repeated: everything is discussed except what constitutes the principal subject of the book. As a characteristic example of such criticisms, I will quote the article of a well-known and ingenious English writer and preacher — Farrar — who, like many learned theologians, is a great master of the art of circuitously evading a question. The article was published in an American journal, the FORUM, in October, 1888.

After conscientiously explaining in brief the contents of my book,

Farrar says:

“Tolstoy came to the conclusion that a coarse deceit had been palmed upon the world when these words ‘Resist not evil,’ were held by civil society to be compatible with war, courts of justice, capital punishment, divorce, oaths, national prejudice, and, indeed, with most of the institutions of civil and social life. He now believes that the kingdom of God would come if all men kept these five commandments of Christ, viz.: 1. Live in peace with all men. 2. Be pure. 3. Take no oaths. 4. Resist not evil. 5. Renounce national distinctions.

“Tolstoy,” he says, “rejects the inspiration of the Old Testament; hence he rejects the chief doctrines of the Church — that of the Atonement by blood, the Trinity, the descent of the Holy Ghost on the Apostles, and his transmission through the priesthood.” And he recognizes only the words and commands of Christ. “But is this interpretation of Christ a true one?” he says. “Are all men bound to act as Tolstoy teaches — i. e., to carry out these five commandments of Christ?”

You expect, then, that in answer to this essential question, which is the only one that could induce a man to write an article about the book, he will say either that this interpretation of Christ’s teaching is true and we ought to follow it, or he will say that such an interpretation is untrue, will show why, and will give some other correct interpretation of those words which I interpret incorrectly. But nothing of this kind is done. Farrar only expresses his “belief” that,

“although actuated by the noblest sincerity, Count Tolstoy has been misled by partial and one-sided interpretations of the meaning of the Gospel and the mind and will of Christ.” What this error consists in is not made clear; it is only said: “To enter into the proof of this is impossible in this article, for I have already exceeded the space at my command.”

And he concludes in a tranquil spirit:

“Meanwhile, the reader who feels troubled lest it should be his duty also to forsake all the conditions of his life and to take up the position and work of a common laborer, may rest for the present on the principle, SECURUS JUDICAT ORBIS TERRARUM. With few and rare exceptions,” he continues, “the whole of Christendom, from the days of the Apostles down to our own, has come to the firm conclusion that it was the object of Christ to lay down great eternal principles, but not to disturb the bases and revolutionize the institutions of all human society, which themselves rest on divine sanctions as well as on inevitable conditions. Were it my object to prove how untenable is the doctrine of communism, based by Count Tolstoy upon the divine paradoxes [sic], which can be interpreted only on historical principles in accordance with the whole method of the teaching of Jesus, it would require an ampler canvas than I have here at my disposal.”

What a pity he has not an “ampler canvas at his disposal”! And what a strange thing it is that for all these last fifteen centuries no one has had a “canvas ample enough” to prove that Christ, whom we profess to believe in, says something utterly unlike what he does say! Still, they could prove it if they wanted to. But it is not worth while to prove what everyone knows; it is enough to say “SECURUS JUDICAT ORBIS TERRARUM.”

And of this kind, without exception, are all the criticisms of educated believers, who must, as such, understand the danger of their position. The sole escape from it for them lies in their hope that they may be able, by using the authority of the Church, of antiquity, and of their sacred office, to overawe the reader and draw him away from the idea of reading the Gospel for himself and thinking out the question in his own mind for himself. And in this they are successful; for, indeed, how could the notion occur to any one that all that has been repeated from century to century with such earnestness and solemnity by all those archdeacons, bishops, archbishops, holy synods, and popes, is all of it a base lie and a calumny foisted upon Christ by them for the sake of keeping safe the money they must have to live luxuriously on the necks of other men? And it is a lie and a calumny so transparent that the only way of keeping it up consists in overawing people by their earnestness, their conscientiousness. It is just what has taken place of late years at recruiting sessions; at a table before the zertzal — the symbol of the Tzars authority — in the seat of honor under the life-size portrait of the Tzar, sit dignified old officials, wearing decorations, conversing freely and easily, writing notes, summoning men before them, and giving orders. Here, wearing a cross on his breast, near them, is prosperous-looking old Priest in a silken cassock, with long gray hair flowing on to his cope; before a lectern who wears the golden cross and has a Gospel bound in gold.

They summon Iran Petroff. A young man comes in, wretchedly, shabbily dressed, and in terror, the muscles of his face working, his eyes bright and restless; and in a broken voice, hardly above a whisper, he says: “I — by Christ’s law — as a Christian — I cannot.” “What is he muttering?” asks the president, frowning impatiently and raising his eyes from his book to listen. “Speak louder,” the colonel with shining epaulets shouts to him. “I — I as a Christian— “ And at last it appears that the young man refuses to serve in the army because he is a Christian. “Don’t talk nonsense. Stand to be measured. Doctor, may I trouble you to measure him. He is all right?” “Yes.” “Reverend father, administer the oath to him.”

No one is the least disturbed by what the poor scared young man is muttering. They do not even pay attention to it. “They all mutter something, but we’ve no time to listen to it, we have to enroll so many.”

The recruit tries to say something still. “It’s opposed to the law of Christ.” “Go along, go along; we know without your help what is opposed to the law and what’s not; and you soothe his mind, reverend father, soothe him. Next: Vassily Nikitin.” And they lead the trembling youth away. And it does not strike anyone — the guards, or Vassily Nikitin, whom they are bringing in, or any of the spectators of this scene — that these inarticulate words of the young man, at once suppressed by the authorities, contain the truth, and that the loud, solemnly uttered sentences of the calm, self-confident official and the priest are a lie and a deception.

Such is the impression produced not only by Farrar’s article, but by all those solemn sermons, articles, and books which make their appearance from all sides directly there is anywhere a glimpse of truth exposing a predominant falsehood. At once begins the series of long, clever, ingenious, and solemn speeches and writings, which deal with questions nearly related to the subject, but skillfully avoid touching the subject itself.

That is the essence of the fifth and most effective means of getting out of the contradictions in which Church Christianity has placed itself, by professing its faith in Christ’s teaching in words, while it denies it in its life, and teaches people to do the same.

Those who justify themselves by the first method, directly, crudely asserting that Christ sanctioned violence, wars, and murder, repudiate Christ’s doctrine directly; those who find their defense in the second, the third, or the fourth method are confused and can easily be convicted of error; but this last class, who do not argue, who do not condescend to argue about it, but take shelter behind their own grandeur, and make a show of all this having been decided by them or at least by someone long ago, and no longer offering a possibility of doubt to anyone — they seem safe from attack, and will be beyond attack till men come to realize that they are under the narcotic influence exerted on them by governments and churches, and are no longer affected by it.

Such was the attitude of the spiritual critics — i. e., those professing faith in Christ — to my book. And their attitude could not have been different. They are bound to take up this attitude by the contradictory position in which they find themselves between belief in the divinity of their Master and disbelief in his clearest utterances, and they want to escape from this contradiction. So that one cannot expect from them free discussion of the very essence of the question — that is, of the change in men’s life which must result from applying Christ’s teaching to the existing order of the world. Such free discussion I only expected from worldly, freethinking critics who are not bound to Christ’s teaching in any way, and can therefore take an independent view of it. I had anticipated that freethinking writers would look at Christ, not merely, like the Churchmen, as the founder of a religion of personal salvation, but, to express it in their language, as a reformer who laid down new principles of life and destroyed the old, and whose reforms are not yet complete, but are still in progress even now.

Such a view of Christ and his teaching follows from my book. But to my astonishment, out of the great number of critics of my book there was not one, either Russian or foreign, who treated the subject from the side from which it was approached in the book — that is, who criticised Christ’s doctrines as philosophical, moral, and social principles, to use their scientific expressions. This was not done in a single criticism. The freethinking Russian critics taking my book as though its whole contents could be reduced to non-resistance to evil, and understanding the doctrine of non-resistance to evil itself (no doubt for greater convenience in refuting it) as though it would prohibit every kind of conflict with evil, fell vehemently upon this doctrine, and for some years past have been very successfully proving that Christ’s teaching is mistaken in so far as it forbids resistance to evil. Their refutations of this hypothetical doctrine of Christ were all the more successful since they knew beforehand that their arguments could not be contested or corrected, for the censorship, not having passed the book, did not pass articles in its defense.

It is a remarkable thing that among us, where one cannot say a word about the Holy Scriptures without the prohibition of the censorship, for some years past there have been in all the journals constant attacks and criticisms on the command of Christ simply and directly stated in Matt. v. 39. The Russian advanced critics, obviously unaware of all that has been done to elucidate the question of non-resistance, and sometimes even imagining apparently that the rule of non-resistance to evil had been invented by me personally, fell foul of the very idea of it. They opposed it and attacked it, and advancing with great heat arguments which had long ago been analyzed and refuted from every point of view, they demonstrated that a man ought invariably to defend (with violence) all the injured and oppressed, and that thus the doctrine of non-resistance to evil is an immoral doctrine.

To all Russian critics the whole import of Christ’s command seemed reducible to the fact that it would hinder them from the active opposition to evil to which they are accustomed. So that the principle of non-resistance to evil by force has been attacked by two opposing camps: the conservatives, because this principle would hinder their activity in resistance to evil as applied to the revolutionists, in persecution and punishment of them; the revolutionists, too, because this principle would hinder their resistance to evil as applied to the conservatives and the overthrowing of them. The conservatives were indignant at the doctrine of non-resistance to evil by force hindering the energetic destruction of the revolutionary elements, which may ruin the national prosperity; the revolutionists were indignant at the doctrine of non-resistance to evil by force hindering the overthrow of the conservatives, who are ruining the national prosperity. It is worthy of remark in this connection that the revolutionists have attacked the principle of nonresistance to evil by force, in spite of the fact that it is the greatest terror and danger for every despotism. For ever since the beginning of the world, the use of violence of every kind, from the Inquisition to the Schlüsselburg fortress, has rested and still rests on the opposite principle of the necessity of resisting evil by force.

Besides this, the Russian critics have pointed out the fact that the application of the command of non-resistance to practical life would turn mankind aside out of the path of civilization along which it is moving. The path of civilization on which mankind in Europe is moving is in their opinion the one along which all mankind ought always to move.

So much for the general character of the Russian critics.

Foreign critics started from the same premises, but their discussions of my book were somewhat different from those of Russian critics, not only in being less bitter, and in showing more culture, but even in the subject-matter.

In discussing my book and the Gospel teaching generally, as it is expressed in the Sermon on the Mount, the foreign critics maintained that such doctrine is not peculiarly Christian (Christian doctrine is either Catholicism or Protestantism according to their views) — the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount is only a string of very pretty impracticable dreams DU CHARMANT DOCTEUR, as Reran says, fit for the simple and half-savage inhabitants of Galilee who lived eighteen hundred years ago, and for the half-savage Russian peasants — Sutaev and Bondarev — and the Russian mystic Tolstoy, but not at all consistent with a high degree of European culture.

The foreign freethinking critics have tried in a delicate manner, without being offensive to me, to give the impression that my conviction that mankind could be guided by such a naïve doctrine as that of the Sermon on the Mount proceeds from two causes: that such a conviction is partly due to my want of knowledge, my ignorance of history, my ignorance of all the vain attempts to apply the principles of the Sermon on the Mount to life, which have been made in history and have led to nothing; and partly it is due to my failing to appreciate the full value of the lofty civilization to which mankind has attained at present, with its Krupp cannons, smokeless powder, colonization of Africa, Irish Coercion Bill, parliamentary government, journalism, strikes, and the Eiffel Tower.

So wrote de Vogüé and Leroy Beaulieu and Matthew Arnold; so wrote the American author Savage, and Ingersoll, the popular freethinking American preacher, and many others.

“Christ’s teaching is no use, because it is inconsistent with our industrial age,” says Ingersoll naïvely, expressing in this utterance, with perfect directness and simplicity, the exact notion of Christ’s teaching held by persons of refinement and culture of our times. The teaching is no use for our industrial age, precisely as though the existence of this industrial age were a sacred fact which ought not to and could not be changed. It is just as though drunkards when advised how they could be brought to habits of sobriety should answer that the advice is incompatible with their habit of taking alcohol.

The arguments of all the freethinking critics, Russian and foreign alike, different as they may be in tone and manner of presentation, all amount essentially to the same strange misapprehension — namely, that Christ’s teaching, one of the consequences of which is non-resistance to evil, is of no use to us because it requires a change of our life.

Christ’s teaching is useless because, if it were carried into practice, life could not go on as at present; we must add: if we have begun by living sinfully, as we do live and are accustomed to live. Not only is the question of non-resistance to evil not discussed; the very mention of the fact that the duty of non-resistance enters into Christ’s teaching is regarded as satisfactory proof of the impracticability of the whole teaching.

Meanwhile one would have thought it was necessary to point out at least some kind of solution of the following question, since it is at the root of almost everything that interests us.

The question amounts to this: In what way are we to decide men’s disputes, when some men consider evil what others consider good, and VICE VERSA? And to reply that that is evil which I think evil, in spite of the fact that my opponent thinks it good, is not a solution of the difficulty. There can only be two solutions: either to find a real unquestionable criterion of what is evil or not to resist evil by force.

The first course has been tried ever since the beginning of historical times, and, as we all know, it has not hitherto led to any successful results.

The second solution — not forcibly to resist what we consider evil until we have found a universal criterion — that is the solution given by Christ.

We may consider the answer given by Christ unsatisfactory; we may replace it by another and better, by finding a criterion by which evil could be defined for all men unanimously and simultaneously; we may simply, like savage nations, not recognize the existence of the question. But we cannot treat the question as the learned critics of Christianity do. They pretend either that no such question exists at all or that the question is solved by granting to certain persons or assemblies of persons the right to define evil and to resist it by force. But we know all the while that granting such a right to certain persons does not decide the question (still less so when the are ourselves the certain persons), since there are always people who do not recognize this right in the authorized persons or assemblies.

But this assumption, that what seems evil to us is really evil, shows a complete misunderstanding of the question, and lies at the root of the argument of freethinking critics about the Christian religion. In this way, then, the discussions of my book on the part of Churchmen and freethinking critics alike showed me that the majority of men simply do not understand either Christ’s teaching or the questions which Christ’s teaching solves.

Chapter 3: Christianity Misunderstood by Believers

Meaning of Christian Doctrine, Understood by a Minority, has

Become Completely Incomprehensible for the Majority of Men —

Reason of this to be Found in Misinterpretation of Christianity

and Mistaken Conviction of Believers and Unbelievers Alike that

they Understand it — The Meaning of Christianity Obscured for

Believers by the Church — The First Appearance of Christ’s

Teaching — Its Essence and Difference from Heathen Religions —

Christianity not Fully Comprehended at the Beginning, Became

More and More Clear to those who Accepted it from its

Correspondence with Truth — Simultaneously with this Arose the

Claim to Possession of the Authentic Meaning of the Doctrine

Based on the Miraculous Nature of its Transmission — Assembly of

Disciples as Described in the Acts — The Authoritative Claim to

the Sole Possession of the True Meaning of Christ’s Teaching

Supported by Miraculous Evidence has Led by Logical Development

to the Creeds of the Churches — A Church Could Not be Founded by

Christ — Definitions of a Church According to the Catechisms —

The Churches have Always been Several in Number and Hostile to

One Another — What is Heresy — The Work of G. Arnold on Heresies —

Heresies the Manifestations of Progress in the Churches —

Churches Cause Dissension among Men, and are Always Hostile to

Christianity — Account of the Work Done by the Russian Church —

Matt. xxiii. 23 — The Sermon on the Mount or the Creed — The

Orthodox Church Conceals from the People the True Meaning of

Christianity — The Same Thing is Done by the Other Churches — All

the External Conditions of Modern Life are such as to Destroy

the Doctrine of the Church, and therefore the Churches use

Every Effort to Support their Doctrines.

Thus the information I received, after my book came out, went to show that the Christian doctrine, in its direct and simple sense, was understood, and had always been understood, by a minority of men, while the critics, ecclesiastical and freethinking alike, denied the possibility of taking Christ’s teaching in its direct sense. All this convinced me that while on one hand the true understanding of this doctrine had never been lost to a minority, but had been established more and more clearly, on the other hand the meaning of it had been more and more obscured for the majority. So that at last such a depth of obscurity has been reached that men do not take in their direct sense even the simplest precepts, expressed in the simplest words, in the Gospel.

Christ’s teaching is not generally understood in its true, simple, and direct sense even in these days, when the light of the Gospel has penetrated even to the darkest recesses of human consciousness; when, in the words of Christ, that which was spoken in the ear is proclaimed from the housetops; and when the Gospel is influencing every side of human life — domestic, economic, civic, legislative, and international. This lack of true understanding of Christ’s words at such a time would be inexplicable, if there were not causes to account for it.

One of these causes is the fact that believers and unbelievers alike are firmly persuaded that they have understood Christ’s teaching a long time, and that they understand it so fully, indubitably, and conclusively that it can have no other significance than the one they attribute to it. And the reason of this conviction is that the false interpretation and consequent misapprehension of the Gospel is an error of such long standing. Even the strongest current of water cannot add a drop to a cup which is already full.

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.

The Christian doctrine is presented to the men of our world to-day as a doctrine which everyone has known so long and accepted so unhesitatingly in all its minutest details that it cannot be understood in any other way than it is understood now.

Christianity is understood now by all who profess the doctrines of the Church as a supernatural miraculous revelation of everything which is repeated in the Creed. By unbelievers it is regarded as an illustration of man’s craving for a belief in the supernatural, which mankind has now outgrown, as an historical phenomenon which has received full expression in Catholicism, Greek Orthodoxy, and Protestantism, and has no longer any living significance for us. The significance of the Gospel is hidden from believers by the Church, from unbelievers by Science.

I will speak first of the former. Eighteen hundred years ago there appeared in the midst of the heathen Roman world a strange new doctrine, unlike any of the old religions, and attributed to a man, Christ.

This new doctrine was in both form and content absolutely new to the Jewish world in which it originated, and still more to the Roman world in which it was preached and diffused.

In the midst of the elaborate religious observances of Judaism, in which, in the words of Isaiah, law was laid upon law, and in the midst of the Roman legal system worked out to the highest point of perfection, a new doctrine appeared, which denied not only every deity, and all fear and worship of them, but even all human institutions and all necessity for them. In place of all the rules of the old religions, this doctrine sets up only a type of inward perfection, truth, and love in the person of Christ, and — as a result of this inward perfection being attained by men — also the outward perfection foretold by the Prophets — the kingdom of God, when all men will cease to learn to make war, when all shall be taught of God and united in love, and the lion will lie down with the lamb. Instead of the threats of punishment which all the old laws of religions and governments alike laid down for non-fulfillment of their rules, instead of promises of rewards for fulfillment of them, this doctrine called men to it only because it was the truth. John vii. 17: “If any man will do His will, he shad know of the doctrine whether it be of God.” John viii. 46: “If I say the truth, why do ye not believe me? But ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth. Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. God is a spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. Keep my sayings, and ye shall know of my sayings whether they be true.” No proofs of this doctrine were offered except its truth, the correspondence of the doctrine with the truth. The whole teaching consisted in the recognition of truth and following it, in a greater and greater attainment of truth, and a closer and closer following of it in the acts of life. There are no acts in this doctrine which could justify a man and make him saved. There is only the image of truth to guide-him, for inward perfection in the person of Christ, and for outward perfection in the establishment of the kingdom of God. The fulfillment of this teaching consists only in walking in the chosen way, in getting nearer to inward perfection in the imitation of Christ, and outward perfection in the establishment of the kingdom of God. The greater or less blessedness of a man depends, according to this doctrine, not on the degree of perfection to which he has attained, but on the greater or less swiftness with which he is pursuing it.

The progress toward perfection of the publican of the publican Zaccheus, of the woman that was a sinner, of the robber on the cross, is a greater state of blessedness, according to this doctrine, than the stationary righteousness of the Pharisee. The lost sheep is dearer than ninety-nine that were not lost. The prodigal son, the piece of money that was lost and found again, are dearer, more precious to God than those which have not been lost.

Every condition, according to this doctrine, is only a particular step in the attainment of inward and outward perfection, and therefore has no significance of itself. Blessedness consists in progress toward perfection; to stand still in any condition whatever means the cessation of this blessedness.

“Let not thy left hand know what they right hand doeth.” “No man having put his hand to the plow and looking back is fit for the Kingdom of God.” “Rejoice not that the spirits are subject to you, but seek rather that your names be written in heaven.” “Be ye perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” “Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and its righteousness.”

The fulfillment of this precept is only to be found in uninterrupted progress toward the attainment of ever higher truth, toward establishing more and more firmly an ever greater love within oneself, and establishing more and more widely the kingdom of God outside oneself.

It is obvious that, appearing as it did in the midst of the Jewish and heathen world, such teaching could not be accepted by the majority of men, who were living a life absolutely different from what was required by it. It is obvious, too, that even for those by whom it was accepted, it was so absolutely opposed to all their old views that it could not be comprehensible in its full significance.

It has been only by a succession of misunderstandings, errors, partial explanations, and the corrections and additions of generations that the meaning of the Christian doctrine has grown continually more and more clear to men. The Christian view of life has exerted an influence on the Jewish and heathen, and the heathen and Jewish view of life has, too, exerted an influence on the Christian. And Christianity, as the living force, has gained more and more upon the extinct Judaism and heathenism, and has grown continually clearer and clearer, as it freed itself from the admixture of falsehood which had overlaid it. Men went further and further in the attainment of the meaning of Christianity, and realized it more and more in life.

The longer mankind lived, the clearer and clearer became the meaning of Christianity, as must always be the case with every theory of life.

Succeeding generations corrected the errors of their predecessors, and grew ever nearer and nearer to a comprehension of the true meaning. It was thus from the very earliest times of Christianity. And so, too, from the earliest times of Christianity there were men who began to assert on their own authority that the meaning they attribute to the doctrine is the only true one, and as proof bring forward supernatural occurrences in support of the correctness of their interpretation.

This was the principal cause at first of the misunderstanding of the doctrine, and afterward of the complete distortion of it.

It was supposed that Christ’s teaching was transmitted to men not like every other truth, but in a special miraculous way. Thus the truth of the teaching was not proved by its correspondence with the needs of the mind and the whole nature of man, but by the miraculous manner of its transmission, which was advanced as an irrefutable proof of the truth of the interpretation put on it. This hypothesis originated from misunderstanding of the teaching, and its result was to make it impossible to understand it rightly.

And this happened first in the earliest times, when the doctrine was still not so fully understood and often interpreted wrongly, as we see by the Gospels and the Acts. The less the doctrine was understood, the more obscure it appeared and the more necessary were external proofs of its truth. The proposition that we ought not to do unto others as we would not they should do unto us, did not need to be proved by miracles and needed no exercise of faith, because this proposition is in itself convincing and in harmony with man’s mind and nature; but the proposition that Christ was God had to be proved by miracles completely beyond our comprehension.

The more the understanding of Christ’s teaching was obscured, the more the miraculous was introduced into it; and the more the miraculous was introduced into it, the more the doctrine was strained from its meaning and the more obscure it became; and the more it was strained from its meaning and the more obscure it became, the more strongly its infallibility had to be asserted, and the less comprehensible the doctrine became.

One can see by the Gospels, the Acts, and the Epistles how from the earliest times the non-comprehension of the doctrine called forth the need for proofs through the miraculous and incomprehensible.

The first example in the book of Acts is the assembly which gathered together in Jerusalem to decide the question which had arisen, whether to baptize or not the uncircumcised and those who had eaten of food sacrificed to idols.

The very fact of this question being raised showed that those who discussed it did not understand the teaching of Christ, who rejected all outward observances — ablutions, purifications, fasts, and sabbaths. It was plainly said, “Not that which goeth into a man’s mouth, but that which cometh out of a man’s mouth, defileth him,” and therefore the question of baptizing the uncircumcised could only have arisen among men who, though they loved their Master and dimly felt the grandeur of his teaching, still did not understand the teaching itself very clearly. And this was the fact.

Just in proportion to the failure of the members of the assembly to understand the doctrine was their need of external confirmation of their incomplete interpretation of it. And then to settle this question, the very asking of which proved their misunderstanding of the doctrine, there was uttered in this assembly, as is described in the Acts, that strange phrase, which was for the first time found necessary to give external confirmation to certain assertions, and which has been productive of so much evil.

That is, it was asserted that the correctness of what they had decided was guaranteed by the miraculous participation of the Holy Ghost, that is, of God, in their decision. But the assertion that the Holy Ghost, that is, God, spoke through the Apostles, in its turn wanted proof. And thus it was necessary, to confirm this, that the Holy Ghost should descend at Pentecost in tongues of fire upon those who made this assertion. (In the account of it, the descent of the Holy Ghost precedes the assembly, but the book of Acts was written much later than both events.) But the descent of the Holy Ghost too had to be proved for those who had not seen the tongues of fire (though it is not easy to understand why a tongue of fire burning above a man’s head should prove that what that man is going to say will be infallibly the truth). And so arose the necessity for still more miracles and changes, raisings of the dead to life, and strikings of the living dead, and all those marvels which have been a stumbling-block to men, of which the Acts is full, and which, far from ever convincing one of the truth of the Christian doctrine, can only repel men from it. The result of such a means of confirming the truth was that the more these confirmations of truth by tales of miracles were heaped up one after another, the more the doctrine was distorted from its original meaning, aid the more incomprehensible it became.

Thus it was from the earliest times, and so it went on, constantly increasing, till it reached in our day the logical climax of the dogmas of transubstantiation and the infallibility of the Pope, or of the bishops, or of Scripture, and of requiring a blind faith rendered incomprehensible and utterly meaningless, not in God, but in Christ, not in a doctrine, but in a person, as in Catholicism, or in persons, as in Greek Orthodoxy, or in a book, as in Protestantism. The more widely Christianity was diffused, and the greater the number of people unprepared for it who were brought under its sway, the less it was understood, the more absolutely was its infallibility insisted on, and the less possible it became to understand the true meaning of the doctrine. In the times of Constantine the whole interpretation of the doctrine had been already reduced to a RÉSUMÉ — supported by the temporal authority — of the disputes that had taken place in the Council — to a creed which reckoned off — I believe in so and so, and so and so, and so and so to the end — to one holy, Apostolic Church, which means the infallibility of those persons who call themselves the Church. So that it all amounts to a man no longer believing in God nor Christ, as they are revealed to him, but believing in what the Church orders him to believe in.

But the Church is holy; the Church was founded by Christ. God could not leave men to interpret his teaching at random — therefore he founded the Church. All those statements are so utterly untrue and unfounded that one is ashamed to refute them. Nowhere nor in anything, except in the assertion of the Church, can we find that God or Christ founded anything like what Churchmen understand by the Church. In the Gospels there is a warning against the Church, as it is an external authority, a warning most clear and obvious in the passage where it is said that Christ’s followers should “call no man master.” But nowhere is anything said of the foundation of what Churchmen call the Church.

The word church is used twice in the Gospels — once in the sense of an assembly of men to decide a dispute, the other time in connection with the obscure utterance about a stone — Peter, and the gates of hell. From these two passages in which the word church is used, in the signification merely of an assembly, has been deduced all that we now understand by the Church.

But Christ could not have founded the Church, that is, what we now understand by that word. For nothing like the idea of the Church as we know it now, with its sacraments, miracles, and above all its claim to infallibility, is to be found either in Christ’s words or in the ideas of the men of that time.

The fact that men called what was formed afterward by the same word as Christ used for something totally different, does not give them the right to assert that Christ founded the one, true Church.

Besides, if Christ had really founded such an institution as the Church for the foundation of all his teaching and the whole faith, he would certainly have described this institution clearly and definitely, and would have given the only true Church, besides tales of miracles, which are used to support every kind of superstition, some tokens so unmistakable that no doubt of its genuineness could ever have arisen. But nothing of the sort was done by him. And there have been and still are different institutions, each calling itself the true Church.

The Catholic catechism says: “L’Église est la société des fidéles établie par notre Seigneur Jésus Christ, répandue sur toute la terre et soumise à l’authorité des pasteurs légitimes, principalement notre Saint Père le Pape,” [see Footnote] understanding by the words “pasteurs légitimes” an association of men having the Pope at its head, and consisting of certain individuals bound together by a certain organization.

[Footnote: “The Church is the society of the faithful, established by our Lord Jesus Christ, spread over the whole earth, and subject to the authority of its lawful pastors, and chief of them our Holy Father the Pope.”

The Greek Orthodox catechism says: “The Church is a society founded upon earth by Jesus Christ, which is united into one whole, by one divine doctrine and by sacraments, under the rule and guidance of a priesthood appointed by God,” meaning by the “priesthood appointed by God” the Greek Orthodox priesthood, consisting of certain individuals who happen to be in such or such positions.

The Lutheran catechism says: “The Church is holy Christianity, or the collection of all believers under Christ, their head, to whom the Holy Ghost through the Gospels and sacraments promises, communicates, and administers heavenly salvation,” meaning that the Catholic Church is lost in error, and that the true means of salvation is in Lutheranism.

For Catholics the Church of God coincides with the Roman

priesthood and the Pope. For the Greek Orthodox believer the

Church of God coincides with the establishment and priesthood of

Russia. [See Footnote]

[Footnote: Homyakov’s definition of the Church, which was received with some favor among Russians, does not improve matters, if we are to agree with Homyakov in considering the Greek Orthodox Church as the one true Church. Homyakov asserts that a church is a collection of men (all without distinction of clergy and laymen) united together by love, and that only to men united by love is the truth revealed (let us love each other, that in the unity of thought, etc.), and that such a church is the church which, in the first place, recognizes the Nicene Creed, and in the second place does not, after the division of the churches, recognize the popes and new dogmas. But with such a definition of the church, there is still more difficulty in reconciling, as Homyakov tries to do, the church united by love with the church that recognizes the Nicene Creed and the doctrine of Photius. So that Homyakov’s assertion that this church, united by love, and consequently holy, is the same church as the Greek Orthodox priesthood profess faith in, is even more arbitrary than the assertions of the Catholics or the Orthodox. If we admit the idea of a church in the sense Homyakov gives to it — that is, a body of men bound together by love and truth — then all that any man can predicate in regard to this body, if such an one exists, is its love and truth, but there can be no outer signs by which one could reckon oneself or another as a member of this holy body, nor by which one could put anyone outside it; so that no institution having an external existence can correspond to this idea.

For Lutherans the Church of God coincides with a body of men who recognize the authority of the Bible and Luther’s catechism.

Ordinarily, when speaking of the rise of Christianity, men belonging to one of the existing churches use the word church in the singular, as though there were and had been only one church. But this is absolutely incorrect. The Church, as an institution which asserted that it possessed infallible truth, did not make its appearance singly; there were at least two churches directly this claim was made.

While believers were agreed among themselves and the body was one, it had no need to declare itself as a church. It was only when believers were split up into opposing parties, renouncing one another, that it seemed necessary to each party to confirm their own truth by ascribing to themselves infallibility. The conception of one church only arose when there were two sides divided and disputing, who each called the other side heresy, and recognized their own side only as the infallible church.

If we knew that there was a church which decided in the year 51 to receive the uncircumcised, it is only so because there was another church — of the Judaists — who decided to keep the uncircumcised out.

If there is a Catholic Church now which asserts its own infallibility, that is only because there are churches — Greco-Russian, Old Orthodox, and Lutheran — each asserting its own infallibility and denying that of all other churches. So that the one Church is only a fantastic imagination which has not the least trace of reality about it.

As a real historical fact there has existed, and still exist, several bodies of men, each asserting that it is the one Church, founded by Christ, and that all the others who call themselves churches are only sects and heresies.

The catechisms of the churches of the most world-wide influence — the Catholic, the Old Orthodox, and the Lutheran — openly assert this.

In the Catholic catechism it is said: “Quels sont ceux qui sont hors de l’église? Les infidèles, les hérétiques, les schismatiques.” [Footnote: “Who are those who are outside the Church? Infidels, heretics, and schismatics.”] The so-called Greek Orthodox are regarded as schismatics, the Lutherans as heretics; so that according to the Catholic catechism the only people in the Church are Catholics.

In the so-called Orthodox catechism it is said: By the one Christian Church is understood the Orthodox, which remains fully in accord with the Universal Church. As for the Roman Church and other sects (the Lutherans and the rest they do not even dignify by the name of church), they cannot be included in the one true Church, since they have themselves separated from it.

According to this definition the Catholics and Lutherans are outside the Church, and there are only Orthodox in the Church.

The Lutheran catechism says: “Die wahre kirche wird darein erkannt, dass in ihr das Wort Gottes lauter und rein ohne Menschenzusätze gelehrt and die Sacramente treu nach Christi Einsetzung gewahret werden.” [Footnote: “The true Church will be known by the Word of God being studied clear and unmixed with man’s additions and the sacraments being maintained faithful to Christ’s teaching.”

According to this definition all those who have added anything to the teaching of Christ and the apostles, as the Catholic and Greek churches have done, are outside the Church. And in the Church there are only Protestants.

The Catholics assert that the Holy Ghost has been transmitted without a break in their priesthood. The Orthodox assert that the same Holy Ghost has been transmitted without a break in their priesthood. The Arians asserted that the Holy Ghost was transmitted in their priesthood (they asserted this with just as much right as the churches in authority now). The Protestants of every kind — Lutherans, Reformed Church, Presbyterians, Methodists, Swedenborgians, Mormons — assert that the Holy Ghost is only present in their communities. If the Catholics assert that the Holy Ghost, at the time of the division of the Church into Arian and Greek, left the Church that fell away and remained in the one true Church, with precisely the same right the Protestants of every denomination can assert that at the time of the separation of their Church from the Catholic the Holy Ghost left the Catholic and passed into the Church they professed. And this is just what they do.

Every church traces its creed through an uninterrupted transmission from Christ and the Apostles. And truly every Christian creed that has been derived from Christ must have come down to the present generation through a certain transmission. But that does not prove that it alone of all that has been transmuted, excluding all the rest, can be the sole truth, admitting of no doubt.

Every branch in a tree comes from the root in unbroken connection; but the fact that each branch comes from the one root, does not prove at all that each branch was the only one. It is precisely the same with the Church. Every church presents exactly the same proofs of the succession, and even the same miracles, in support of its authenticity, as every other. So that there is but one strict and exact definition of what is a church (not of something fantastic which we would wish it to be, but of what it is and has been in reality) — a church is a body of men who claim for themselves that they are in complete and sole possession of the truth. And these bodies, having in course of time, aided by the support of the temporal authorities, developed into powerful institutions, have been the principal obstacles to the diffusion of a true comprehension of the teaching of Christ.

It could not be otherwise. The chief peculiarity which distinguished Christ’s teaching from previous religions consisted in the fact that those who accepted it strove ever more and more to comprehend and realize its teaching. But the Church doctrine asserted its own complete and final comprehension and realization of it.

Strange though it may seem to us who have been brought up in the erroneous view of the Church as a Christian institution, and in contempt for heresy, yet the fact is that only in what was called heresy was there any true movement, that is, true Christianity, and that it only ceased to be so when those heresies stopped short in their movement and also petrified into the fixed forms of a church.

And, indeed what is a heresy? Read all the theological works one after another. In all of them heresy is the subject which first presents itself for definition; since every theological work deals with the true doctrine of Christ as distinguished from the erroneous doctrines which surround it, that is, heresies. Yet you will not find anywhere anything like a definition of heresy.

The treatment of this subject by the learned historian of Christianity, E. de Pressensé, in his “Histoire du Dogme” (Paris, 1869), under the heading “Ubi Christus, ibi Ecclesia,” may serve as an illustration of the complete absence of anything like a definition of what is understood by the word heresy. Here is what he says in his introduction (p. 3):

“Je sais que l’on nous conteste le droit de qualifier ainsi [that is, to call heresies] les tendances qui furent si vivement combattues par les premiers Pères. La désignation même d’hérésie semble une atteinte portée à la liberté de conscience et de pensée. Nous ne pouvons partager ce scrupule, car il n’irait à rien moins qu’à enlever au Christianisme tout caractère distinctif.” [see Footnote]

[Footnote: “I know that our right to qualify thus the tendencies which were so actively opposed by the early Fathers is contested. The very use of the word heresy seems an attack upon liberty of conscience and thought. We cannot share this scruple; for it would amount to nothing less than depriving Christianity of all distinctive character.”

And though he tells us that after Constantine’s time the Church did actually abuse its power by designating those who dissented from it as heretics and persecuting them, yet he says, when speaking of early times:

“L’église est une libre association; il y a tout profit a se séparer d’elle. La polémique contre l’erreur n’a d’autres ressources que la pensée et le sentiment. Un type doctrinal uniforme n’a pas encore été élaboré; les divergences secondaires se produisent en Orient et en Occident avec une entière liberté; la théologie n’est point liée a d’invariables formules. Si au sein de cette diversité apparait un fonds commun de croyances, n’est-on pas en droit d’y voir non pas un système formulé et composé par les représentants d’une autorité d’école, mais la foi elle-même dons son instinct le plus sûr et sa manifestation la plus spontanée? Si cette même unanimité qui se révèle dans les croyances essentielles, se retrouve pour repousser telles ou telles tendances ne serons nous pas en droit de conclure que ces tendances étaient en désacord flagrant avec les principes fondamentaux du christianisme? Cette présomption ne se transformerait-elle pas en certitude si nous reconnaissons dans la doctrine universellement repoussée par l’Église les traits caractéristiques de l’une des religions du passé? Pour dire que le gnosticisme ou l’ébionitisme sont les formes légitimes de la pensée chrétienne il faut dire hardiment qu’il n’y a pas de pensée chrétienne, ni de caractère spécifique qui la fasse reconnaître. Sous prétexte de l’élargir, on la dissout. Personne au temps de Platon n’eût osé couvrir de son nom une doctrine qui n’eut pas fait place à la théorie des idées; et l’on eût excité les justes moqueries de la Grèce, en voulant faire d’Epicure ou de Zénon un disciple de l’Académie. Reconnaissons donc que s’il existe une religion ou une doctrine qui s’appelle christianisme, elle peut avoir ses hérésies.” [see Footnote]

[Footnote: “The Church is a free association; there is much to be gained by separation from it. Conflict with error has no weapons other than thought and feeling. One uniform type of doctrine has not yet been elaborated; divergencies in secondary matters arise freely in East and West; theology is not wedded to invariable formulas. If in the midst of this diversity a mass of beliefs common to all is apparent, is one not justified in seeing in it, not a formulated system, framed by the representatives of pedantic authority, but faith itself in its surest instinct and its most spontaneous manifestation? If the same unanimity which is revealed in essential points of belief is found also in rejecting certain tendencies, are we not justified in concluding that these tendencies were in flagrant opposition to the fundamental principles of Christianity? And will not this presumption be transformed into certainty if we recognize in the doctrine universally rejected by the Church the characteristic features of one of the religions of the past? To say that gnosticism or ebionitism are legitimate forms of Christian thought, one must boldly deny the existence of Christian thought at all, or any specific character by which it could be recognized. While ostensibly widening its realm, one undermines it. No one in the time of Plato would lave ventured to give his name to a doctrine in which the theory of ideas had no place, and one would deservedly have excited the ridicule of Greece by trying to pass off Epicurus or Zeno as a disciple of the Academy. Let us recognize, then, that if a religion or a doctrine exists which is called Christianity, it may have its heresies.”

The author’s whole argument amounts to this: that every opinion which differs from the code of dogmas we believe in at a given time, is heresy. But of course at any given time and place men always believe in something or other; and this belief in something, indefinite at any place, at some time, cannot be a criterion of truth.

It all amounts to this: since ubi Christus ibi Ecclesia, then

Christus is where we are.

Every so-called heresy, regarding, as it does, its own creed as the truth, can just as easily find in Church history a series of illustrations of its own creed, can use all Pressensé’s arguments on its own behalf, and can call its own creed the one truly Christian creed. And that is just what all heresies do and have always done.

The only definition of heresy (the word [GREEK WORD], means a part) is this: the name given by a body of men to any opinion which rejects a part of the Creed professed by that body. The more frequent meaning, more often ascribed to the word heresy, is — that of an opinion which rejects the Church doctrine founded and supported by the temporal authorities.

[TRANSCRIBIST’S NOTE: The GREEK WORD above used Greek letters, spelled: alpha(followed by an apostrophe)-iota(with accent)-rho-epsilon-sigma-iota-zeta]

There is a remarkable and voluminous work, very little known, “Unpartheyische Kirchen-und Ketzer-Historie,” 1729, by Gottfried Arnold, which deals with precisely this subject, and points out all the unlawfulness, the arbitrariness, the senselessness, and the cruelty of using the word heretic in the sense of reprobate. This book is an attempt to write the history of Christianity in the form of a history of heresy.

In the introduction the author propounds a series of questions: (1) Of those who make heretics; (2) Of those whom they made heretics; (3) Of heretical subjects themselves; (4) Of the method of making heretics; and (5) Of the object and result of making heretics.

On each of these points he propounds ten more questions, the answers to which he gives later on from the works of well-known theologians. But he leaves the reader to draw for himself the principal conclusion from the expositions in the whole book. As examples of these questions, in which the answers are to some extent included also, I will quote the following. Under the 4th head, of the manner in which heretics are made, he says, in one of the questions (in the 7th):

“Does not all history show that the greatest makers of heretics and masters of that craft were just these wise men, from whom the Father hid his secrets, that is, the hypocrites, the Pharisees, and lawyers, men utterly godless and perverted (Question 20-21)? And in the corrupt times of Christianity were not these very men cast out, denounced by the hypocrites and envious, who were endowed by God with great gifts and who would in the days of pure Christianity have been held in high honor? And, on the other hand, would not the men who, in the decline of Christianity raised themselves above all, and regarded themselves as the teachers of the purest Christianity, would not these very men, in the times of the apostles and disciples of Christ, have been regarded as the most shameless heretics and anti-Christians?”

He expounds, among other things in these questions, the theory that any verbal expression of faith, such as was demanded by the Church, and the departure from which was reckoned as heresy, could never fully cover the exact religious ideas of a believer, and that therefore the demand for an expression of faith in certain words was ever productive of heresy, and he says, in Question 21:

“And if heavenly things and thoughts present themselves to a man’s mind as so great and so profound that he does not find corresponding words to express them, ought one to call him a heretic, because he cannot express his idea with perfect exactness?”

And in Question 33:

“And is not the fact that there was no heresy in the earliest days due to the fact that the Christians did not judge one another by verbal expressions, but by deed and by heart, since they had perfect liberty to express their ideas without the dread of being called heretics; was it not the easiest and most ordinary ecclesiastical proceeding, if the clergy wanted to get rid of or to ruin anyone, for them to cast suspicion on the person’s belief, and to throw a cloak of heresy upon him, and by this means to procure his condemnation and removal?

“True though it may be that there were sins and errors among the so-called heretics, it is no less true and evident,” he says farther on, “from the innumerable examples quoted here (i. e., in the history of the Church and of heresy), that there was not a single sincere and conscientious man of any importance whom the Churchmen would not from envy or other causes have ruined.”

Thus, almost two hundred years ago, the real meaning of heresy was understood. And notwithstanding that, the same conception of it has gone on existing up to now. And it cannot fail to exist so long as the conception of a church exists. Heresy is the obverse side of the Church. Wherever there is a church, there must be the conception of heresy. A church is a body of men who assert that they are in possession of infallible truth. Heresy is the opinion of the men who do not admit the infallibility of the Church’s truth.

Heresy makes its appearance in the Church. It is the effort to break through the petrified authority of the Church. All effort after a living comprehension of the doctrine has been made by heretics. Tertullian, Origen, Augustine, Luther, Huss, Savonarola, Helchitsky, and the rest were heretics. It could not be otherwise.

The follower of Christ, whose service means an ever-growing understanding of his teaching, and an ever-closer fulfillment of it, in progress toward perfection, cannot, just because he is a follower, of Christ, claim for himself or any other that he understands Christ’s teaching fully and fulfills it. Still less can he claim this for any body of men.

To whatever degree of understanding and perfection the follower of Christ may have attained, he always feels the insufficiency of his understanding and fulfillment of it, and is always striving toward a fuller understanding and fulfillment. And therefore, to assert of one’s self or of any body of men, that one is or they are in possession of perfect understanding and fulfillment of Christ’s word, is to renounce the very spirit of Christ’s teaching.

Strange as it may seem, the churches as churches have always been, and cannot but be, institutions not only alien in spirit to Christ’s teaching, but even directly antagonistic to it. With good reason Voltaire calls the Church l’infâme; with good reason have all or almost all so-called sects of Christians recognized the Church as the scarlet woman foretold in the Apocalypse; with good reason is the history of the Church the history of the greatest cruelties and horrors.

The churches as churches are not, as many people suppose, institutions which have Christian principles for their basis, even though they may have strayed a little away from the straight path. The churches as churches, as bodies which assert their own infallibility, are institutions opposed to Christianity. There is not only nothing in common between the churches as such and Christianity, except the name, but they represent two principles fundamentally opposed and antagonistic to one another. One represents pride, violence, self-assertion, stagnation, and death; the other, meekness, penitence, humility, progress, and life.

We cannot serve these two masters; we have to choose between them.

The servants of the churches of all denominations, especially of later times, try to show themselves champions of progress in Christianity. They make concessions, wish to correct the abuses that have slipped into the Church, and maintain that one cannot, on account of these abuses, deny the principle itself of a Christian church, which alone can bind all men together in unity and be a mediator between men and God. But this is all a mistake. Not only have churches never bound men together in unity; they have always been one of the principal causes of division between men, of their hatred of one another, of wars, battles, inquisitions, massacres of St. Bartholomew, and so on. And the churches have never served as mediators between men and God. Such mediation is not wanted, and was directly forbidden by Christ, who has revealed his teaching directly and immediately to each man. But the churches set up dead forms in the place of God, and far from revealing God, they obscure him from men’s sight. The churches, which originated from misunderstanding of Christ’s teaching and have maintained this misunderstanding by their immovability, cannot but persecute and refuse to recognize all true understanding of Christ’s words. They try to conceal this, but in vain; for every step forward along the path pointed out for us by Christ is a step toward their destruction.

To hear and to read the sermons and articles in which Church writers of later times of all denominations speak of Christian truths and virtues; to hear or read these skillful arguments that have been elaborated during centuries, and exhortations and professions, which sometimes seem like sincere professions, one is ready to doubt whether the churches can be antagonistic to Christianity. “It cannot be,” one says, “that these people who can point to such men as Chrysostom, Fénelon, Butler, and others professing the Christian faith, were antagonistic to Christianity.” One is tempted to say, “The churches may have strayed away from Christianity, they may be in error, but they cannot be hostile to it.” But we must look to the fruit to judge the tree, as Christ taught c us. And if we see that their fruits were evil, that the results of their activity were antagonistic to Christianity, we cannot but admit that however good the men were — the work of the Church in which these men took part was not Christian. The goodness and worth of these men who served the churches was the goodness and worth of the men, and not of the institution they served. All the good men, such as Francis of Assisi, and Francis of Sales, our Tihon Zadonsky, Thomas à Kempis, and others, were good men in spite of their serving an institution hostile to Christianity, and they would have been still better if they had not been under the influence of the error which they were serving.

But why should we speak of the past and judge from the past, which may have been misrepresented and misunderstood by us? The churches, with their principles and their practice, are not a thing of the past. The churches are before us to-day, and we can judge of them to some purpose by their practical activity, their influence on men.

What is the practical work of the churches to-day? What is their influence upon men? What is done by the churches among us, among the Catholics and the Protestants of all denominations — what is their practical work? and what are the results of their practical work?

The practice of our Russian so-called Orthodox Church is plain to all. It is an enormous fact which there is no possibility of hiding and about which there can be no disputing.

What constitutes the practical work of this Russian Church, this immense, intensely active institution, which consists of a regiment of half a million men and costs the people tens of millions of rubles?

The practical business of the Church consists in instilling by every conceivable means into the mass of one hundred millions of the Russian people those extinct relics of beliefs for which there is nowadays no kind of justification, “in which scarcely anyone now believes, and often not even those whose duty it is to diffuse these false beliefs.” To instill into the people the formulas of Byzantine theology, of the Trinity, of the Mother of God, of Sacraments, of Grace, and so on, extinct conceptions, foreign to us, and having no kind of meaning for men of our times, forms only one part of the work of the Russian Church. Another part of its practice consists in the maintenance of idol-worship in the most literal meaning of the word; in the veneration of holy relics, and of ikons, the offering of sacrifices to them, and the expectation of their answers to prayer. I am not going to speak of what is preached and what is written by clergy of scientific or liberal tendencies in the theological journals. I am going to speak of what is actually done by the clergy through the wide expanse of the Russian land among a people of one hundred millions. What do they, diligently, assiduously, everywhere alike, without intermission, teach the people? What do they demand from the people in virtue of their (so-called) Christian faith?

I will begin from the beginning with the birth of a child. At the birth of a child they teach them that they must recite a prayer over the child and mother to purify them, as though without this prayer the mother of a newborn child were unclean. To do this the priest holds the child in his arms before the images of the saints (called by the people plainly gods) and reads words of exorcizing power, and this purifies the mother. Then it is suggested to the parents, and even exacted of them, under fear of punishment for non-fulfillment, that the child must be baptized; that is, be dipped by the priest three times into the water, while certain words, understood by no one, are read aloud, and certain actions, still less understood, are performed; various parts of the body are rubbed with oil, and the hair is cut, while the sponsors blow and spit at an imaginary devil. All this is necessary to purify the child and to make him a Christian. Then it is instilled into the parents that they ought to administer the sacrament to the child, that is, give him, in the guise of bread and wine, a portion of Christ’s body to eat, as a result of which the child receives the grace of God within it, and so on. Then it is suggested that the child as it grows up must be taught to pray. To pray means to place himself directly before the wooden boards on which are painted the faces of Christ, the Mother of God, and the saints, to bow his head and his whole body, and to touch his forehead, his shoulders and his stomach with his right hand, holding his fingers in a certain position, and to utter some words of Slavonic, the most usual of which as taught to all children are: Mother of God, virgin, rejoice thee, etc., etc.

Then it is instilled into the child as it is brought up that at the sight of any church or ikon he must repeat the same action — i. e., cross himself. Then it is instilled into him that on holidays (holidays are the days on which Christ was born, though no one knows when that was, on which he was circumcised, on which the Mother of God died, on which the cross was carried in procession, on which ikons have been set up, on which a lunatic saw a vision, and so on) — on holidays he must dress himself in his best clothes and go to church, and must buy candles and place them there before the images of the saints. Then he must give offerings and prayers for the dead, and little loaves to be cut up into three-cornered pieces, and must pray many times for the health and prosperity of the Tzar and the bishops, and for himself and his own affairs, and then kiss the cross and the hand of the priest. Besides these observances, it is instilled into him that at least once a year he must confess. To confess means to go to the church and to tell the priest his sins, on the theory that this informing a stranger of his sins completely purifies him from them. And after that he must eat with a little spoon a morsel of bread with wine, which will purify him still more. Next it is instilled into him that if a man and woman want their physical union to be sanctified they must go to church, put on metal crowns, drink certain potions, walk three times round a table to the sound of singing, and that then the physical union of a man and woman becomes sacred and altogether different from all other such unions.

Further it is instilled into him in his life that he must observe the following rules: not to eat butter or milk on certain days, and on certain other days to sing Te Deums and requiems for the dead, on holidays to entertain the priest and give him money, and several times in the year to bring the ikons from the church, and to carry them slung on his shoulders through the fields and houses. It is instilled into him that on his death-bed a man must not fail to eat bread and wine with a spoon, and that it will be still better if he has time to be rubbed with sacred oil. This will guarantee his welfare in the future life. After his death it is instilled into his relatives that it is a good thing for the salvation of the dead man to place a printed paper of prayers in his hands; it is a good thing further to read aloud a certain book over the dead body, and to pronounce the dead man’s name in church at a certain time. All this is regarded as faith obligatory on everyone.

But if anyone wants to take particular care of his soul, then according to this faith he is instructed that the greatest security of the salvation of the soul in the world is attained by offering money to the churches and monasteries, and engaging the holy men by this means to pray for him. Entering monasteries too and kissing relics and miraculous ikons, are further means of salvation for the soul.

According to this faith ikons and relics communicate a special sanctity, power, and grace, and even proximity to these objects, touching them, kissing them, putting candles before them, crawling under them while they are being carried along, are all efficacious for salvation, as well as Te Deums repeated before these holy things.

So this, and nothing else, is the faith called Orthodox, that is the actual faith which, under the guise of Christianity, has been with all the forces of the Church, and is now with especial zeal, instilled into the people.

And let no one say that the Orthodox teachers place the essential part of their teaching in something else, and that all these are only ancient forms, which it is not thought necessary to do away with. That is false. This, and nothing but this, is the faith taught through the whole of Russia by the whole of the Russian clergy, and of late years with especial zeal. There is nothing else taught. Something different may be talked of and written of in the capitals; but among the hundred millions of the people this is what is done, this is what is taught, and nothing more. Churchmen may talk of something else, but this is what they teach by every means in their power.

All this, and the worship of relics and of ikons, has been introduced into works of theology and into the catechisms. Thus they teach it to the people in theory and in practice, using every resource of authority, solemnity, pomp, and violence to impress them. They compel the people, by overawing them, to believe in this, and jealously guard this faith from any attempt to free the people from these barbarous superstitions.

As I said when I published my book, Christ’s teaching and his very words about non-resistance to evil were for many years a subject for ridicule and low jesting in my eyes, and Churchmen, far from opposing it, even encouraged this scoffing at sacred things. But try the experiment of saying a disrespectful word about a hideous idol which is carried sacrilegiously about Moscow by drunken men under the name of the ikon of the Iversky virgin, and you will raise a groan of indignation from these same Churchmen. All that they preach is an external observance of the rites of idolatry. And let it not be said that the one does not hinder the other, that “These ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.” “All, therefore, whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not” (Matt. xxiii. 23, 3).

This was spoken of the Pharisees, who fulfilled all the external observances prescribed by the law, and therefore the words “whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do,” refer to works of mercy and goodness, and the words “do not ye after their works, for they say and do not,” refer to their observance of ceremonies and their neglect of good works, and have exactly the opposite meaning to that which the Churchmen try to give to the passage, interpreting it as an injunction to observe ceremonies. External observances and the service of truth and goodness are for the most part difficult to combine; the one excludes the other. So it was with the Pharisees, so it is now with Church Christians.

If a man can be saved by the redemption, by sacraments, and by prayer, then he does not need good works.

The Sermon on the Mount, or the Creed. One cannot believe in both. And Churchmen have chosen the latter. The Creed is taught and is read as a prayer in the churches, but the Sermon on the Mount is excluded even from the Gospel passages read in the churches, so that the congregation never hears it in church, except on those days when the whole of the Gospel is read. Indeed, it could not he otherwise. People who believe in a wicked and senseless God — who has cursed the human race and devoted his own Son to sacrifice, and a part of mankind to eternal torment — cannot believe in the God of love. The man who believes in a God, in a Christ coming again in glory to judge and to punish the quick and the dead, cannot believe in the Christ who bade us turn the left cheek, judge not, forgive these that wrong us, and love our enemies. The man who believes in the inspiration of the Old Testament and the sacred character of David, who commanded on his deathbed the murder of an old man who had cursed him, and whom he could not kill himself because he was bound by an oath to him, and the similar atrocities of which the Old Testament is full, cannot believe in the holy love of Christ. The man who believes in the Church’s doctrine of the compatibility of warfare and capital punishment with Christianity cannot believe in the brotherhood of all men.

And what is most important of all — the man who believes in salvation through faith in the redemption or the sacraments, cannot devote all his powers to realizing Christ’s moral teaching in his life.

The man who has been instructed by the Church in the profane doctrine that a man cannot be saved by his own powers, but that there is another means of salvation, will infallibly rely upon this means and not on his own powers, which, they assure him, it is sinful to trust in.

The teaching of every Church, with its redemption and sacraments, excludes the teaching of Christ; most of all the teaching of the Orthodox Church with its idolatrous observances.

“But the people have always believed of their own accord as they believe now,” will be said in answer to this. “The whole history of the Russian people proves it. One cannot deprive the people of their traditions.” This statement, too, is misleading. The people did certainly at one time believe in something like what the Church believes in now, though it was far from being the same thing. In spite of their superstitious regard for ikons, housespirits, relics, and festivals with wreaths of birch leaves, there has still always been in the people a profound moral and living understanding of Christianity, which there has never been in the Church as a whole, and which is only met with in its best representatives. But the people, notwithstanding all the prejudices instilled into them by the government and the Church, have in their best representatives long outgrown that crude stage of understanding, a fact which is proved by the springing up everywhere of the rationalist sects with which Russia is swarming to-day, and on which Churchmen are now carrying on an ineffectual warfare. The people are advancing to a consciousness of the moral, living side of Christianity. And then the Church comes forward, not borrowing from the people, but zealously instilling into them the petrified formalities of an extinct paganism, and striving to thrust them back again into the darkness from which they are emerging with such effort.

“We teach the people nothing new, nothing but what they believe, only in a more perfect form,” say the Churchmen. This is just what the man did who tied up the full-grown chicken and thrust it back into the shell it had come out of.

I have often been irritated, though it would be comic if the consequences were not so awful, by observing how men shut one another in a delusion and cannot get out of this magic circle.

The first question, the first doubt of a Russian who is beginning to think, is a question about the ikons, and still more the miraculous relics: Is it true that they are genuine, and that miracles are worked through them? Hundreds of thousands of men put this question to themselves, and their principal difficulty in answering it is the fact that bishops, metropolitans, and all men in positions of authority kiss the relics and wonder-working ikons. Ask the bishops and men in positions of authority why they do so, and they will say they do it for the sake of the people, while the people kiss them because the bishops and men in authority do so.

In spite of all the external varnish of modernity, learning, and spirituality which the members of the Church begin nowadays to assume in their works, their articles, their theological journals, and their sermons, the practical work of the Russian Church consists of nothing more than keeping the people in their present condition of coarse and savage idolatry, and worse still, strengthening and diffusing superstition and religious ignorance, and suppressing that living understanding of Christianity which exists in the people side by side with idolatry.

I remember once being present in the monks’ bookshop of the Optchy Hermitage while an old peasant was choosing books for his grandson, who could read. A monk pressed on him accounts of relics, holidays, miraculous ikons, a psalter, etc. I asked the old man, “Has he the Gospel?” “No.” “Give him the Gospel in Russian,” I said to the monk. “That will not do for him,” answered the monk. There you have an epitome of the work of our Church.

But this is only in barbarous Russia, the European and American reader will observe. And such an observation is just, but only so far as it refers to the government, which aids the Church in its task of stultification and corruption in Russia.

It is true that there is nowhere in Europe a government so despotic and so closely allied with the ruling Church. And therefore the share of the temporal power in the corruption of the people is greatest in Russia. But it is untrue that the Russian Church in its influence on the people is in any respect different from any other church.

The churches are everywhere the same, and if the Catholic, the Anglican, or the Lutheran Church has not at hand a government as compliant as the Russian, it is not due to any indisposition to profit by such a government.

The Church as a church, whatever it may be — Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian — every church, in so far as it is a church, cannot but strive for the same object as the Russian Church. That object is to conceal the real meaning of Christ’s teaching and to replace it by their own, which lays no obligation on them, excludes the possibility of understanding the true teaching of Christ, and what is the chief consideration, justifies the existence of priests supported at the people’s expense.

What else has Catholicism done, what else is it doing in its prohibition of reading the Gospel, and in its demand for unreasoning submission to Church authorities and to an infallible Pope? Is the religion of Catholicism any other than that of the Russian Church? There is the same external ritual, the same relics, miracles, and wonder-working images of Notre Dame, and the same processions; the same loftily vague discussions of Christianity in books and sermons, and when it comes to practice, the same supporting of the present idolatry. And is not the same thing done in Anglicanism, Lutheranism, and every denomination of Protestantism which has been formed into a church? There is the same duty laid on their congregations to believe in the dogmas expressed in the fourth century, which have lost all meaning for men of our times, and the same duty of idolatrous worship, if not of relics and ikons, then of the Sabbath Day and the letter of the Bible. There is always the same activity directed to concealing the real duties of Christianity, and to putting in their place an external respectability and cant, as it is so well described by the English, who are peculiarly oppressed by it. In Protestantism this tendency is specially remarkable because it has not the excuse of antiquity. And does not exactly the same thing show itself even in contemporary revivalism — the revived Calvinism and Evangelicalism, to which the Salvation Army owes its origin?

Uniform is the attitude of all the churches to the teaching of

Christ, whose name they assume for their own advantage.

The inconsistency of all church forms of religion with the teaching of Christ is, of course, the reason why special efforts are necessary to conceal this inconsistency from people. Truly, the need only imagine ourselves in the position of any grown-up man, not necessarily educated, even the simplest man of the present day, who has picked up the ideas that are everywhere in the air nowadays of geology, physics, chemistry, cosmography, or history, when he, for the first time, consciously compares them with the articles of belief instilled into him in childhood, and maintained by the churches — that God created the world in six days, and light before the sun; that Noah shut up all the animals in his ark, and so on; that Jesus is also God the Son, who created all before time was; that this God came down upon earth to atone for Adam’s sin; that he rose again, ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father, and will come in the clouds to judge the world, and so on. All these propositions, elaborated by men of the fourth century, had a certain meaning for men of that time, but for men of to-day they have no meaning whatever. Men of the present day can repeat these words with their lips, but believe them they cannot. For such sentences as that God lives in heaven, that the heavens opened and a voice from somewhere said something, that Christ rose again, and ascended somewhere in heaven, and again will come from somewhere on the clouds, and so on, have no meaning for us.

A man who regarded the heavens as a solid, finite vault could believe or disbelieve that God created the heavens, that the heavens opened, that Christ ascended into heaven, but for us all these phrases nave no sense whatever. Men of the present can only believe, as indeed they do, that they ought to believe in this; but believe it they cannot, because it has no meaning for them.

Even if all these phrases ought to be interpreted in a figurative sense and are allegories, we know that in the first place all Churchmen are not agreed about it, but, on the contrary, the majority stick to understanding the Holy Scripture in its literal sense; and secondly, that these allegorical interpretations are very varied and are not supported by any evidence.

But even if a man wants to force himself to believe in the doctrines of the Church just as they are taught to him, the universal diffusion of education and of the Gospel and of communication between people of different forms of religion presents a still more insurmountable obstacle to his doing so.

A man of the present day need only buy a Gospel for three copecks and read through the plain words, admitting of no misinterpretation, that Christ said to the Samaritan woman “that the Father seeketh not worshipers at Jerusalem, nor in this mountain nor in that, but worshipers in spirit and in truth,” or the saying that “the Christian must not pray like the heathen, nor for show, but secretly, that is, in his closet,” or that Christ’s follower must call no man master or father — he need only read these words to be thoroughly convinced that the Church pastors, who call themselves teachers in opposition to Christ’s precept, and dispute among themselves, constitute no kind of authority, and that what the Churchmen teach us is not Christianity. Less even than that is necessary. Even if a man nowadays did continue to believe in miracles and did not read the Gospel, mere association with people of different forms of religion and faith, which happens so easily in these days, compels him to doubt of the truth of his own faith. It was all very well when a man did not see men of any other form of religion than his own; he believed that his form of religion was the one true one. But a thinking man has only to come into contact — as constantly happens in these days — with people, equally good and bad, of different denominations, who condemn each other’s beliefs, to doubt of the truth of the belief he professes himself. In these days only a man who is absolutely ignorant or absolutely indifferent to the vital questions with which religion deals, can remain in the faith of the Church.

What deceptions and what strenuous efforts the churches must employ to continue, in spite of all these tendencies subversive of the faith, to build churches, to perform masses, to preach, to teach, to convert, and, most of all, to receive for it all immense emoluments, as do all these priests, pastors, incumbents, superintendents, abbots, archdeacons, bishops, and archbishops. They need special supernatural efforts. And the churches do, with ever-increasing intensity and zeal, make such efforts. With us in Russia, besides other means, they employ, simple brute force, as there the temporal power is willing to obey the Church. Men who refuse an external assent to the faith, and say so openly, are either directly punished or deprived of their rights; men who strictly keep the external forms of religion are rewarded and given privileges.

That is how the Orthodox clergy proceed; but indeed all churches without exception avail themselves of every means for the purpose — one of the most important of which is what is now called hypnotism.

Every art, from architecture to poetry, is brought into requisition to work its effect on men’s souls and to reduce them to a state of stupefaction, and this effect is constantly produced. This use of hypnotizing influence on men to bring them to a state of stupefaction is especially apparent in the proceedings of the Salvation Army, who employ new practices to which we are unaccustomed: trumpets, drums, songs, flags, costumes, marching, dancing, tears, and dramatic performances.

But this only displeases us because these are new practices. Were not the old practices in churches essentially the same, with their special lighting, gold, splendor, candles, choirs, organ, bells, vestments, intoning, etc.?

But however powerful this hypnotic influence may be, it is not the chief nor the most pernicious activity of the Church. The chief and most pernicious work of the Church is that which is directed to the deception of children — these very children of whom Christ said: “Woe to him that offendeth one of these little ones.” From the very first awakening of the consciousness of the child they begin to deceive him, to instill into him with the utmost solemnity what they do not themselves believe in, and they continue to instill it into him till the deception has by habit grown into the child’s nature. They studiously deceive the child on the most important subject in life, and when the deception has so grown into his life that it would be difficult to uproot it, then they reveal to him the whole world of science and reality, which cannot by any means be reconciled with the beliefs that have been instilled into him, leaving it to him to find his way as best he can out of these contradictions.

If one set oneself the task of trying to confuse a man so that he could not think clearly nor free himself from the perplexity of two opposing theories of life which had been instilled into him from childhood, one could not invent any means more effectual than the treatment of every young man educated in our so-called Christian society.

It is terrible to think what the churches do to men. But if one imagines oneself in the position of the men who constitute the Church, we see they could not act differently. The churches are placed in a dilemma: the Sermon on the Mount or the Nicene Creed — the one excludes the other. If a man sincerely believes in the Sermon on the Mount, the Nicene Creed must inevitably lose all meaning and significance for him, and the Church and its representatives together with it. If a man believes in the Nicene Creed, that is, in the Church, that is, in those who call themselves its representatives, the Sermon on the Mount becomes superfluous for him. And therefore the churches cannot but make every possible effort to obscure the meaning of the Sermon on the Mount, and to attract men to themselves. It is only due to the intense zeal of the churches in this direction that the influence of the churches has lasted hitherto.

Let the Church stop its work of hypnotizing the masses, and deceiving children even for the briefest interval of time, and men would begin to understand Christ’s teaching. But this understanding will be the end of the churches and all their influence. And therefore the churches will not for an instant relax their zeal in the business of hypnotizing grown-up people and deceiving children. This, then, is the work of the churches: to instill a false interpretation of Christ’s teaching into men, and to prevent a true interpretation of it for the majority of so-called believers.

Chapter 4: Christianity Misunderstood by Men of Science

Attitude of Men of Science to Religions in General — What Religion is, and What is its Significance for the Life of Humanity — Three Conceptions of Life — Christian Religion the Expression of the Divine Conception of Life — Misinterpretation of Christianity by Men of Science, who Study it in its External Manifestations Due to their Criticising it from Standpoint of Social Conception of Life — Opinion, Resulting from this Misinterpretation, that Christ’s Moral Teaching is Exaggerated and Cannot be put into Practice — Expression of Divine Conception of Life in the Gospel — False Ideas of Men of Science on Christianity Proceed from their Conviction that they have an Infallible Method of Criticism — From which come Two Misconceptions in Regard to Christian Doctrine — First Misconception, that the Teaching Cannot be put into Practice, Due to the Christian Religion Directing Life in a Way Different from that of the Social Theory of Life — Christianity holds up Ideal, does not lay down Rules — To the Animal Force of Man Christ Adds the Consciousness of a Divine Force — Christianity Seems to Destroy Possibility of Life only when the Ideal held up is Mistaken for Rule — Ideal Must Not be Lowered — Life, According to Christ’s Teaching, is Movement — The Ideal and the Precepts — Second Misconception Shown in Replacing Love and Service of God by Love and Service of Humanity — Men of Science Imagine their Doctrine of Service of Humanity and Christianity are Identical — Doctrine of Service of Humanity Based on Social Conception of Life — Love for Humanity, Logically Deduced from Love of Self, has No Meaning because Humanity is a Fiction — Christian Love Deduced from Love of God, Finds its Object in the whole World, not in Humanity Alone — Christianity Teaches Man to Live in Accordance with his Divine Nature — It Shows that the Essence of the Soul of Man is Love, and that his Happiness Ensues from Love of God, whom he Recognizes as Love within himself.

Now I will speak of the other view of Christianity which hinders the true understanding of it — the scientific view.

Churchmen substitute for Christianity the version they have framed of it for themselves, and this view of Christianity they regard as the one infallibly true one.

Men of science regard as Christianity only the tenets held by the different churches in the past and present; and finding that these tenets have lost all the significance of Christianity, they accept it as a religion which has outlived its age.

To see clearly how impossible it is to understand the Christian teaching from such a point of view, one must form for oneself an idea of the place actually held by religions in general, by the Christian religion in particular, in the life of mankind, and of the significance attributed to them by science.

Just as the individual man cannot live without having some theory of the meaning of his life, and is always, though often unconsciously, framing his conduct in accordance with the meaning he attributes to his life, so too associations of men living in similar conditions — nations — cannot but have theories of the meaning of their associated life and conduct ensuing from those theories. And as the individual man, when he attains a fresh stage of growth, inevitably changes his philosophy of life, and the grown-up man sees a different meaning in it from the child, so too associations of men — nations — are bound to change their philosophy of life and the conduct ensuing from their philosophy, to correspond with their development.

The difference, as regards this, between the individual man and humanity as a whole, lies in the fact that the individual, in forming the view of life proper to the new period of life on which he is entering and the conduct resulting from it, benefits by the experience of men who have lived before him, who have already passed through the stage of growth upon which he is entering. But humanity cannot have this aid, because it is always moving along a hitherto untrodden track, and has no one to ask how to understand life, and to act in the conditions on which it is entering and through which no one has ever passed before.

Nevertheless, just as a man with wife and children cannot continue to look at life as he looked at it when he was a child, so too in the face of the various changes that are taking place, the greater density of population, the establishment of communication between different peoples, the improvements of the methods of the struggle with nature, and the accumulation of knowledge, humanity cannot continue to look at life as of old, and it must frame a new theory of life, from which conduct may follow adapted to the new conditions on which it has entered and is entering.

To meet this need humanity has the special power of producing men who give a new meaning to the whole of human life — a theory of life from which follow new forms of activity quite different from all preceding them. The formation of this philosophy of life appropriate to humanity in the new conditions on which it is entering, and of the practice resulting from it, is what is called religion.

And therefore, in the first place, religion is not, as science imagines, a manifestation which at one time corresponded with the development of humanity, but is afterward outgrown by it. It is a manifestation always inherent in the life of humanity, and is as indispensable, as inherent in humanity at the present time as at any other. Secondly, religion is always the theory of the practice of the future and not of the past, and therefore it is clear that investigation of past manifestations cannot in any case grasp the essence of religion.

The essence of every religious teaching lies not in the desire for a symbolic expression of the forces of nature, nor in the dread of these forces, nor in the craving for the marvelous, nor in the external forms in which it is manifested, as men of science imagine; the essence of religion lies in the faculty of men of foreseeing and pointing out the path of life along which humanity must move in the discovery of a new theory of life, as a result of which the whole future conduct of humanity is changed and different from all that has been before.

This faculty of foreseeing the path along which humanity must move, is common in a greater or less degree to all men. But in all times there have been men in whom this faculty was especially strong, and these men have given clear and definite expression to what all men felt vaguely, and formed a new philosophy of life from which new lines of action followed for hundreds and thousands of years.

Of such philosophies of life we know three; two have already been passed through by humanity, and the third is that we are passing through now in Christianity. These philosophies of life are three in number, and only three, not because we have arbitrarily brought the various theories of life together under these three heads, but because all men’s actions are always based on one of these three views of life — because we cannot view life otherwise than in these three ways.

These three views of life are as follows: First, embracing the individual, or the animal view of life; second, embracing the society, or the pagan view of life; third, embracing the whole world, or the divine view of life.

In the first theory of life a man’s life is limited to his one individuality; the aim of life is the satisfaction of the will of this individuality. In the second theory of life a man’s life is limited not to his own individuality, but to certain societies and classes of individuals: to the tribe, the family, the clan, the nation; the aim of life is limited to the satisfaction of the will of those associations of individuals. In the third theory of life a man’s life is limited not to societies and classes of individuals, but extends to the principle and source of life — to God.

These three conceptions of life form the foundation of all the religious that exist or have existed.

The savage recognizes life only in himself and his personal desires. His interest in life is concentrated on himself alone. The highest happiness for him is the fullest satisfaction of his desires. The motive power of his life is personal enjoyment. His religion consists in propitiating his deity and in worshiping his gods, whom he imagines as persons living only for their personal aims.

The civilized pagan recognizes life not in himself alone, but in societies of men — in the tribe, the clan, the family, the kingdom — and sacrifices his personal good for these societies. The motive power of his life is glory. His religion consists in the exaltation of the glory of those who are allied to him — the founders of his family, his ancestors, his rulers — and in worshiping gods who are exclusively protectors of his clan, his family, his nation, his government [see Footnote].

[Footnote: The fact that so many varied forms of existence, as the life of the family, of the tribe, of the clan, of the state, and even the life of humanity theoretically conceived by the Positivists, are founded on this social or pagan theory of life, does not destroy the unity of this theory of life. All these varied forms of life are founded on the same conception, that the life of the individual is not a sufficient aim of life — that the meaning of life can be found only in societies of individuals.

The man who holds the divine theory of life recognizes life not in his own individuality, and not in societies of individualities (in the family, the clan, the nation, the tribe, or the government), but in the eternal undying source of life — in God; and to fulfill the will of God he is ready to sacrifice his individual and family and social welfare. The motor power of his life is love. And his religion is the worship in deed and in truth of the principle of the whole — God.

The whole historic existence of mankind is nothing else than the gradual transition from the personal, animal conception of life to the social conception of life, and from the social conception of life to the divine conception of life. The whole history of the ancient peoples, lasting through thousands of years and ending with the history of Rome, is the history of the transition from the animal, personal view of life to the social view of life. The whole of history from the time of the Roman Empire and the appearance of Christianity is the history of the transition, through which we are still passing now, from the social view of life to the divine view of life.

This view of life is the last, and founded upon it is the Christian teaching, which is a guide for the whole of our life and lies at the root of all our activity, practical and theoretic. Yet men of what is falsely called science, pseudo-scientific men, looking at it only in its externals, regard it as something outgrown and having no value for us.

Reducing it to its dogmatic side only — to the doctrines of the Trinity, the redemption, the miracles, the Church, the sacraments, and so on — men of science regard it as only one of an immense number of religions which have arisen among mankind, and now, they say, having played out its part in history, it is outliving its own age and fading away before the light of science and of true enlightenment.

We come here upon what, in a large proportion of case, forms the source of the grossest errors of mankind. Men on a lower level of understanding, when brought into contact with phenomena of a higher order, instead of making efforts to understand them, to raise themselves up to the point of view from which they must look at the subject, judge it from their lower standpoint, and the less they understand what they are talking about, the more confidently and unhesitatingly they pass judgment on it.

To the majority of learned then, looking at the living, moral teaching of Christ from the lower standpoint of the conception of life, this doctrine appears as nothing but very indefinite and incongruous combination of Indian asceticism, Stoic and Neoplatonic philosophy, and insubstantial anti-social visions, which have no serious significance for our times. Its whole meaning is concentrated for them in its external manifestations — in Catholicism, Protestantism, in certain dogmas, or in the conflict with the temporal power. Estimating the value of Christianity by these phenomena is like a deaf man’s judging of the character and quality of music by seeing the movements of the musicians.

The result of this is that all these scientific men, from Kant, Strauss, Spencer, and Renan down, do not understand the meaning of Christ’s sayings, do not understand the significance, the object, or the reason of their utterance, do not understand even the question to which they form the answer. Yet, without even taking the pains to enter into their meaning, they refuse, if unfavorably disposed, to recognize any reasonableness in his doctrines; or if they want to treat them indulgently, they condescend, from the height of their superiority, to correct them, on the supposition that Christ meant to express precisely their own ideas, but did not succeed in doing so. They behave to his teaching much as self-assertive people talk to those whom they consider beneath them, often supplying their companions’ words: “Yes, you mean to say this and that.” This correction is always with the aim of reducing the teaching of the higher, divine conception of life to the level of the lower, state conception of life.

They usually say that the moral teaching of Christianity is very fine, but overexaggerated; that to make it quite right we must reject all in it that is superfluous and unnecessary to our manner of life. “And the doctrine that asks too much, and requires what cannot he performed, is worse than that which requires of men what is possible and consistent with their powers,” these learned interpreters of Christianity maintain, repeating what was long ago asserted, and could not but be asserted, by those who crucified the Teacher because they did not understand him — the Jews.

It seems that in the judgment of the learned men of our time the Hebrew law — a tooth for a tooth, and an eye for an eye — is a law of just retaliation, known to mankind five thousand years before the law of holiness which Christ taught in its place.

It seems that all that has been done by those men who understood Christ’s teaching literally and lived in accordance with such an understanding of it, all that has been said and done by all true Christians, by all the Christian saints, all that is now reforming the world in the shape of socialism and communism — is simply exaggeration, not worth talking about.

After eighteen hundred years of education in Christianity the civilized world, as represented by its most advanced thinkers, holds the conviction that the Christian religion is a religion of dogmas; that its teaching in relation to life is unreasonable, and is an exaggeration, subversive of the real lawful obligations of morality consistent with the nature of man; and that very doctrine of retribution which Christ rejected, and in place of which he put his teaching, is more practically useful for us.

To learned men the doctrine of non-resistance to evil by force is exaggerated and even irrational. Christianity is much better without it, they think, not observing closely what Christianity, as represented by them, amounts to.

They do not see that to say that the doctrine of nonresistance to evil is an exaggeration in Christ’s teaching is just like saying that the statement of the equality of the radii of a circle is an exaggeration in the definition of a circle. And those who speak thus are acting precisely like a man who, having no idea of what a circle is, should declare that this requirement, that every point of the circumference should be an equal distance from the center, is exaggerated. To advocate the rejection of Christ’s command of non-resistance to evil, or its adaptation to the needs of life, implies a misunderstanding of the teaching of Christ.

And those who do so certainly do not understand it. They do not understand that this teaching is the institution of a new theory of life, corresponding to the new conditions on which men have entered now for eighteen hundred years, and also the definition of the new conduct of life which results from it. They do not believe that Christ meant to say what he said; or he seems to them to have said what he said in the Sermon on the Mount and in other places accidentally, or through his lack of intelligence or of cultivation.

[Footnote: Here, for example, is a characteristic view of that kind from the American journal the ARENA (October, 1890): “New Basis of Church Life.” Treating of the significance of the Sermon on the Mount and non-resistance to evil in particular, the author, being under no necessity, like the Churchmen, to hide its significance, says:

“Christ in fact preached complete communism and anarchy; but one must learn to regard Christ always in his historical and psychological significance. Like every advocate of the love of humanity, Christ went to the furthest extreme in his teaching. Every step forward toward the moral perfection of humanity is always guided by men who see nothing but their vocation. Christ, in no disparaging sense be it said, had the typical temperament of such a reformer. And therefore we must remember that his precepts cannot be understood literally as a complete philosophy of life. We ought to analyze his words with respect for them, but in the spirit of criticism, accepting what is true,” etc.

Christ would have been happy to say what he ought, but he was not able to express himself as exactly and clearly as we can in the spirit of criticism, and therefore let us correct him. All that he said about meekness, sacrifice, lowliness, not caring for the morrow, was said by accident, through lack of knowing how to express himself scientifically.]

Matt. vi. 25-34: “Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than rainment? Behold the fouls of the air; for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit onto his stature? And why take ye thought for rainment? Consider the lilies of the field how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek), for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Luke xii. 33-34: “Sell that ye have, and give alms; provide yourselves bags which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that faileth not, where no thief approacheth, neither moth corrupteth. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Sell all thou hast and follow me; and he who will not leave father, or mother, or children, or brothers, or fields, or house, he cannot be my disciple. Deny thyself, take up thy cross each day and follow me. My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to perform his works. Not my will, but thine be done; not what I will, but as thou wilt. Life is to do not one’s will, but the will of God.

All these principles appear to men who regard them from the standpoint of a lower conception of life as the expression of an impulsive enthusiasm, having no direct application to life. These principles, however, follow from the Christian theory of life, just as logically as the principles of paying a part of one’s private gains to the commonwealth and of sacrificing one’s life in defense of one’s country follow from the state theory of life.

As the man of the stale conception of life said to the savage: Reflect, bethink yourself! The life of your individuality cannot be true life, because that life is pitiful and passing. But the life of a society and succession of individuals, family, clan, tribe, or state, goes on living, and therefore a man must sacrifice his own individuality for the life of the family or the state. In exactly the same way the Christian doctrine says to the man of the social, state conception of life, Repent ye — [GREEK WORD]-i. e., bethink yourself, or you will be ruined. Understand that this casual, personal life which now comes into being and to-morrow is no more can have no permanence, that no external means, no construction of it can give it consecutiveness and permanence. Take thought and understand that the life you are living is not real life — the life of the family, of society, of the state will not save you from annihilation. The true, the rational life is only possible for man according to the measure in which he can participate, not in the family or the state, but in the source of life — the Father; according to the measure in which he can merge his life in the life of the Father. Such is undoubtedly the Christian conception of life, visible in every utterance of the Gospel.

[TRANSCRIBIST’S NOTE: The GREEK WORD above used Greek letters, spelled: mu-epsilon-tau-alpha-nu-omicron-zeta-epsilon-tau-epsilon]

One may not share this view of life, one may reject it, one may show its inaccuracy and its erroneousness, but we cannot judge of the Christian teaching without mastering this view of life. Still less can one criticise a subject on a higher plane from a lower point of view. From the basement one cannot judge of the effect of the spire. But this is just what the learned critics of the day try to do. For they share the erroneous idea of the orthodox believers that they are in possession of certain infallible means for investigating a subject. They fancy if they apply their so-called scientific methods of criticism, there can be no doubt of their conclusion being correct.

This testing the subject by the fancied infallible method of science is the principal obstacle to understanding the Christian religion for unbelievers, for so-called educated people. From this follow all the mistakes made by scientific men about the Christian religion, and especially two strange misconceptions which, more than everything else, hinder them from a correct understanding of it. One of these misconceptions is that the Christian moral teaching cannot be carried out, and that therefore it has either no force at all — that is, it should not be accepted as the rule of conduct — or it must be transformed, adapted to the limits within which its fulfillment is possible in our society. Another misconception is that the Christian doctrine of love of God, and therefore of his service, is an obscure, mystic principle, which gives no definite object for love, and should therefore be replaced by the more exact and comprehensible principles of love for men and the service of humanity.

The first misconception in regard to the impossibility of following the principle is the result of men of the state conception of life unconsciously taking that conception as the standard by which the Christian religion directs men, and taking the Christian principle of perfection as the rule by which that life is to be ordered; they think and say that to follow Christ’s teaching is impossible, because the complete fulfillment of all that is required by this teaching would put an end to life. “If a man were to carry out all that Christ teaches, he would destroy his own life; and if all men carried it out, then the human race would come to an end,” they say.

“If we take no thought for the morrow, what we shall eat and what we shall drink, and wherewithal we shall be clothed, do not defend our life, nor resist evil by force, lay down our life for others, and observe perfect chastity, the human race cannot exist,” they say.

And they are perfectly right if they take the principle of perfection given by Christ’s teaching as a rule which everyone is bound to fulfill, just as in the state principles of life everyone is bound to carry out the rule of paying taxes, supporting the law, and so on.

The misconception is based precisely on the fact that the teaching of Christ guides men differently from the way in which the precepts founded on the lower conception of life guide men. The precepts of the state conception of life only guide men by requiring of them an exact fulfillment of rules or laws. Christ’s teaching guides men by pointing them to the infinite perfection of their heavenly Father, to which every man independently and voluntarily struggles, whatever the degree of his imperfection in the present.

The misunderstanding of men who judge of the Christian principle from the point of view of the state principle, consists in the fact that on the supposition that the perfection which Christ points to, can be fully attained, they ask themselves (just as they ask the same question on the supposition that state laws will be carried out) what will be the result of all this being carried out? This supposition cannot be made, because the perfection held up to Christians is infinite and can never be attained; and Christ lays down his principle, having in view the fact that absolute perfection can never be attained, but that striving toward absolute, infinite perfection will continually increase the blessedness of men, and that this blessedness may be increased to infinity thereby.

Christ is teaching not angels, but men, living and moving in the animal life. And so to this animal force of movement Christ, as it were, applies the new force-the recognition of Divide perfection-and thereby directs the movement by the resultant of these two forces..

To suppose that human life is going in the direction to which Christ pointed it, is just like supposing that a little boat afloat on a rabid river, and directing its course almost exactly against the current, will progress in that direction.

Christ recognizes the existence of both sides of the parallelogram, of both eternal indestructible forces of which the life of man is compounded: the force of his animal nature and the force of the consciousness of Kinship to God. Saying nothing of the animal force which asserts itself, remains always the same, and is therefore independent of human will, Christ speaks only of the Divine force, calling upon a man to know it more closely, to set it more free from all that retards it, and to carry it to a higher degree of intensity.

In the process of liberating, of strengthening this force, the true life of man, according to Christ’s teaching, consists. The true life, according to preceding religions, consists in carrying out rules, the law; according to Christ’s teaching it consists in an ever closer approximation to the divine perfection hell up before every man, and recognized within himself by every man, in an ever closer and closer approach to the perfect fusion of his will in the will of God, that fusion toward which man strives, and the attainment of which would be the destruction of the life me know.

The divine perfection is the asymptote of human life to which it is always striving, and always approaching, though it can only be reached in infinity.

The Christian religion seems to exclude the possibility life only when men mistake the pointing to an ideal as the laying down of a rule. It is only then that the principles presented in Christ’s teaching appear to be destructive of life. These principles, on the contrary, are the only ones that make true life possible. Without these principles true life could not be possible.

“One ought not to expect so much,” is what people usually say in discussing the requirements of the Christian religion. “One cannot expect to take absolutely no thought for the morrow, as is said in the Gospel, but only not to take too much thought for it; one cannot give away all to the poor, but one must give away a certain definite part; one need not aim at virginity, but one must avoid debauchery; one need not forsake wife and children, but one must not give too great a place to them in one’s heart,” and so on.

But to speak like this is just like telling a man who is struggling on a swift river and is directing his course against the current, that it is impossible to cross the river rowing against the current, and that to cross it he must float in the direction of the point he wants to reach.

In reality, in order to reach the place to which he wants to go, he must row with all his strength toward a point much higher up.

To let go the requirements of the ideal means not only to diminish the possibility of perfection, but to make an end of the ideal itself. The ideal that has power over men is not an ideal invented by someone, but the ideal that every man carries within his soul. Only this ideal of complete infinite perfection has power over men, and stimulates them to action. A moderate perfection loses its power of influencing men’s hearts.

Christ’s teaching only has power when it demands absolute perfection — that is, the fusion of the divine nature which exists in every man’s soul with the will of God — the union of the Son with the Father. Life according to Christ’s teaching consists of nothing but this setting free of the Son of God, existing in every man, from the animal, and in bringing him closer to the Father.

The animal existence of a man does not constitute human life alone. Life, according to the will of God only, is also not human life. Human life is a combination of the animal life and the divine life. And the more this combination approaches to the divine life, the more life there is in it.

Life, according to the Christian religion, is a progress toward the divine perfection. No one condition, according to this doctrine, can be higher or lower than another. Every condition, according to this doctrine, is only a particular stage, of no consequence in itself, on the way toward unattainable perfection, and therefore in itself it does not imply a greater or lesser degree of life. Increase of life, according to this, consists in nothing but the quickening of the progress toward perfection. And therefore the progress toward perfection of the publican Zaccheus, of the woman that was a sinner, and of the robber on the cross, implies a higher degree of life than the stagnant righteousness of the Pharisee. And therefore for this religion there cannot be rules which it is obligatory to obey. The man who is at a lower level but is moving onward toward perfection is living a more moral, a better life, is more fully carrying out Christ’s teaching, than the man on a much higher level of morality who is not moving onward toward perfection.

It is in this sense that the lost sheep is dearer to the Father than those that were not lost. The prodigal son, the piece of money lost and found again, were more precious than those that were not lost.

The fulfillment of Christ’s teaching consists in moving away from self toward God. It is obvious that there cannot be definite laws and rules for this fulfillment of the teaching. Every degree of perfection and every degree of imperfection are equal in it; no obedience to laws constitutes a fulfillment of this doctrine, and therefore for it there can be no binding rules and laws.

From this fundamental distinction between the religion of Christ and all preceding religions based on the state conception of life, follows a corresponding difference in the special precepts of the state theory and the Christian precepts. The precepts of the state theory of life insist for the most part on certain practical prescribed acts, by which men are justified and secure of being right. The Christian precepts (the commandment of love is not a precept in the strict sense of the word, but the expression of the very essence of the religion) are the five commandments of the Sermon on the Mount — all negative in character. They show only what at a certain stage of development of humanity men may not do.

These commandments are, as it were, signposts on the endless road to perfection, toward which humanity is moving, showing the point of perfection which is possible at a certain period in the development of humanity.

Christ has given expression in the Sermon on the Mount to the eternal ideal toward which men are spontaneously struggling, and also the degree of attainment of it to which men may reach in our times.

The ideal is not to desire to do ill to anyone, not to provoke ill will, to love all men. The precept, showing the level below which we cannot fall in the attainment of this ideal, is the prohibition of evil speaking. And that is the first command.

The ideal is perfect chastity, even in thought. The precept, showing the level below which we cannot fall in the attainment of this ideal, is that of purity of married life, avoidance of debauchery. That is the second command.

The ideal is to take no thought for the future, to live in the present moment. The precept, showing the level below which we cannot fall, is the prohibition of swearing, of promising anything in the future. And that is the third command.

The ideal is never for any purpose to use force. The precept, showing the level below which we cannot fall is that of returning good for evil, being patient under wrong, giving the cloak also. That is the fourth command.

The ideal is to love the enemies who hate us. The precept, showing the level below which we cannot fall, is not to do evil to our enemies, to speak well of them, and to make no difference between them and our neighbors.

All these precepts are indications of what, on our journey to perfection, we are already fully able to avoid, and what we must labor to attain now, and what we ought by degrees to translate into instinctive and unconscious habits. But these precepts, far from constituting the whole of Christ’s teaching and exhausting it, are simply stages on the way to perfection. These precepts must and will be followed by higher and higher precepts on the way to the perfection held up by the religion.

And therefore it is essentially a part of the Christian religion to make demands higher than those expressed in its precepts; and by no means to diminish the demands either of the ideal itself, or of the precepts, as people imagine who judge it from the standpoint of the social conception of life.

So much for one misunderstanding of the scientific men, in relation to the import and aim of Christ’s teaching. Another misunderstanding arising from the same source consists in substituting love for men, the service of humanity, for the Christian principles of love for God and his service.

The Christian doctrine to love God and serve him, and only as a result of that love to love and serve one’s neighbor, seems to scientific men obscure, mystic, and arbitrary. And they would absolutely exclude the obligation of love and service of God, holding that the doctrine of love for men, for humanity alone, is far more clear, tangible, and reasonable.

Scientific men teach in theory that the only good and rational life is that which is devoted to the service of the whole of humanity. That is for them the import of the Christian doctrine, and to that they reduce Christ’s teaching. They seek confirmation of their own doctrine in the Gospel, on the supposition that the two doctrines are really the same.

This idea is an absolutely mistaken one. The Christian doctrine has nothing in common with the doctrine of the Positivists, Communists, and all the apostles of the universal brotherhood of mankind, based on the general advantage of such a brotherhood. They differ from one another especially in Christianity’s having a firm and clear basis in the human soul, while love for humanity is only a theoretical deduction from analogy.

The doctrine of love for humanity alone is based on the social conception of life.

The essence of the social conception of life consists in the transference of the aim of the individual life to the life of societies of individuals: family, clan, tribe, or state. This transference is accomplished easily and naturally in its earliest forms, in the transference of the aim of life from the individual to the family and the clan. The transference to the tribe or the nation is more difficult and requires special training. And the transference of the sentiment to the state is the furthest limit which the process can reach.

To love one’s self is natural to everyone, and no one needs any encouragement to do so. To love one’s clan who support and protect one, to love one’s wife, the joy and help of one’s existence, one’s children, the hope and consolation of one’s life, and one’s parents, who have given one life and education, is natural. And such love, though far from being so strong as love of self, is met with pretty often.

To love — for one’s own sake, through personal pride — one’s tribe, one’s nation, though not so natural, is nevertheless common. Love of one’s own people who are of the same blood, the same tongue, and the same religion as one’s self is possible, though far from being so strong as love of self, or even love of family or clan. But love for a state, such as Turkey, Germany, England, Austria, or Russia is a thing almost impossible. And though it is zealously inculcated, it is only an imagined sentiment; it has no existence in reality. And at that limit man’s power of transferring his interest ceases, and he cannot feel any direct sentiment for that fictitious entity. The Positivists, however, and all the apostles of fraternity on scientific principles, without taking into consideration the weakening of sentiment in proportion to the extension of its object, draw further deductions in theory in the same direction. “Since,” they say, “it was for the advantage of the individual to extend his personal interest to the family, the tribe, and subsequently to the nation and the state, it would be still more advantageous to extend his interest in societies of men to the whole of mankind, and so all to live for humanity just as men live for the family or the state.”

Theoretically it follows, indeed, having extended the love and interest for the personality to the family, the tribe, and thence to the nation and the state, it would be perfectly logical for men to save themselves the strife and calamities which result from the division of mankind into nations and states by extending their love to the whole of humanity. This would be most logical, and theoretically nothing would appear more natural to its advocates, who do not observe that love is a sentiment which may or may not he felt, but which it is useless to advocate; and moreover, that love must have an object, and that humanity is not an object. It is nothing but a fiction.

The family, the tribe, even the state were not invented by men, but formed themselves spontaneously, like ant-hills or swarms of bees, and have a real existence. The man who, for the sake of his own animal personality, loves his family, knows whom he loves: Anna, Dolly, John, Peter, and so on. The man who loves his tribe and takes pride in it, knows that he loves all the Guelphs or all the Ghibellines; the man who loves the state knows that he loves France bounded by the Rhine, and the Pyrenees, and its principal city Paris, and its history and so on. But the man who loves humanity — what does he love? There is such a thing as a state, as a nation; there is the abstract conception of man; but humanity as a concrete idea does not, and cannot exist.

Humanity! Where is the definition of humanity? Where does it end and where does it begin? Does humanity end with the savage, the idiot, the dipsomaniac, or the madman? If we draw a line excluding from humanity its lowest representatives, where are we to draw the line? Shall we exclude the negroes like the Americans, or the Hindoos like some Englishmen, or the Jews like some others? If we include all men without exception, why should we not include also the higher animals, many of whom are superior to the lowest specimens of the human race.

We know nothing of humanity as an eternal object, and we know nothing of its limits. Humanity is a fiction, and it is impossible to love it. It would, doubtless, be very advantageous if men could love humanity just as they love their family. It would be very advantageous, as Communists advocate, to replace the competitive, individualistic organization of men’s activity by a social universal organization, so that each would be for all and all for each.

Only there are no motives to lead men to do this. The Positivists, the Communists, and all the apostles of fraternity on scientific principles advocate the extension to the whole of humanity of the love men feel for themselves, their families, and the state. They forget that the love which they are discussing is a personal love, which might expand in a rarefied form to embrace a man’s native country, but which disappears before it can embrace an artificial state such as Austria, England, or Turkey, and which we cannot even conceive of in relation to all humanity, an absolutely mystic conception.

“A man loves himself (his animal personality), he loves his family, he even loves his native country. Why should he not love humanity? That would be such an excellent thing. And by the way, it is precisely what is taught by Christianity.” So think the advocates of Positivist, Communistic, or Socialistic fraternity.

It would indeed be an excellent thing. But it can never be, for the love that is based on a personal or social conception of life can never rise beyond love for the state.

The fallacy of the argument lies in the fact that the social conception of life, on which love for family and nation is founded, rests itself on love of self, and that love grows weaker and weaker as it is extended from self to family, tribe, nationality, and slate; and in the state we reach the furthest limit beyond which it cannot go.

The necessity of extending the sphere of love is beyond dispute. But in reality the possibility of this love is destroyed by the necessity of extending its object indefinitely. And thus the insufficiency of personal human love is made manifest.

And here the advocates of Positivist, Communistic, Socialistic fraternity propose to draw upon Christian love to make up the default of this bankrupt human love; but Christian love only in its results, not in its foundations. They propose love for humanity alone, apart from love for God.

But such a love cannot exist. There is no motive to produce it. Christian love is the result only of the Christian conception of life, in which the aim of life is to love and serve God.

The social conception of life has led men, by a natural transition from love of self and then of family, tribe, nation, and state, to a consciousness of the necessity of love for humanity, a conception which has no definite limits and extends to all living things. And this necessity for love of what awakens no kind of sentiment in a man is a contradiction which cannot be solved by the social theory of life.

The Christian doctrine in its full significance can alone solve it, by giving a new meaning to life. Christianity recognizes love of self, of family, of nation, and of humanity, and not only of humanity, but of everything living, everything existing; it recognizes the necessity of an infinite extension of the sphere of love. But the object of this love is not found outside self in societies of individuals, nor in the external world, but within self, in the divine self whose essence is that very love, which the animal self is brought to feel the need of through its consciousness of its own perishable nature.

The difference between the Christian doctrine and those which preceded it is that the social doctrine said: “Live in opposition to your nature [understanding by this only the animal nature], make it subject to the external law of family, society, and state.” Christianity says: “Live according to your nature [understanding by this the divine nature]; do not make it subject to anything — neither you (an animal self) nor that of others — and you will attain the very aim to which you are striving when you subject your external self.”

The Christian doctrine brings a man to the elementary consciousness of self, only not of the animal self, but of the divine self, the divine spark, the self as the Son of God, as much God as the Father himself, though confined in an animal husk. The consciousness of being the Son of God, whose chief characteristic is love, satisfies the need for the extension of the sphere of love to which the man of the social conception of life had been brought. For the latter, the welfare of the personality demanded an ever-widening extension of the sphere of love; love was a necessity and was confined to certain objects — self, family, society. With the Christian conception of life, love is not a necessity and is confined to no object; it is the essential faculty of the human soul. Man loves not because it is his interest to love this or that, but because love is the essence of his soul, because he cannot but love.

The Christian doctrine shows man that the essence of his soul is love — that his happiness depends not on loving this or that object, but on loving the principle of the whole — God, whom he recognizes within himself as love, and therefore he loves all things and all men.

In this is the fundamental difference between the Christian doctrine and the doctrine of the Positivists, and all the theorizers about universal brotherhood on non-Christian principles.

Such are the two principal misunderstandings relating to the Christian religion, from which the greater number of false reasonings about it proceed. The first consists in the belief that Christ’s teaching instructs men, like all previous religions, by rules, which they are bound to follow, and that these rules cannot be fulfilled. The second is the idea that the whole purport of Christianity is to teach men to live advantageously together, as one family, and that to attain this we need only follow the rule of love to humanity, dismissing all thought of love of God altogether.

The mistaken notion of scientific men that the essence of Christianity consists in the supernatural, and that its moral teaching is impracticable, constitutes another reason of the failure of men of the present day to understand Christianity.

Chapter 5: Contradiction Between Our Life and Our Christian Conscience

Men Think they can Accept Christianity without Altering their

Life — Pagan Conception of Life does not Correspond with Present

Stage of Development of Humanity, and Christian Conception

Alone Can Accord with it — Christian Conception of Life not yet

Understood by Men, but the Progress of Life itself will Lead

them Inevitably to Adopt it — The Requirements of a New Theory

of Life Always Seem Incomprehensible, Mystic, and Supernatural

— So Seem the Requirements of the Christian Theory of Life to

the Majority of Men — The Absorption of the Christian Conception

of Life will Inevitably be Brought About as the Result of

Material and Spiritual Causes — The Fact of Men Knowing the

Requirements of the Higher View of Life, and yet Continuing to

Preserve Inferior Organizations of Life, Leads to

Contradictions and Sufferings which Embitter Existence and Must

Result in its Transformation — The Contradictions of our Life —

The Economic Contradiction and the Suffering Induced by it for

Rich and Poor Alike — The Political Contradiction and the

Sufferings Induced by Obedience to the Laws of the State — The

International Contradiction and the Recognition of it by

Contemporaries: Komarovsky, Ferri, Booth, Passy, Lawson,

Wilson, Bartlett, Defourney, Moneta — The Striking Character of

the Military Contradiction.

There are many reasons why Christ’s teaching is not understood. One reason is that people suppose they have understood it when they have decided, as the Churchmen do, that it was revealed by supernatural means, or when they have studied, as the scientific men do, the external forms in which it has been manifested. Another reason is the mistaken notion that it is impracticable, and ought to be replaced by the doctrine of love for humanity. But the principal reason, which is the source of all the other mistaken ideas about it, is the notion that Christianity is a doctrine which can be accepted or rejected without any change of life.

Men who are used to the existing order of things, who like it and dread its being changed, try to take the doctrine as a collection of revelations and rules which one can accept without their modifying one’s life. While Christ’s teaching is not only a doctrine which gives rules which a man must follow, it unfolds a new meaning in life, and defines a whole world of human activity quite different from all that has preceded it and appropriate to the period on which man is entering.

The life of humanity changes and advances, like the life of the individual, by stages, and every stage has a theory of life appropriate to it, which is inevitably absorbed by men. Those who do not absorb it consciously, absorb it unconsciously. It is the same with the changes in the beliefs of peoples and of all humanity as it is with the changes of belief of individuals. If the father of a family continues to be guided in his conduct by his childish conceptions of life, life becomes so difficult for him that he involuntarily seeks another philosophy and readily absorbs that which is appropriate to his age.

That is just what is happening now to humanity at this time of transition through which we are passing, from the pagan conception of life to the Christian. The socialized man of the present day is brought by experience of life itself to the necessity of abandoning the pagan conception of life, which is inappropriate to the present stage of humanity, and of submitting to the obligation of the Christian doctrines, the truths of which, however corrupt and misinterpreted, are still known to him, and alone offer him a solution of the contradictions surrounding him.

If the requirements of the Christian doctrine seem strange and even alarming to the than of the social theory of life, no less strange, incomprehensible, and alarming to the savage of ancient times seemed the requirements of the social doctrine when it was not fully understood and could not be foreseen in its results.

“It is unreasonable,” said the savage, “to sacrifice my peace of mind or my life in defense of something incomprehensible, impalpable, and conventional — family, tribe, or nation; and above all it is unsafe to put oneself at the disposal of the power of others.”

But the time came when the savage, on one hand, felt, though vaguely, the value of the social conception of life, and of its chief motor power, social censure, or social approbation — glory, and when, on the other hand, the difficulties of his personal life became so great that he could not continue to believe in the value of his old theory of life. Then he accepted the social, state theory of life and submitted to it.

That is just what the man of the social theory of life is passing through now.

“It is unreasonable,” says the socialized man, “to sacrifice my welfare and that of my family and my country in order to fulfill some higher law, which requires me to renounce my most natural and virtuous feelings of love of self, of family, of kindred, and of country; and above all, it is unsafe to part with the security of life afforded by the organization of government.”

But the time is coming when, on one hand, the vague consciousness in his soul of the higher law, of love to God and his neighbor, and, on the other hand, the suffering, resulting from the contradictions of life, will force the man to reject the social theory and to assimilate the new one prepared ready for him, which solves all the contradictions and removes all his sufferings — the Christian theory of life. And this time has now come.

We, who thousands of years ago passed through the transition, from the personal, animal view of life to the socialized view, imagine that that transition was an inevitable and natural one; but this transition though which we have been passing for the last eighteen hundred years seems arbitrary, unnatural, and alarming. But we only fancy this because that first transition has been so fully completed that the practice attained by it has become unconscious and instinctive in us, while the present transition is not yet over and we have to complete it consciously.

It took ages, thousands of years, for the social conception of life to permeate men’s consciousness. It went through various forms and has now passed into the region of the instinctive through inheritance, education, and habit. And therefore it seems natural to us. But five thousand years ago it seemed as unnatural and alarming to men as the Christian doctrine in its true sense seems to-day.

We think to-day that the requirements of the Christian doctrine — of universal brotherhood, suppression of national distinctions, abolition of private property, and the strange injunction of non-resistance to evil by force — demand what is impossible. But it was just the same thousands of years ago, with every social or even family duty, such as the duty of parents to support their children, of the young to maintain the old, of fidelity in marriage. Still more strange, and even unreasonable, seemed the state duties of submitting to the appointed authority, and paying taxes, and fighting in defense of the country, and so on. All such requirements seem simple, comprehensible, and natural to us to-day, and we see nothing mysterious or alarming in them. But three or five thousand years ago they seemed to require what was impossible.

The social conception of life served as the basis of religion because at the time when it was first presented to men it seemed to them absolutely incomprehensible, mystic, and supernatural. Now that we have outlived that phase of the life of humanity, we understand the rational grounds for uniting men in families, communities, and states. But in antiquity the duties involved by such association were presented under cover of the supernatural and were confirmed by it.

The patriarchal religions exalted the family, the tribe, the nation. State religions deified emperors and states. Even now most ignorant people — like our peasants, who call the Tzar an earthly god — obey state laws, not through any rational recognition of their necessity, nor because they have any conception of the meaning of state, but through a religious sentiment.

In precisely the same way the Christian doctrine is presented to men of the social or heathen theory of life to-day, in the guise of a supernatural religion, though there is in reality nothing mysterious, mystic, or supernatural about it. It is simply the theory of life which is appropriate to the present degree of material development, the present stage of growth of humanity, and which must therefore inevitably be accepted.

The time will come — it is already coming — when the Christian principles of equality and fraternity, community of property, non-resistance of evil by force, will appear just as natural and simple as the principles of family or social life seem to us now.

Humanity can no more go backward in its development than the individual man. Men have outlived the social, family, and state conceptions of life. Now they must go forward and assimilate the next and higher conception of life, which is what is now taking place. This change is brought about in two ways: consciously through spiritual causes, and unconsciously through material causes.

Just as the individual man very rarely changes his way of life at the dictates of his reason alone, but generally continues to live as before, in spite of the new interests and aims revealed to him by his reason, and only alters his way of living when it has become absolutely opposed to his conscience, and consequently intolerable to him; so, too, humanity, long after it has learnt through its religions the new interests and aims of life, toward which it must strive, continues in the majority of its representatives to live as before, and is only brought to accept the new conception by finding it impossible to go on living its old life as before.

Though the need of a change of life is preached by the religious leaders and recognized and realized by the most intelligent men, the majority, in spite of their reverential attitude to their leaders, that is, their faith in their teaching, continue to be guided by the old theory of life in their present complex existence. As though the father of a family, knowing how he ought to behave at his age, should yet continue through habit and thoughtlessness to live in the same childish way as he did in boyhood.

That is just what is happening in the transition of humanity from one stage to another, through which we are passing now. Humanity has outgrown its social stage and has entered upon a new period. It recognizes the doctrine which ought to be made the basis of life in this new period. But through inertia it continues to keep up the old forms of life. From this inconsistency between the new conception of life and practical life follows a whole succession of contradictions and sufferings which embitter our life and necessitate its alteration.

One need only compare the practice of life with the theory of it, to be dismayed at the glaring antagonism between our conditions of life and our conscience.

Our whole life is in flat contradiction with all we know, and with all we regard as necessary and right. This contradiction runs through everything, in economic life, in political life, and in international life. As though the had forgotten what we knew and put away for a time the principles we believe in (we cannot help still believing in them because they are the only foundation we have to base our life on) we do the very opposite of all that our conscience and our common sense require of us.

We are guided in economical, political, and international questions by the principles which were appropriate to men of three or five thousand years ago, though they are directly opposed to our conscience and the conditions of life in which we are placed to-day.

It was very well for the man of ancient times to live in a society based on the division of mankind into masters and slaves, because he believed that such a distinction was decreed by God and must always exist. But is such a belief possible in these days?

The man of antiquity could believe he had the right to enjoy the good things of this world at the expense of other men, and to keep them in misery for generations, since he believed that men came from different origins, were base or noble in blood, children of Ham or of Japhet. The greatest sages of the world, the teachers of humanity, Plato and Aristotle, justified the existence of slaves and demonstrated the lawfulness of slavery; and even three centuries ago, the men who described an imaginary society of the future, Utopia, could not conceive of it without slaves.

Men of ancient and medieval times believed, firmly believed, that men are not equal, that the only true men are Persians, or Greeks, or Romans, or Franks. But we cannot believe that now. And people who sacrifice themselves for the principles of aristocracy and of patriotism to-duty, don’t believe and can’t believe what they assert.

We all know and cannot help knowing — even though we may never have heard the idea clearly expressed, may never have read of it, and may never have put it into words, still through unconsciously imbibing the Christian sentiments that are in the air — with our whole heart we know and cannot escape knowing the fundamental truth of the Christian doctrine, that we are all sons of one Father, wherever we may live and whatever language we may speak; we are all brothers and are subject to the same law of love implanted by our common Father in our hearts.

Whatever the opinions and degree of education of a man of to-day, whatever his shade of liberalism, whatever his school of philosophy, or of science, or of economics, however ignorant or superstitious he may be, every man of the present day knows that all men have an equal right to life and the good things of life, and that one set of people are no better nor worse than another, that all are equal. Everyone knows this, beyond doubt; everyone feels it in his whole being. Yet at the same time everyone sees all round him the division of men into two castes — the one, laboring, oppressed, poor, and suffering, the other idle, oppressing, luxurious, and profligate. And everyone not only sees this, but voluntarily or involuntarily, in one way or another, he takes part in maintaining this distinction which his conscience condemns. And he cannot help suffering from the consciousness of this contradiction and his share in it.

Whether he be master or slave, the man of to-day cannot help constantly feeling the painful opposition between his conscience and actual life, and the miseries resulting from it.

The toiling masses, the immense majority of mankind who are suffering under the incessant, meaningless, and hopeless toil and privation in which their whole life is swallowed up, still find their keenest suffering in the glaring contrast between what is and what ought to be, according to all the beliefs held by themselves, and those who have brought them to that condition and keep them in it.

They know that they are in slavery and condemned to privation and darkness to minister to the lusts of the minority who keep them down. They know it, and they say so plainly. And this knowledge increases their sufferings and constitutes its bitterest sting.

The slave of antiquity knew that he was a slave by nature, but our laborer, while he feels he is a slave, knows that he ought not to be, and so he tastes the agony of Tantalus, forever desiring and never gaining what might and ought to be his.

The sufferings of the working classes, springing from the contradiction between what is and what ought to be, are increased tenfold by the envy and hatred engendered by their consciousness of it.

The laborer of the present day would not cease to suffer even if his toil were much lighter than that of the slave of ancient times, even if he gained an eight-hour working day and a wage of three dollars a day. For he is working at the manufacture of things which he will not enjoy, working not by his own will for his own benefit, but through necessity, to satisfy the desires of luxurious and idle people in general, and for the profit of a single rich man, the owner of a factory or workshop in particular. And he knows that all this is going on in a world in which it is a recognized scientific principle that labor alone creates wealth, and that to profit by the labor of others is immoral, dishonest, and punishable by law; in a world, moreover, which professes to believe Christ’s doctrine that we are all brothers, and that true merit and dignity is to be found in serving one’s neighbor, not in exploiting him. All this he knows, and he cannot but suffer keenly from the sharp contrast between what is and what ought to be.

“According to all principles, according to all I know, and what everyone professes,” the workman says to himself. “I ought to be free, equal to everyone else, and loved; and I am — a slave, humiliated and hated.” And he too is filled with hatred and tries to find means to escape from his position, to shake off the enemy who is over-riding him, and to oppress him in turn. People say, “Workmen have no business to try to become capitalists, the poor to try to put themselves in the place of the rich.” That is a mistake. The workingmen and the poor would be wrong if they tried to do so in a world in which slaves and masters were regarded as different species created by God; but they are living in a world which professes the faith of the Gospel, that all are alike sons of God, and so brothers and equal. And however men may try to conceal it, one of the first conditions of Christian life is love, not in words but in deeds.

The man of the so-called educated classes lives in still more glaring inconsistency and suffering. Every educated man, if he believes in anything, believes in the brotherhood of all men, or at least he has a sentiment of humanity, or else of justice, or else he believes in science. And all the while he knows that his whole life is framed on principles in direct opposition to it all, to all the principles of Christianity, humanity, justice, and science.

He knows that all the habits in which he has been brought up, and which he could not give up without suffering, can only be satisfied through the exhausting, often fatal, toil of oppressed laborers, that is, through the most obvious and brutal violation of the principles of Christianity, humanity, and justice, and even of science (that is, economic science). He advocates the principles of fraternity, humanity, justice, and science, and yet he lives so that he is dependent on the oppression of the working classes, which he denounces, and his whole life is based on the advantages gained by their oppression. Moreover he is directing every effort to maintaining this state of things so flatly opposed to all his beliefs.

We are all brothers — and yet every morning a brother or a sister must empty the bedroom slops for me. We are all brothers, but every morning I must have a cigar, a sweetmeat, an ice, and such things, which my brothers and sisters have been wasting their health in manufacturing, and I enjoy these things and demand them. We are all brothers, yet I live by working in a bank, or mercantile house, or shop at making all goods dearer for my brothers. We are all brothers, but I live on a salary paid me for prosecuting, judging, and condemning the thief or the prostitute whose existence the whole tenor of my life tends to bring about, and who I know ought not to be punished but reformed. We are all brothers, but I live on the salary I gain by collecting taxes from needy laborers to be spent on the luxuries of the rich and idle. We are all brothers, but I take a stipend for preaching a false Christian religion, which I do not myself believe in, and which only serve’s to hinder men from understanding true Christianity. I take a stipend as priest or bishop for deceiving men in the matter of the greatest importance to them. We are all brothers, but I will not give the poor the benefit of my educational, medical, or literary labors except for money. We are all brothers, yet I take a salary for being ready to commit murder, for teaching men to murder, or making firearms, gunpowder, or fortifications.

The whole life of the upper classes is a constant inconsistency. The more delicate a man’s conscience is, the more painful this contradiction is to him.

A man of sensitive conscience cannot but suffer if he lives such a life. The only means by which he can escape from this suffering is by blunting his conscience, but even if some men succeed in dulling their conscience they cannot dull their fears.

The men of the higher dominating classes whose conscience is naturally not sensitive or has become blunted, if they don’t suffer through conscience, suffer from fear and hatred. They are bound to suffer. They know all the hatred of them existing, and inevitably existing in the working classes. They are aware that the working classes know that they are deceived and exploited, and that they are beginning to organize themselves to shake off oppression and revenge themselves on their oppressors. The higher classes see the unions, the strikes, the May Day Celebrations, and feel the calamity that is threatening them, and their terror passes into an instinct of self-defense and hatred. They know that if for one instant they are worsted in the struggle with their oppressed slaves, they will perish, because the slaves are exasperated and their exasperation is growing more intense with every day of oppression. The oppressors, even if they wished to do so, could not make an end to oppression. They know that they themselves will perish directly they even relax the harshness of their oppression. And they do not relax it, in spite of all their pretended care for the welfare of the working classes, for the eight-hour day, for regulation of the labor of minors and of women, for savings banks and pensions. All that is humbug, or else simply anxiety to keep the slave fit to do his work. But the slave is still a slave, and the master who cannot live without a slave is less disposed to set him free than ever.

The attitude of the ruling classes to the laborers is that of a man who has felled his adversary to the earth and holds him down, not so much because he wants to hold him down, as because he knows that if he let him go, even for a second, he would himself be stabbed, for his adversary is infuriated and has a knife in his hand. And therefore, whether their conscience is tender or the reverse, our rich men cannot enjoy the wealth they have filched from the poor as the ancients did who believed in their right to it. Their whole life and all their enjoyments are embittered either by the stings of conscience or by terror.

So much for the economic contradiction. The political contradiction is even more striking.

All men are brought up to the habit of obeying the laws of the state before everything. The whole existence of modern times is defined by laws. A man marries and is divorced, educates his children, and even (in many countries) professes his religious faith in accordance with the law. What about the law then which defines our whose existence? Do men believe in it? Do they regard it as good? Not at all. In the majority of cases people of the present time do not believe in the justice of the law, they despise it, but still they obey it. It was very well for the men of the ancient world to observe their laws. They firmly believed that their law (it was generally of a religious character) was the only just law, which everyone ought to obey. But is it so with us? we know and cannot help knowing that the law of our country is not the one eternal law; that it is only one of the many laws of different countries, which are equally imperfect, often obviously wrong and unjust, and are criticised from every point of view in the newspapers. The Jew might well obey his laws, since he had not the slightest doubt that God had written them with his finger; the Roman too might well obey the laws which he thought had been dictated by the nymph Egeria. Men might well observe the laws if they believed the Tzars who made them were God’s anointed, or even if they thought they were the work of assemblies of lawgivers who had the power and the desire to make them as good as possible. But we all know how our laws are made. We have all been behind the scenes, we know that they are the product of covetousness, trickery, and party struggles; that there is not and cannot be any real justice in them. And so modern men cannot believe that obedience to civic or political laws can satisfy the demands of the reason or of human nature. Men have long ago recognized that it is irrational to obey a law the justice of which is very doubtful, and so they cannot but suffer in obeying a law which they do not accept as judicious and binding.

A man cannot but suffer when his whole life is defined beforehand for him by laws, which he must obey under threat of punishment, though he does not believe in their wisdom or justice, and often clearly perceives their injustice, cruelty, and artificiality.

We recognize the uselessness of customs and import duties, and are obliged to pay them. We recognize the uselessness of the expenditure on the maintenance of the Court and other members of Government, and we regard the teaching of the Church as injurious, but we are obliged to bear our share of the expenses of these institutions. We regard the punishments inflicted by law as cruel and shameless, but we must assist in supporting them. We regard as unjust and pernicious the distribution of landed property, but we are obliged to submit to it. We see no necessity for wars and armies, but we must bear terribly heavy burdens in support of troops and war expenses.

But this contradiction is nothing in comparison with the contradiction which confronts us when we turn to international questions, and which demands a solution, under pain of the loss of the sanity and even the existence of the human race. That is the contradiction between the Christian conscience and war.

We are all Christian nations living the same spiritual life, so that every noble and pregnant thought, springing up at one end of the world, is at once communicated to the whole of Christian humanity and evokes everywhere the same emotion at pride and rejoicing without distinction of nationalities. We who love thinkers, philanthropists, poets, and scientific men of foreign origin, and are as proud of the exploits of Father Damien as if he were one of ourselves, we, who have a simple love for men of foreign nationalities, Frenchmen, Germans, Americans, and Englishmen, who respect their qualities, are glad to meet them and make them so warmly welcome, cannot regard war with them as anything heroic. We cannot even imagine without horror the possibility of a disagreement between these people and ourselves which would call for reciprocal murder. Yet we are all bound to take a hand in this slaughter which is bound to come to pass to-morrow not to-day.

It was very well for the Jew, the Greek, and the Roman to defend the independence of his nation by murder. For he piously believed that his people was the only true, fine, and good people dear to God, and all the rest were Philistines, barbarians. Men of medieval times — even up to the end of the last and beginning of this century — might continue to hold this belief. But however much we work upon ourselves we cannot believe it. And this contradiction for men of the present day has become so full of horror that without its solution life is no longer possible.

“We live in a time which is full of inconsistencies,” writes Count Komarovsky, the professor of international law, in his learned treatise.

“The press of ail countries is continually expressing the universal desire for peace, and the general sense of its necessity for all nations.

“Representatives of governments, private persons, and official organs say the same thing; it is repeated in parliamentary debates, diplomatic correspondence, and even in state treaties. At the same time governments are increasing the strength of their armies every year, levying fresh taxes, raising loans, and leaving as a bequest to future generations the duty of repairing the blunders of the senseless policy of the present. What a striking contrast between words and deeds! Of course governments will plead in justification of these measures that all their expenditure and armament are exclusively for purposes of defense. But it remains a mystery to every disinterested man whence they can expect attacks if all the great powers are single-hearted in their policy, in pursuing nothing but self defense. In reality it looks as if each of the great powers were every instant anticipating an attack on the part of the others. And this results in a general feeling of insecurity and superhuman efforts on the part of each government to increase their forces beyond those of the other powers. Such a competition of itself increases the danger of war. Nations cannot endure the constant increase of armies for long, and sooner or later they will prefer war to all the disadvantages of their present position and the constant menace of war. Then the most trifling pretext will be sufficient to throw the whole of Europe into the fire of universal war. And it is a mistaken idea that such a crisis might deliver us from the political and economical troubles that are crushing us. The experience of the wars of latter years teaches us that every war has only intensified national hatreds, made military burdens more crushing and insupportable, and rendered the political and economical grievous and insoluble.”

“Modern Europe keeps under arms an active army of nine millions of men,” writes Enrico Ferri,

“besides fifteen millions of reserve, with an outlay of four hundred millions of francs per annum. By continual increase of the armed force, the sources of social and individual prosperity are paralyzed, and the state of the modern world may be compared to that of a man who condemns himself to wasting from lack of nutrition in order to provide himself with arms, losing thereby the strength to use the arms he provides, under, the weight of which he will at last succumb.”

Charles Booth, in his paper read in London before the Association for the Reform and Codification of the Law of Nations, June 26, 1887, says the same thing. After referring to the same number, nine millions of the active army and fifteen millions of reserve, and the enormous expenditure of governments on the support and arming of these forces, he says:

“These figures represent only a small part of the real cost, because besides the recognized expenditure of the war budget of the various nations, we ought also to take into account the enormous loss to society involved in withdrawing from it such an immense number of its most vigorous men, who are taken from industrial pursuits and every kind of labor, as well as the enormous interest on the sums expended on military preparations without any return. The inevitable result of this expenditure on war and preparations for war is a continually growing national debt. The greater number of loans raised by the governments of Europe were with a view to war. Their total sum amounts to four hundred millions sterling, and these debts are increasing every year.”

The same Professor Komarovsky says in another place:

“We live in troubled times. Everywhere we hear complaints of the depression of trade and manufactures, and the wretchedness of the economic position generally, the miserable conditions of existence of the working classes, and the universal impoverishment of the masses. But in spite of this, governments in their efforts to maintain their independence rush to the greatest extremes of senselessness. New taxes and duties are being devised everywhere, and the financial oppression of the nations knows no limits. If we glance at the budgets of the states of Europe for the last hundred years, what strikes us most of all is their rapid and continually growing increase.

“How can we explain this extraordinary phenomenon which sooner or later threatens us all with inevitable bankruptcy?

“It is caused beyond dispute by the expenditure for the maintenance of armaments which swallows up a third and even a half of all the expenditure of European states. And the most melancholy thing is that one can foresee no limit to this augmentation of the budget and impoverishment of the masses. What is socialism but a protest against this abnormal position in which the greater proportion of the population of our world is placed?

“We are ruining ourselves,” says Frederick Passy in a letter read before the last Congress of Universal Peace (in 1890) in London,

“we are ruining ourselves in order to be able to take part in the senseless wars of the future or to pay the interest on debts we have incurred by the senseless and criminal wars of the past. We are dying of hunger so as to secure the means of killing each other.”

Speaking later on of the way the subject is looked at in France, he says:

“We believe that, a hundred years after the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the citizen, the time has come to recognize the rights of nations and to renounce at once and forever all those undertakings based on fraud and force, which, under the name of conquests, are veritable crimes against humanity, and which, whatever the vanity of monarchs and the pride of nations may think of them, only weaken even those who are triumphant over them.”

“I am surprised at the way religion is carried on in this country,” said Sir Wilfrid Lawson at the same congress.

“You send a boy to Sunday school, and you tell him: ‘Dear boy, you must love your enemies. If another boy strikes you, you mustn’t hit him back, but try to reform him by loving him.’ Well. The boy stays in the Sunday school till he is fourteen or fifteen, and then his friends send him into the army. What has he to do in the army? He certainly won’t love his enemy; quite the contrary, if he can only get at him, he will run him through with his bayonet. That is the nature of all religious teaching in this country. I do not think that that is a very good way of carrying out the precepts of religion. I think if it is a good thing for a boy to love his enemy, it is good for a grown-up man.”

“There are in Europe twenty-eight millions of men under arms,” says Wilson,

“to decide disputes, not by discussion, but by murdering one another. That is the accepted method for deciding disputes among Christian nations. This method is, at the same time, very expensive, for, according to the statistics I have read, the nations of Europe spent in the year 1872 a hundred and fifty millions sterling on preparations for deciding disputes by means of murder. It seems to me, therefore, that in such a state of things one of two alternatives must be admitted: either Christianity is a failure, or those who have undertaken to expound it have failed in doing so. Until our warriors are disarmed and our armies disbanded, the have not the right to call ourselves a Christian nation.”

In a conference on the subject of the duty of Christian ministers to preach against war, G. D. Bartlett said among other things:

“If I understand the Scriptures, I say that men are only playing with Christianity so long as they ignore the question of war. I have lived a longish life and have heard our ministers preach on universal peace hardly half a dozen times. Twenty years ago, in a drawing room, I dared in the presence of forty persons to moot the proposition that war was incompatible with Christianity; I was regarded as an arrant fanatic. The idea that we could get on without war was regarded as unmitigated weakness and folly.”

The Catholic priest Defourney has expressed himself in the same spirit. “One of the first precepts of the eternal law inscribed in the consciences of all men,” says the Abby Defourney,

“is the prohibition of taking the life or shedding the blood of a fellow-creature without sufficient cause, without being forced into the necessity of it. This is one of the commandments which is most deeply stamped in the heart of man. But so soon as it is a question of war, that is, of shedding blood in torrents, men of the present day do not trouble themselves about a sufficient cause. Those who take part in wars do not even think of asking themselves whether there is any justification for these innumerable murders, whether they are justifiable or unjustifiable, lawful or unlawful, innocent or criminal; whether they are breaking that fundamental commandment that forbids killing without lawful cause. But their conscience is mute. War has ceased to be something dependent on moral considerations. In warfare men have in all the toil and dangers they endure no other pleasure than that of being conquerors, no sorrow other than that of being conquered. Don’t tell me that they are serving their country. A great genius answered that long ago in the words that have become a proverb: ‘Without justice, what is an empire but a great band of brigands?’ And is not every band of brigands a little empire? They too have their laws; and they too make war to gain booty, and even for honor.

“The aim of the proposed institution [the institution of an international board of arbitration] is that the nations of Europe may cease to be nations of robbers, and their armies, bands of brigands. And one must add, not only brigands, but slaves. For our armies are simply gangs of slaves at the disposal of one or two commanders or ministers, who exercise a despotic control over them without any real responsibility, as we very well know.

“The peculiarity of a slave is that he is a mere tool in the hands of his master, a thing, not a man. That is just what soldiers, officers, and generals are, going to murder and be murdered at the will of a ruler or rulers. Military slavery is an actual fact, and it is the worst form of slavery, especially now when by means of compulsory service it lays its fetters on the necks of all the strong and capable men of a nation, to make them instruments of murder, butchers of human flesh, for that is all they are taken and trained to do.

“The rulers, two or three in number, meet together in cabinets, secretly deliberate without registers, without publicity, and consequently without responsibility, and send men to be murdered.”

“Protests against armaments, burdensome to the people, have not originated in our times,” says Signor E. G. Moneta.

“Hear what Montesquieu wrote in his day. ‘France [and one might say, Europe] will be ruined by soldiers. A new plague is spreading throughout Europe. It attacks sovereigns and forces them to maintain an incredible number of armed men. This plague is infectious and spreads, because directly one government increases its armament, all the others do likewise. So that nothing is gained by it but general ruin.

“‘Every government maintains as great an army as it possibly could maintain if its people were threatened with extermination, and people call peace this state of tension of all against all. And therefore Europe is so ruined that if private persons were in the position of the governments of our continent, the richest of them would not have enough to live on. We are poor though we have the wealth and trade of the whole world.’

“That was written almost 150 years ago. The picture seems drawn from the world of to-day. One thing only has changed-the form of government. In Montesquieu’s time it was said that the cause of the maintenance of great armaments was the despotic power of kings, who made war in the hope of augmenting by conquest their personal revenues and gaining glory. People used to say then: ‘Ah, if only people could elect those who would have the right to refuse governments the soldiers and the money — then there would be an end to military politics.’ Now there are representative governments in almost the whole of Europe, and in spite of that, war expenditures and the preparations for war have increased to alarming proportions.

“It is evident that the insanity of sovereigns has gained possession of the ruling classes. War is not made now because one king has been wanting in civility to the mistress of another king, as it was in Louis XIV.’s time. But the natural and honorable sentiments of national honor and patriotism are so exaggerated, and the public opinion of one nation so excited against another, that it is enough for a statement to be made (even though it may be a false report) that the ambassador of one state was not received by the principal personage of another state to cause the outbreak of the most awful and destructive war there has ever been seen. Europe keeps more soldiers under arms to-day than in the time of the great Napoleonic wars. All citizens with few exceptions are forced to spend some years in barracks. Fortresses, arsenals, and ships are built, new weapons are constantly being invented, to be replaced in a short time by fresh ones, for, sad to say, science, which ought always to be aiming at the good of humanity, assists in the work of destruction, and is constantly inventing new means for killing the greatest number of men in the shortest time. And to maintain so great a multitude of soldiers and to make such vast preparations for murder, hundreds of millions are spent annually, sums which would be sufficient for the education of the people and for immense works of public utility, and which would make it possible to find a peaceful solution of the social question.

“Europe, then, is, in this respect, in spite of all the conquests of science, in the same position as in the darkest and most barbarous days of the Middle Ages. All deplore this state of things — neither peace nor war — and all would be glad to escape from it. The heads of governments all declare that they all wish for peace, and vie with one another in the most solemn protestations of peaceful intentions. But the same day or the next they will lay a scheme for the increase of the armament before their legislative assembly, saying that these are the preventive measures they take for the very purpose of securing peace.

“But this is not the kind of peace we want. And the nations are not deceived by it. True peace is based on mutual confidence, while these huge armaments show open and utter lack of confidence, if not concealed hostility, between states. What should we say of a man who, wanting to show his friendly feelings for his neighbor, should invite him to discuss their differences with a loaded revolver in his hand?

“It is just this flagrant contradiction between the peaceful professions and the warlike policy of governments which all good citizens desire to put an end to, at any cost.”

People are astonished that every year there are sixty thousand cases of suicide in Europe, and those only the recognized and recorded cases — and excluding Russia and Turkey; but one ought rather to be surprised that there are so few. Every man of the present day, if we go deep enough into the contradiction between his conscience and his life, is in a state of despair.

Not to speak of all the other contradictions between modern life and the conscience, the permanently armed condition of Europe together with its profession of Christianity is alone enough to drive any man to despair, to doubt of the sanity of mankind, and to terminate an existence in this senseless and brutal world. This contradiction, which is a quintessence of all the other contradictions, is so terrible that to live and to take part in it is only possible if one does not think of it — if one is able to forget it.

What! all of us, Christians, not only profess to love one another, but do actually live one common life; we whose social existence beats with one common pulse — we aid one another, learn from one another, draw ever closer to one another to our mutual happiness, and find in this closeness the whole meaning of life! — and to-morrow some crazy ruler will say some stupidity, and another will answer in the same spirit, and then I must go expose myself to being murdered, and murder men — who have done me no harm — and more than that, whom I love. And this is not a remote contingency, but the very thing we are all preparing for, which is not only probable, but an inevitable certainty.

To recognize this clearly is enough to drive a man out of his senses or to make him shoot himself. And this is just what does happen, and especially often among military men. A man need only come to himself for an instant to be impelled inevitably to such an end.

And this is the only explanation of the dreadful intensity with which men of modern times strive to stupefy themselves, with spirits, tobacco, opium, cards, reading newspapers, traveling, and all kinds of spectacles and amusements. These pursuits are followed up as an important, serious business. And indeed they are a serious business. If there were no external means of dulling their sensibilities, half of mankind would shoot themselves without delay, for to live in opposition to one’s reason is the most intolerable condition. And that is the condition of all men of the present day. All men of the modern world exist in a state of continual and flagrant antagonism between their conscience and their way of life. This antagonism is apparent in economic as well as political life. But most striking of all is the contradiction between the Christian law of the brotherhood of men existing in the conscience and the necessity under which all men are placed by compulsory military service of being prepared for hatred and murder — of being at the same time a Christian and a gladiator.

Chapter 6: Attitude of Men of the Present Day to War

People do not Try to Remove the Contradiction between Life and Conscience by a Change of Life, but their Cultivated Leaders Exert Every Effort to Obscure the Demands of Conscience, and justify their Life; in this Way they Degrade Society below Paganism to a State of Primeval Barbarism — Undefined Attitude of Modern Leaders of Thought to War, to Universal Militarism, and to Compulsory Service in Army — One Section Regards War as an Accidental Political Phenomenon, to be Avoided by External Measures only — Peace Congress — The Article in the REVUE DES REVUES — Proposition of Maxime du Camp — Value of Boards of Arbitration and Suppression of Armies — Attitude of Governments to Men of this Opinion and What they Do — Another Section Regards War as Cruel, but Inevitable — Maupassant — Rod — A Third Section Regard War as Necessary, and not without its Advantages — Doucet-Claretie-Zola-Vogüé.

The antagonism between life and the conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change of life or by a change of conscience. And there would seem there can be no doubt as to these alternatives.

A man may cease to do what he regards as wrong, but he cannot cease to consider wrong what is wrong. Just in the same way all humanity may cease to do what it regards as wrong, but far from being able to change, it cannot even retard for a time the continual growth of a clearer recognition of what is wrong and therefore ought not to be. And therefore it would seem inevitable for Christian men to abandon the pagan forms of society which they condemn, and to reconstruct their social existence on the Christian principles they profess.

So it would be were it not for the law of inertia, as immutable a force in men and nations as in inanimate bodies. In men it takes the form of the psychological principle, so truly expressed in the words of the Gospel, “They have loved darkness better than light because their deeds were evil.” This principle shows itself in men not trying to recognize the truth, but to persuade themselves that the life they are leading, which is what they like and are used to, is a life perfectly consistent with truth.

Slavery was opposed to all the moral principles advocated by Plato and Aristotle, yet neither of them saw that, because to renounce slavery would have meant the break up of the life they were living. We see the same thing in our modern world.

The division of men into two castes, as well as the use of force in government and war, are opposed to every moral principle professed by our modern society. Yet the cultivated and advanced men of the day seem not to see it.

The majority, if not all, of the cultivated men of our day try unconsciously to maintain the old social conception of life, which justifies their position, and to hide from themselves and others its insufficiency, and above all the necessity of adopting the Christian conception of life, which will mean the break up of the whole existing social order. They struggle to keep up the organization based on the social conception of life, but do not believe in it themselves, because it is extinct and it is impossible to believe in it.

All modern literature — philosophical, political, and artistic — is striking in this respect. What wealth of idea, of form, of color, what erudition, what art, but what a lack of serious matter, what dread of any exactitude of thought or expression! Subtleties, allegories, humorous fancies, the widest generalizations, but nothing simple and clear, nothing going straight to the point, that is, to the problem of life.

But that is not all; besides these graceful frivolities, our literature is full of simple nastiness and brutality, of arguments which would lead men back in the most refined way to primeval barbarism, to the principles not only of the pagan, but even of the animal life, which we have left behind us five thousand years ago.

And it could not be otherwise. In their dread of the Christian conception of life which will destroy the social order, which some cling to only from habit, others also from interest, men cannot but be thrown back upon the pagan conception of life and the principles based on it. Nowadays we see advocated not only patriotism and aristocratic principles just as they were advocated two thousand years ago, but even the coarsest epicureanism and animalism, only with this difference, that the men who then professed those views believed in them, while nowadays even the advocates of such views do not believe in them, for they have no meaning for the present day. No one can stand still when the earth is shaking under his feet. If we do not go forward we must go back. And strange and terrible to say, the cultivated men of our day, the leaders of thought, are in reality with their subtle reasoning drawing society back, not to paganism even, but to a state of primitive barbarism.

This tendency on the part of the leading thinkers of the day is nowhere more apparent than in their attitude to the phenomenon in which all the insufficiency of the social conception of life is presented in the most concentrated form — in their attitude, that is, to war, to the general arming of nations, and to universal compulsory service.

The undefined, if not disingenuous, attitude of modern thinkers to this phenomenon is striking. It takes three forms in cultivated society. One section look at it as an incidental phenomenon, arising out of the special political situation of Europe, and consider that this state of things can be reformed without a revolution in the whole internal social order of nations, by external measures of international diplomacy. Another section regard it as something cruel and hideous, but at the same time fated and inevitable, like disease and death. A third party with cool indifference consider war as an inevitable phenomenon, beneficial in its effects and therefore desirable.

Men look at the subject from different points of view, but all alike talk of war as though it were something absolutely independent of the will of those who take part in it. And consequently they do not even admit the natural question which presents itself to every simple man: “How about me — ought I to take any part in it?” In their view no question of this kind even exists, and every man, however he may regard war from a personal standpoint, must slavishly submit to the requirements of the authorities on the subject.

The attitude of the first section of thinkers, those who see a way out of war in international diplomatic measures, is well expressed in the report of the last Peace Congress in London, and the articles and letters upon war that appeared in No. 8 of the REVUE DES REVUES, 1891. The congress after gathering together from various quarters the verbal and written opinion of learned men opened the proceedings by a religious service, and after listening to addresses for five whole days, concluded them by a public dinner and speeches. They adopted the following resolutions:

“1. The congress affirms its belief that the brotherhood of man involves as a necessary consequence a brotherhood of nations.

“2. The congress recognizes the important influence that Christianity exercises on the moral and political progress of mankind, and earnestly urges upon ministers of the Gospel and other religious teachers the duty of setting forth the principles of peace and good will toward men. AND IT RECOMMENDS THAT THE THIRD SUNDAY IN DECEMBER BE SET APART FOR THA PURPOSE.

“3. The congress expresses the opinion that all teachers of history should call the attention of the young to the grave evils inflicted on mankind in all ages by war, and to the fact that such war has been waged for most inadequate causes.

“4. The congress protests against the use of military drill in schools by way of physical exercise, and suggests the formation of brigades for saving life rather than of a quasi-military character; and urges the desirability of impressing on the Board of Examiners who formulate the questions for examination the propriety of guiding the minds of children in the principles of peace.

“5. The congress holds that the doctrine of the Rights of Man requires that the aboriginal and weaker races, their territories and liberties, shall be guarded from injustice and fraud, and that these races shall be shielded against the vices so prevalent among the so-called advanced races of men. It further expresses its conviction that there should be concert of action among the nations for the accomplishment of these ends. The congress expresses its hearty appreciation of the resolutions of the Anti-slavery Conference held recently at Brussels for the amelioration of the condition of the peoples of Africa.

“6. The congress believes that the warlike prejudices and traditions which are still fostered in the various nationalities, and the misrepresentations by leaders of public opinion in legislative assemblies or through the press, are often indirect causes of war, and that these evils should be counteracted by the publication of accurate information tending to the removal of misunderstanding between nations, and recommends the importance of considering the question of commencing an international newspaper with such a purpose.

“7. The congress proposes to the Inter-parliamentary Conference that the utmost support should be given to every project for unification of weights and measures, coinage, tariff, postage, and telegraphic arrangements, etc., which would assist in constituting a commercial, industrial, and scientific union of the peoples.

“8. The congress, in view of the vast social and moral influence of woman, urges upon every woman to sustain the things that make for peace, as otherwise she incurs grave responsibility for the continuance of the systems of militarism.

“9. The congress expresses the hope that the Financial Reform Association and other similar societies in Europe and America should unite in considering means for establishing equitable commercial relations between states, by the reduction of import duties. The congress feels that it can affirm that the whole of Europe desires peace, and awaits with impatience the suppression of armaments, which, under the plea of defense, become in their turn a danger by keeping alive mutual distrust, and are, at the same time, the cause of that general economic disturbance which stands in the way of settling in a satisfactory manner the problems of labor and poverty, which ought to take precedence of all others.

“10. The congress, recognizing that a general disarmament would be the best guarantee of peace and would lead to the solution of the questions which now most divide states, expresses the wish that a congress of representatives of all the states of Europe may be assembled as soon as possible to consider the means of effecting a gradual general disarmament.

“11. The congress, in consideration of the fact that the timidity of a single power might delay the convocation of the above-mentioned congress, is of opinion that the government which should first dismiss any considerable number of soldiers would confer a signal benefit on Europe and mankind, because it would, by public opinion, oblige other governments to follow its example, and by the moral force of this accomplished fact would have increased rather than diminished the conditions of its national defense.

“12. The congress, considering the question of disarmament, as of peace in general, depends on public opinion, recommends the peace societies, as well as all friends of peace, to be active in its propaganda, especially at the time of parliamentary elections, in order that the electors should give their votes to candidates who are pledged to support Peace, Disarmament, and Arbitration.

“13. The congress congratulates the friends of peace on the resolution adopted by the International American Conference, held at Washington in April last, by which it was recommended that arbitration should be obligatory in all controversies, whatever their origin, except only those which may imperil the independence of one of the nations involved.

“14. The congress recommends this resolution to the attention of European statesmen, and expresses the ardent desire that similar treaties may speedily be entered into between the other nations of the world.

“15. The congress expresses its satisfaction at the adoption by the Spanish Senate on June 16 last of a project of law authorizing the government to negotiate general or special treaties of arbitration for the settlement of all disputes except those relating to the independence or internal government of the states affected; also at the adoption of resolutions to a like effect by the Norwegian Storthing and by the Italian Chamber.

“16. The congress resolves that a committee be appointed to address communications to the principal political, religious, commercial, and labor and peace organizations, requesting them to send petitions to the governmental authorities praying that measures be taken for the formation of suitable tribunals for the adjudicature of international questions so as to avoid the resort to war.

“17. Seeing (1) that the object pursued by all peace societies is the establishment of judicial order between nations, and (2) that neutralization by international treaties constitutes a step toward this judicial state and lessens the number of districts in which war can be carried on, the congress recommends a larger extension of the rule of neutralization, and expresses the wish, (1) that all treaties which at present assure to certain states the benefit of neutrality remain in force, or if necessary be amended in a manner to render the neutrality more effective, either by extending neutralization to the whole of the state or by ordering the demolition of fortresses, which constitute rather a peril than a guarantee for neutrality; (2) that new treaties in harmony with the wishes of the populations concerned be concluded for establishing the neutralization of other states.

“18. The sub-committee proposes, (1) that the annual Peace Congress should be held either immediately before the meeting of the annual Sub-parliamentary Conference, or immediately after it in the same town; (2) that the question of an international peace emblem be postponed SINE DIE; (3) that the following resolutions be adopted:

“a. To express satisfaction at the official overtures of the Presbyterian Church in the United States addressed to the highest representatives of each church organization in Christendom to unite in a general conference to promote the substitution of international arbitration for war.

“b. To express in the name of the congress its profound reverence for the memory of Aurelio Saffi, the great Italian jurist, a member of the committee of the International League of Peace and Liberty.

”(4) That the memorial adopted by this congress and

signed by the president to the heads of the civilized states

should, as far as practicable, be presented to each power by

influential deputations.

“(5) That the following resolutions be adopted:

“a. A resolution of thanks to the presidents of the various sittings of the congress.

”b. A resolution of thanks to the chairman, the secretaries,

and the members of the bureau of the congress.

“c. A resolution of thanks to the conveners and members of the sectional committees.

“d. A resolution of thanks to Rev. Canon Scott Holland, Rev. Dr. Reuen Thomas, and Rev. J. Morgan Gibbon for their pulpit addresses before the congress, and also to the authorities of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the City Temple, and Stamford Hill Congregational Church for the use of those buildings for public services.

“e. A letter of thanks to her Majesty for permission to visit Windror Castle.

“f. And also a resolution of thanks to the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress, to Mr. Passmore Edwards, and other friends who have extended their hospitality to the members of the congress.

“19. The congress places on record a heartfelt expression of gratitude to Almighty God for the remarkable harmony and concord which have characterized the meetings of the assembly, in which so many men and women of varied nations, creeds, tongues, and races have gathered in closest co-operation, and for the conclusion of the labors of the congress; and expresses its firm and unshaken belief in the ultimate triumph of the cause of peace and of the principles advocated at these meetings.”

The fundamental idea of the congress is the necessity (1) of diffusing among all people by all means the conviction of the disadvantages of war and the great blessing of peace, and (2) of rousing governments to the sense of the superiority of international arbitration over war and of the consequent advisability and necessity of disarmament. To attain the first aim the congress has recourse to teachers of history, to women, and to the clergy, with the advice to the latter to preach on the evil of war and the blessing of peace every third Sunday in December. To attain the second object the congress appeals to governments with the suggestion that they should disband their armies and replace war by arbitration.

To preach to men of the evil of war and the blessing of peace! But the blessing of peace is so well known to men that, ever since there have been men at all, their best wish has been expressed in the greeting, “Peace be with you.” So why preach about it?

Not only Christians, but pagans, thousands of years ago, all recognized the evil of war and the blessing of peace. So that the recommendation to ministers of the Gospel to preach on the evil of war and the blessing of peace every third Sunday in December is quite superfluous.

The Christian cannot but preach on that subject every day of his life. If Christians and preachers of Christianity do not do so, there must be reasons for it. And until these have been removed no recommendations will be effective. Still less effective will be the recommendations to governments to disband their armies and replace them by international boards of arbitration. Governments, too, know very well the difficulty and the burdensomeness of raising and maintaining forces, and if in spite of that knowledge they do, at the cost of terrible strain and effort, raise and maintain forces, it is evident that they cannot do otherwise, and the recommendation of the congress can never change it. But the learned gentlemen are unwilling to see that, and keep hoping to find a political combination, through which governments shall be induced to limit their powers themselves.

“Can we get rid of war”? asks a learned writer in the REVUE DES

REVUES.

”All are agreed that if it were to break out in Europe, its

consequences would be like those of the great inroads of

barbarians. The existence of whole nationalities would be at

stake, and therefore the war would be desperate, bloody,

atrocious.

“This consideration, together with the terrible engines of destruction invented by modern science, retards the moment of declaring war, and maintains the present temporary situation, which might continue for an indefinite period, except for the fearful cost of maintaining armaments which are exhausting the European states and threatening to reduce nations to a state of misery hardly less than that of war itself.

“Struck by this reflection, men of various countries have tried to find means for preventing, or at least for softening, the results of the terrible slaughter with which we are threatened.

”Such are the questions brought forward by the Peace Congress

shortly to be held in Rome, and the publication of a pamphlet,

Sur le Désarmement.’

“It is unhappily beyond doubt that with the present organization of the majority of European states, isolated from one another and guided by distinct interests, the absolute suppression of war is an illusion with which it would be dangerous to cheat ourselves. Wiser rules and regulations imposed on these duels between nations might, however, at least limit its horrors.

“It is equally chimerical to reckon on projects of disarmament, the execution of which is rendered almost impossible by considerations of a popular character present to the mind of all our readers. [This probably means that France cannot disband its army before taking its revenge.] Public opinion is not prepared to accept them, and moreover, the international relations between different peoples are not such as to make their acceptance possible. Disarmament imposed on one nation by another in circumstances threatening its security would be equivalent to a declaration of war.

“However, one may admit that an exchange of ideas between the nations interested could aid, to a certain degree, in bringing about the good understanding indispensable to any negotiations, and would render possible a considerable reduction of the military expenditure which is crushing the nations of Europe and greatly hindering the solution of the social question, which each individually must solve on pain of having internal war as the price for escaping it externally.

“We might at least demand the reduction of the enormous expenses of war organized as it is at present with a view to the power of invasion within twenty-four hours and a decisive battle within a week of the declaration of war.

“We ought to manage so that states could not make the attack suddenly and invade each other’s territories within twenty-four hours.”

This practical notion has been put forth by Maxime du Camp, and his article concludes with it.

The propositions of M. du Camp are as follows:

1. A diplomatic congress to be held every year.

2. No war to be declared till two months after the incident which provoked it. (The difficulty here would be to decide precisely what incident did provoke the war, since whenever war is declared there are very many such incidents, and one would have to decide from which to reckon the two months’ interval.)

3. No war to be declared before it has been submitted to a plebiscitum of the nations preparing to take part in it.

4. No hostilities to be commenced till a month after the official declaration of war.

“No war to be declared. No hostilities to be commenced,” etc. But who is to arrange that no war is to be declared? Who is to compel people to do this and that? Who is to force states to delay their operations for a certain fixed time? All the other states. But all these others are also states which want holding in check and keeping within limits, and forcing, too. Who is to force them, and how? Public opinion. But if there is a public opinion which can force governments to delay their operations for a fixed period, the same public opinion can force governments not to declare war at all.

But, it will be replied, there may be such a balance of power, such a PONDÉRATION DE FORCES, as would lead states to hold back of their own accord. Well, that has been tried and is being tried even now. The Holy Alliance was nothing but that, the League of Peace was another attempt at the same thing, and so on.

But, it will be answered, suppose all were agreed. If all were agreed there would be no more war certainly, and no need for arbitration either.

“A court of arbitration! Arbitration shall replace war. Questions shall be decided by a court of arbitration. The Alabama question was decided by a court of arbitration, and the question of the Caroline Islands was submitted to the decision of the Pope. Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark, and Holland have all declared that they prefer arbitration to war.”

I dare say Monaco has expressed the same preference. The only unfortunate thing is that Germany, Russia, Austria, and France have not so far shown the same inclination. It is amazing how men can deceive themselves when they find it necessary! Governments consent to decide their disagreements by arbitration and to disband their armies! The differences between Russia and Poland, between England and Ireland, between Austria and Bohemia, between Turkey and the Slavonic states, between France and Germany, to be soothed away by amiable conciliation!

One might as well suggest to merchants and bankers that they should sell nothing for a greater price than they gave for it, should undertake the distribution of wealth for no profit, and should abolish money, as it would thus be rendered unnecessary.

But since commercial and banking operations consist in nothing but selling for more than the cost price, this would be equivalent to an invitation to suppress themselves. It is the same in regard to governments. To suggest to governments that they should not have recourse to violence, but should decide their misunderstandings in accordance with equity, is inviting them to abolish themselves as rulers, and that no government can ever consent to do.

The learned men form societies (there are more than a hundred such societies), assemble in congresses (such as those recently held in London and Paris, and shortly to be held in Rome), deliver addresses, eat public dinners and make speeches, publish journals, and prove by every means possible that the nations forced to support millions of troops are strained to the furthest limits of their endurance, that the maintenance of these huge armed forces is in opposition to all the aims, the interests, and the wishes of the people, and that it is possible, moreover, by writing numerous papers, and uttering a great many words, to bring all men into agreement and to arrange so that they shall have no antagonistic interests, and then there will be no more war.

When I was a little boy they told me if I wanted to catch a bird I must put salt on its tail. I ran after the birds with the salt in my hand, but I soon convinced myself that if I could put salt on a bird’s tail, I could catch it, and realized that I had been hoaxed.

People ought to realize the same fact when they read books and articles on arbitration and disarmament.

If one could put salt on a bird’s tail, it would be because it could not fly and there would be no difficulty in catching it. If the bird had wings and did not want to be caught, it would not let one put salt on its tail, because the specialty of a bird is to fly. In precisely the same way the specialty of government is not to obey, but to enforce obedience. And a government is only a government so long as it can make itself obeyed, and therefore it always strives for that and will never willingly abandon its power. But since it is on the army that the power of government rests, it will never give up the army, and the use of the army in war.

The error arises from the learned jurists deceiving themselves and others, by asserting that government is not what it really is, one set of men banded together to oppress another set of men, but, as shown by science, is the representation of the citizens in their collective capacity. They have so long been persuading other people of this that at last they have persuaded themselves of it; and thus they often seriously suppose that government can be bound by considerations of justice. But history shows that from Caesar to Napoleon, and from Napoleon to Bismarck, government is in its essence always a force acting in violation of justice, and that it cannot be otherwise. Justice can have no binding force on a ruler or rulers who keep men, deluded and drilled in readiness for acts of violence — soldiers, and by means of them control others. And so governments can never be brought to consent to diminish the number of these drilled slaves, who constitute their whole power and importance.

Such is the attitude of certain learned men to the contradiction under which our society is being crushed, and such are their methods of solving it. Tell these people that the whole matter rests on the personal attitude of each man to the moral and religious question put nowadays to everyone, the question, that is, whether it is lawful or unlawful for him to take his share of military service, and these learned gentlemen will shrug their shoulders and not condescend to listen or to answer you. The solution of the question in their idea is to be found in reading addresses, writing books, electing presidents, vice-presidents, and secretaries, and meeting and speaking first in one town and then in another. From all this speechifying and writing it will come to pass, according to their notions, that governments will cease to levy the soldiers, on whom their whole strength depends, will listen to their discourses, and will disband their forces, leaving themselves without any defense, not only against their neighbors, but also against their own subjects. As though a band of brigands, who have some unarmed travelers bound and ready to be plundered, should be so touched by their complaints of the pain caused by the cords they are fastened with as to let them go again.

Still there are people who believe in this, busy themselves over peace congresses, read addresses, and write books. And governments, we may be quite sure, express their sympathy and make a show of encouraging them. In the same way they pretend to support temperance societies, while they are living principally on the drunkenness of the people; and pretend to encourage education, when their whole strength is based on ignorance; and to support constitutional freedom, when their strength rests on the absence of freedom; and to be anxious for the improvement of the condition of the working classes, when their very existence depends on their oppression; and to support Christianity, when Christianity destroys all government.

To be able to do this they have long ago elaborated methods encouraging temperance, which cannot suppress drunkenness; methods of supporting education, which not only fail to prevent ignorance, but even increase it; methods of aiming at freedom and constitutionalism, which are no hindrance to despotism; methods of protecting the working classes, which will not free them from slavery; and a Christianity, too, they have elaborated, which does not destroy, but supports governments.

Now there is something more for the government to encourage — peace. The sovereigns, who nowadays take counsel with their ministers, decide by their will alone whether the butchery of millions is to be begun this year or next. They know very well that all these discourses upon peace will not hinder them from sending millions of men to butchery when it seems good to them. They listen even with satisfaction to these discourses, encourage them, and take part in them.

All this, far from being detrimental, is even of service to governments, by turning people’s attention from the most important and pressing question: Ought or ought not each man called upon for military service to submit to serve in the army?

“Peace will soon be arranged, thanks to alliances and congresses, to books and pamphlets; meantime go and put on your uniform, and prepare to cause suffering and to endure it for our benefit,” is the government’s line of argument. And the learned gentlemen who get up congresses and write articles are in perfect agreement with it.

This is the attitude of one set of thinkers. And since it is that most beneficial to governments, it is also the most encouraged by all intelligent governments.

Another attitude to war has something tragical in it. There are men who maintain that the love for peace and the inevitability of war form a hideous contradiction, and that such is the fate of man. These are mostly gifted and sensitive men, who see and realize all the horror and imbecility and cruelty of war, but through some strange perversion of mind neither see nor seek to find any way out of this position, and seem to take pleasure in teasing the wound by dwelling on the desperate position of humanity. A notable example of such an attitude to war is to be found in the celebrated French writer Guy de Maupassant. Looking from his yacht at the drill and firing practice of the French soldiers the following reflections occur to him:

“When I think only of this word war, a kind of terror seizes upon me, as though I were listening to some tale of sorcery, of the Inquisition, some long past, remote abomination, monstrous, unnatural.

“When cannibalism is spoken of, we smile with pride, proclaiming our superiority to these savages. Which are the savages, the real savages? Those who fight to eat the conquered, or those who fight to kill, for nothing but to kill?

“The young recruits, moving about in lines yonder, are destined to death like the flocks of sheep driven by the butcher along the road. They will fall in some plain with a saber cut in the head, or a bullet through the breast. And these are young men who might work, be productive and useful. Their fathers are old and poor. Their mothers, who have loved them for twenty years, worshiped them as none but mothers can, will learn in six months’ time, or a year perhaps, that their son, their boy, the big boy reared with so much labor, so much expense, so much love, has been thrown in a hole like some dead dog, after being disemboweled by a bullet, and trampled, crushed, to a mass of pulp by the charges of cavalry. Why have they killed her boy, her handsome boy, her one hope, her pride, her life? She does not know. Ah, why?

“War! fighting! slaughter! massacres of men! And we have now, in our century, with our civilization, with the spread of science, and the degree of philosophy which the genius of man is supposed to have attained, schools for training to kill, to kill very far off, to perfection, great numbers at once, to kill poor devils of innocent men with families and without any kind of trial.

“AND WHAT IS MOST BEWILDERING IS THAT THE PEOPLE DO NOT RISE AGAINST THEIR GOVERNMENTS. FOR WHAT DIFFERENCE IS THERE BETWEEN MONARCHIES AND REPUBLICS? THE MOST BEWILDERING THING IS THAT THE WHOLE OF SOCIETY IS NOT IN REVOLT AT THE WORD WAR.”

“Ah! we shall always live under the burden of the ancient and odious customs, the criminal prejudices, the ferocious ideas of our barbarous ancestors, for we are beasts, and beasts we shall remain, dominated by instinct and changed by nothing. Would not any other man than Victor Hugo have been exiled for that mighty cry of deliverance and truth? ‘To-day force is called violence, and is being brought to judgment; war has been put on its trial. At the plea of the human race, civilization arraigns warfare, and draws up the great list of crimes laid at the charge of conquerors and generals. The nations are coming to understand that the magnitude of a crime cannot be its extenuation; that if killing is a crime, killing many can be no extenuating circumstance; that if robbery is disgraceful, invasion cannot be glorious. Ah! let us proclaim these absolute truths; let us dishonor war!’

“Vain wrath,” continues Maupassant, “a poet’s indignation. War is held in more veneration than ever.

“A skilled proficient in that line, a slaughterer of genius, Von Moltke, in reply to the peace delegates, once uttered these strange words:

“‘War is holy, war is ordained of God. It is one of the most sacred laws of the world. It maintains among men all the great and noble sentiments — honor, devotion, virtue, and courage, and saves them in short from falling into the most hideous materialism.’

“So, then, bringing millions of men together into herds, marching by day and by night without rest, thinking of nothing, studying nothing, learning nothing, reading nothing, being useful to no one, wallowing in filth, sleeping in mud, living like brutes in a continual state of stupefaction, sacking towns, burning villages, ruining whole populations, then meeting another mass of human flesh, falling upon them, making pools of blood, and plains of flesh mixed with trodden mire and red with heaps of corpses, having your arms or legs carried off, your brains blown out for no advantage to anyone, and dying in some corner of a field while your old parents, your wife and children are perishing of hunger — that is what is meant by not falling into the most hideous materialism!

“Warriors are the scourge of the world. We struggle against nature and ignorance and obstacles of all kinds to make our wretched life less hard. Learned men — benefactors of all — spend their lives in working, in seeking what can aid, what be of use, what can alleviate the lot of their fellows. They devote themselves unsparingly to their task of usefulness, making one discovery after another, enlarging the sphere of human intelligence, extending the bounds of science, adding each day some new store to the sum of knowledge, gaining each day prosperity, ease, strength for their country.

”War breaks out. In six months the generals have destroyed the

work of twenty years of effort, of patience, and of genius.

”That is what is meant by not falling into the most hideous

materialism.

“We have seen it, war. “We have seen men turned to brutes, frenzied, killing for fun, for terror, for bravado, for ostentation. Then when right is no more, law is dead, every notion of justice has disappeared. We have seen men shoot innocent creatures found on the road, and suspected because they were afraid. We have seen them kill dogs chained at their masters’ doors to try their new revolvers, we have seen them fire on cows lying in a field for no reason whatever, simply for the sake of shooting, for a joke.

“That is what is meant by not falling into the most hideous materialism.

“Going into a country, cutting the man’s throat who defends his house because he wears a blouse and has not a military cap on his head, burning the dwellings of wretched beings who have nothing to eat, breaking furniture and stealing goods, drinking the wine found in the cellars, violating the women in the streets, burning thousands of francs’ worth of powder, and leaving misery and cholera in one’s track —

“That is what is meant by not falling into the most hideous materialism.

“What have they done, those warriors, that proves the least intelligence? Nothing. What have they invented? Cannons and muskets. That is all.

”What remains to us from Greece? Books and statues. Is Greece

great from her conquests or her creations?

”Was it the invasions of the Persians which saved Greece from

falling into the most hideous materialism?

”Were the invasions of the barbarians what saved and

regenerated Rome?

“Was it Napoleon I. who carried forward the great intellectual movement started by the philosophers of the end of last century?

“Yes, indeed, since government assumes the right of annihilating peoples thus, there is nothing surprising in the fact that the peoples assume the right of annihilating governments.

“They defend themselves. They are right. No one has an absolute right to govern others. It ought only to be done for the benefit of those who are governed. And it is as much the duty of anyone who governs to avoid war as it is the duty of a captain of a ship to avoid shipwreck.

“When a captain has let his ship come to ruin, he is judged and condemned, if he is found guilty of negligence or even incapacity.

”Why should not the government be put on its trial after every

declaration of war? IF THE PEOPLE UNDERSTOOD THAT, IF THEY

THEMSELVES PASSED JUDGMENT ON MURDEROUS GOVERNMENTS, IF THEY

REFUSED TO LET THEMSELVES BE KILLED FOR NOTHING, IF THEY WOULD

ONLY TURN THEIR ARMS AGAINST THOSE WHO HAVE GIVEN THEM TO THEM

FOR MASSACRE, ON THAT DAY WAR WOULD BE NO MORE. BUT THAT DAY

WILL NEVER COME” [Footnote: “Sur l’Eau,” pp. 71-80].

The author sees all the horror of war. He sees that it is caused by governments forcing men by deception to go out to slaughter and be slain without any advantage to themselves. And he sees, too, that the men who make up the armies could turn their arms against the governments and bring them to judgment. But he thinks that that will never come to pass, and that there is, therefore, no escape from the present position.

“I think war is terrible, but that it is inevitable; that compulsory military service is as inevitable as death, and that since government will always desire it, war will always exist.”

So writes this talented and sincere writer, who is endowed with that power of penetrating to the innermost core of the subjects which is the essence of the poetic faculty. He brings before us all the cruelty of the inconsistency between men’s moral sense and their actions, but without trying to remove it; seems to admit that this inconsistency must exist and that it is the poetic tragedy of life.

Another no less gifted writer, Edouard Rod, paints in still more vivid colors the cruelty and madness of the present state of things. He too only aims at presenting its tragic features, without suggesting or forseeing any issue from the position.

“What is the good of doing anything? What is the good of undertaking any enterprise? And how are we to love men in these troubled times when every fresh day is a menace of danger?…All we have begun, the plans we are developing, our schemes of work, the little good we may have been able to do, will it not all be swept away by the tempest that is in preparation?…Everywhere the earth is shaking under our feet and storm-clouds are gathering on our horizon which will have no pity on us.

“Ah! if all we had to dread were the revolution which is held up as a specter to terrify us! Since I cannot imagine a society more detestable than ours, I feel more skeptical than alarmed in regard to that which will replace it. If I should have to suffer from the change, I should be consoled by thinking that the executioners of that day were the victims of the previous time, and the hope of something better would help us to endure the worst. But it is not that remote peril which frightens me. I see another danger, nearer and far more cruel; more cruel because there is no excuse for it, because it is absurd, because it can lead to no good. Every day one balances the chances of war on the morrow, every day they become more merciless.

“The imagination revolts before the catastrophe which is coming at the end of our century as the goal of the progress of our era, and yet we must get used to facing it. For twenty years past every resource of science has been exhausted in the invention of engines of destruction, and soon a few charges of cannon will suffice to annihilate a whole army. No longer a few thousands of poor devils, who were paid a price for their blood, are kept under arms, but whole nations are under arms to cut each other’s throats. They are robbed of their time now (by compulsory service) that they may be robbed of their lives later. To prepare them for the work of massacre, their hatred is kindled by persuading them that they are hated. And peaceable men let themselves be played on thus and go and fall on one another with the ferocity of wild beasts; furious troops of peaceful citizens taking up arms at an empty word of command, for some ridiculous question of frontiers or colonial trade interests — Heaven only knows what…They will go like sheep to the slaughter, knowing all the while where they are going, knowing that they are leaving their wives, knowing that their children will want for food, full of misgivings, yet intoxicated by the fine-sounding lies that are dinned into their ears. THEY WILL MARCH WITHOUT REVOLT, PASSIVE, RESIGNED — THOUGH THE NUMBERS AND THE STRENGTH ARE THEIRS, AND THEY MIGHT, IF THEY KNEW HOW TO CO-OPERATE TOGETHER, ESTABLISH THE REIGN OF GOOD SENSE AND FRATERNITY, instead of the barbarous trickery of diplomacy. They will march to battle so deluded, so duped, that they will believe slaughter to be a duty, and will ask the benediction of God on their lust for blood. They will march to battle trampling underfoot the harvests they have sown, burning the towns they have built — with songs of triumph, festive music, and cries of jubilation. And their sons will raise statues to those who have done most in their slaughter.

“The destiny of a whole generation depends on the hour in which some ill-fated politician may give the signal that will be followed. We know that the best of us will be cut down and our work will be destroyed in embryo. WE KNOW IT AND TREMBLE WITH RAGE, BUT WE CAN DO NOTHING. We are held fast in the toils of officialdom and red tape, and too rude a shock would be needed to set us free. We are enslaved by the laws we set up for our protection, which have become our oppression. WE ARE BUT THE TOOLS OF THAT AUTOCRATIC ABSTRACTION THE STATE, WHICH ENSLAVES EACH INDIVIDUAL IN THE NAME OF THE WILL OF ALL, WHO WOULD ALL, TAKEN INDIVIDUALLY, DESIRE EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT THEY WILL BE MADE TO DO.

“And if it were only a generation that must be sacrificed! But there are graver interests at stake.

“The paid politicians, the ambitious statesmen, who exploit the evil passions of the populace, and the imbeciles who are deluded by fine-sounding phrases, have so embittered national feuds that the existence of a whole race will be at stake in the war of the morrow. One of the elements that constitute the modern world is threatened, the conquered people will be wiped out of existence, and whichever it may be, we shall see a moral force annihilated, as if there were too many forces to work for good — we shall have a new Europe formed on foundations so unjust, so brutal, so sanguinary, stained with so monstrous a crime, that it cannot but be worse than the Europe of to-day — more iniquitous, more barbarous, more violent.

“Thus one feels crushed under the weight of an immense discouragement. We are struggling in a CUL DE SAC with muskets aimed at us from the housetops. Our labor is like that of sailors executing their last task as the ship begins to sink. Our pleasures are those of the condemned victim, who is offered his choice of dainties a quarter of an hour before his execution. Thought is paralyzed by anguish, and the most it is capable of is to calculate — interpreting the vague phrases of ministers, spelling out the sense of the speeches of sovereigns, and ruminating on the words attributed to diplomatists reported on the uncertain authority of the newspapers — whether it is to be to-morrow or the day after, this year or the next, that we are to be murdered. So that one might seek in vain in history an epoch more insecure, more crushed under the weight of suffering” [footnote: “Le Sens de la Vie,” pp.208-13].

Here it is pointed out that the force is in the hands of those who work their own destruction, in the hands of the individual men who make up the masses; it is pointed out that the source of the evil is the government. It would seem evident that the contradiction between life and conscience had reached the limit beyond which it cannot go, and after reaching this limit some solution of it must be found.

But the author does not think so. He sees in this the tragedy of human life, and after depicting all the horror of the position he concludes that human life must be spent in the midst of this horror.

So much for the attitude to war of those who regard it as something tragic and fated by destiny.

The third category consists of men who have lost all conscience and, consequently, all common sense and feeling of humanity.

To this category belongs Moltke, whose opinion has been quoted above by Maupassant, and the majority of military men, who have been educated in this cruel superstition, live by it, and consequently are often in all simplicity convinced that war is not only an inevitable, but even a necessary and beneficial thing. This is also the view of some civilians, so-called educated and cultivated people.

Here is what the celebrated academician Camille Doucet writes in reply to the editor of the REVUE DES REVUES, where several letters on war were published together:

“Dear Sir: When you ask the least warlike of academicians whether he is a partisan of war, his answer is known beforehand.

“Alas! sir, you yourself speak of the pacific ideal inspiring your generous compatriots as a dream.

“During my life I have heard a great many good people protest against this frightful custom of international butchery, which all admit and deplore; but how is it to be remedied?

“Often, too, there have been attempts to suppress dueling; one would fancy that seemed an easy task: but not at all! All that has been done hitherto with that noble object has never been and never will be of use.

“All the congresses of both hemispheres may vote against war, and against dueling too, but above all arbitrations, conventions, and legislations there will always be the personal honor of individual men, which has always demanded dueling, and the interests of nations, which will always demand war.

”I wish none the less from the depths of my heart that the

Congress of Universal Peace may succeed at last in its very

honorable and difficult enterprise.

”I am, dear sir, etc.,

”CAMILLE DOUCET.”

The upshot of this is that personal honor requires men to fight, and the interests of nations require them to ruin and exterminate each other. As for the efforts to abolish war, they call for nothing but a smile.

The opinion of another well-known academician, Jules Claretie, is of the same kind.

”Dear Sir [he writes]: For a man of sense there can be but one

opinion on the subject of peace and war.

“Humanity is created to live, to live free, to perfect and ameliorate its fate by peaceful labor. The general harmony preached by the Universal Peace Congress is but a dream perhaps, but at least it is the fairest of all dreams. Man is always looking toward the Promised Land, and there the harvests are to ripen with no fear of their being torn up by shells or crushed by cannon wheels…But! Ah! but —— since philosophers and philanthropists are not the controlling powers, it is well for our soldiers to guard our frontier and homes, and their arms, skillfully used, are perhaps the surest guarantee of the peace we all love.

“Peace is a gift only granted to the strong and the resolute.

”I am, dear sir, etc.,

”JULES CLARETIE.”

The upshot of this letter is that there is no harm in talking about what no one intends or feels obliged to do. But when it comes to practice, we must fight.

And here now is the view lately expressed by the most popular novelist in Europe, Émile Zola:

“I regard war as a fatal necessity, which appears inevitable for us from its close connection with human nature and the whole constitution of the world. I should wish that war could be put off for the longest possible time. Nevertheless, the moment will come when we shall be forced to go to war. I am considering it at this moment from the standpoint of universal humanity, and making no reference to our misunderstanding with Germany — a most trivial incident in the history of mankind. I say that war is necessary and beneficial, since it seems one of the conditions of existence for humanity. War confronts us everywhere, not only war between different races and peoples, but war too, in private and family life. It seems one of the principal elements of progress, and every step in advance that humanity has taken hitherto has been attended by bloodshed.

“Men have talked, and still talk, of disarmament, while disarmament is something impossible, to which, even if it were possible, we ought not to consent. I am convinced that a general disarmament throughout the world would involve something like a moral decadence, which would show itself in general feebleness, and would hinder the progressive advancement of humanity. A warlike nation has always been strong and flourishing. The art of war has led to the development of all the other arts. History bears witness to it. So in Athens and in Rome, commerce, manufactures, and literature never attained so high a point of development as when those cities were masters of the whole world by force of arms. To take an example from times nearer our own, we may recall the age of Louis XIV. The wars of the Grand Monarque were not only no hindrance to the progress of the arts and sciences, but even, on the contrary, seem to have promoted and favored their development.”

So war is a beneficial thing!

But the best expression of this attitude is the view of the most gifted of the writers of this school, the academician de Vogüé. This is what he writes in an article on the Military Section of the Exhibition of 1889:

“On the Esplanade des Invalides, among the exotic and colonial encampments, a building in a more severe style overawes the picturesque bazaar; all these fragments of the globe have come to gather round the Palace of War, and in turn our guests mount guard submissively before the mother building, but for whom they would not be here. Fine subject for the antithesis of rhetoric, of humanitarians who could not fail to whimper over this juxtaposition, and to say that ‘CECI TUERA CELA,’ [footnote: Phrase quoted from Victor-Hugo, “Notre-Dame de Paris.”] that the union of the nations through science and labor will overcome the instinct of war. Let us leave them to cherish the chimera of a golden age, which would soon become, if it could be realized, an age of mud. All history teaches us that the one is created for the other, that blood is needed to hasten and cement the union of the nations. Natural science has ratified in our day the mysterious law revealed to Joseph de Maistre by the intuition of his genius and by meditation on fundamental truths; he saw the world redeeming itself from hereditary degenerations by sacrifice; science shows it advancing to perfection through struggle and violent selection; there is the statement of the same law in both, expressed in different formulas. The statement is disagreeable, no doubt; but the laws of the world are not made for our pleasure, they are made for our progress. Let us enter this inevitable, necessary palace of war; we shall be able to observe there how the most tenacious of our instincts, without losing any of its vigor, is transformed and adapted to the varying exigencies of historical epochs.”

M. de Vogüé finds the necessity for war, according to his views, well expressed by the two great writers, Joseph de Maistre and Darwin, whose statements he likes so much that he quotes them again.

“Dear Sir [he writes to the editor of the REVUE DES REVUES]: You ask me my view as to the possible success of the Universal Congress of Peace. I hold with Darwin that violent struggle is a law of nature which overrules all other laws; I hold with Joseph de Maistre that it is a divine law; two different ways of describing the same thing. If by some impossible chance a fraction of human society — all the civilized West, let us suppose — were to succeed in suspending the action of this law, some races of stronger instincts would undertake the task of putting it into action against us: those races would vindicate nature’s reasoning against human reason; they would be successful, because the certainty of peace — I do not say PEACE, I say the CERTAINTY OF PEACE — would, in half a century, engender a corruption and a decadence more destructive for mankind than the worst of wars. I believe that we must do with war — the criminal law of humanity — as with all our criminal laws, that is, soften them, put them in force as rarely as possible; use every effort to make their application unnecessary. But all the experience of history teaches us that they cannot be altogether suppressed so long as two men are left on earth, with bread, money, and a woman between them.

“I should be very happy if the Congress would prove me in error. But I doubt if it can prove history, nature, and God in error also.

”I am, dear sir, etc.

”E. M. DE VOGÜÉ.”

This amounts to saying that history, human nature, and God show us that so long as there are two men, and bread, money and a woman — there will be war. That is to say that no progress will lead men to rise above the savage conception of life, which regards no participation of bread, money (money is good in this context) and woman possible without fighting.

They are strange people, these men who assemble in Congresses, and make speeches to show us how to catch birds by putting salt on their tails, though they must know it is impossible to do it. And amazing are they too, who, like Maupassant, Rod, and many others, see clearly all the horror of war, all the inconsistency of men not doing what is needful, right, and beneficial for them to do; who lament over the tragedy of life, and do not see that the whole tragedy is at an end directly men, ceasing to take account of any unnecessary considerations, refuse to do what is hateful and disastrous to them. They are amazing people truly, but those who, like De Vogüé and others, who, professing the doctrine of evolution, regard war as not only inevitable, but beneficial and therefore desirable — they are terrible, hideous, in their moral perversion. The others, at least, say that they hate evil, and love good, but these openly declare that good and evil do not exist.

All discussion of the possibility of re-establishing peace instead of everlasting war — is the pernicious sentimentality of phrasemongers. There is a law of evolution by which it follows that I must live and act in an evil way; what is to be done? I am an educated man, I know the law of evolution, and therefore I will act in an evil way. “ENTRONS AU PALAIS DE LA GUERRE.” There is the law of evolution, and therefore there is neither good nor evil, and one must live for the sake of one’s personal existence, leaving the rest to the action of the law of evolution. This is the last word of refined culture, and with it, of that overshadowing of conscience which has come upon the educated classes of our times. The desire of the educated classes to support the ideas they prefer, and the order of existence based on them, has attained its furthest limits. They lie, and delude themselves, and one another, with the subtlest forms of deception, simply to obscure, to deaden conscience.

Instead of transforming their life into harmony with their conscience, they try by every means to stifle its voice. But it is in darkness that the light begins to shine, and so the light is rising upon our epoch.

Chapter 7: Significance of Compulsory Service

Universal Compulsory Service is not a Political Accident, but the

Furthest Limit of the Contradiction Inherent in the Social

Conception of Life — Origin of Authority in Society — Basis of

Authority is Physical Violence — To be Able to Perform its Acts

of Violence Authority Needs a Special Organization — The Army —

Authority, that is, Violence, is the Principle which is

Destroying the Social Conception of Life — Attitude of Authority

to the Masses, that is, Attitude of Government to Working

Oppressed Classes — Governments Try to Foster in Working Classes

the Idea that State Force is Necessary to Defend Them from

External Enemies — But the Army is Principally Needed to Preserve

Government from its own Subjects — The Working Classes — Speech of

M. de Caprivi — All Privileges of Ruling Classes Based on

Violence — The Increase of Armies up to Point of Universal

Service — Universal Compulsory Service Destroys all the

Advantages of Social Life, which Government is Intended to

Preserve — Compulsory Service is the Furthest Limit of

Submission, since in Name of the State it Requires Sacrifice of

all that can be Precious to a Man — Is Government Necessary? — The

Sacrifices Demanded by Government in Compulsory Service have No

Longer any Reasonable Basis — And there is More Advantage to be

Gained by not Submitting to the Demands of the State than by

Submitting to Them.

Educated people of the upper classes are trying to stifle the ever-growing sense of the necessity of transforming the existing social order. But life, which goes on growing more complex, and developing in the same direction, and increases the inconsistencies and the sufferings of men, brings them to the limit beyond which they cannot go. This furthest limit of inconsistency is universal compulsory military service.

It is usually supposed that universal military service and the increased armaments connected with it, as well as the resulting increase of taxes and national debts, are a passing phenomenon, produced by the particular political situation of Europe, and that it may be removed by certain political combinations without any modification of the inner order of life.

This is absolutely incorrect. Universal military service is only the internal inconsistency inherent in the social conception of life, carried to its furthest limits, and becoming evident when a certain stage of material development is reached.

The social conception of life, we have seen, consists in the transfer of the aim of life from the individual to groups and their maintenance — to the tribe, family, race, or state.

In the social conception of life it is supposed that since the aim of life is found in groups of individuals, individuals will voluntarily sacrifice their own interests for the interests of the group. And so it has been, and still is, in fact, in certain groups, the distinction being that they are the most primitive forms of association in the family or tribe or race, or even in the patriarchal state. Through tradition handed down by education and supported by religious sentiment, individuals without compulsion merged their interests in the interest of the group and sacrificed their own good for the general welfare.

But the more complex and the larger societies become, and especially the more often conquest becomes the cause of the amalgamation of people into a state, the more often individuals strive to attain their own aims at the public expense, and the more often it becomes necessary to restrain these insubordinate individuals by recourse to authority, that is, to violence. The champions of the social conception of life usually try to connect the idea of authority, that is, of violence, with the idea of moral influence, but this connection is quite impossible.

The effect of moral influence on a man is to change his desires and to bend them in the direction of the duty required of him. The man who is controlled by moral influence acts in accordance with his own desires. Authority, in the sense in which the word is ordinarily understood, is a means of forcing a man to act in opposition to his desires. The man who submits to authority does not do as he chooses but as he is obliged by authority. Nothing can oblige a man to do what he does not choose except physical force, or the threat of it, that is — deprivation of freedom, blows, imprisonment, or threats — easily carried out — of such punishments. This is what authority consists of and always has consisted of.

In spite of the unceasing efforts of those who happen to be in authority to conceal this and attribute some other significance to it, authority has always meant for man the cord, the chain with which he is bound and fettered, or the knout with which he is to be flogged, or the ax with which he is to have hands, ears, nose, or head cut off, or at the very least, the threat of these terrors. So it was under Nero and Ghenghis Khan, and so it is to-day, even under the most liberal government in the Republics of the United States or of France. If men submit to authority, it is only because they are liable to these punishments in case of non-submission. All state obligations, payment of taxes, fulfillment of state duties, and submission to punishments, exile, fines, etc., to which people appear to submit voluntarily, are always based on bodily violence or the threat of it.

The basis of authority is bodily violence. The possibility of applying bodily violence to people is provided above all by an organization of armed men, trained to act in unison in submission to one will. These bands of armed men, submissive to a single will, are what constitute the army. The army has always been and still is the basis of power. Power is always in the hands of those who control the army, and all men in power — from the Roman Caesars to the Russian and German Emperors — take more interest in their army than in anything, and court popularity in the army, knowing that if that is on their side their power is secure.

The formation and aggrandizement of the army, indispensable to the maintenance of authority, is what has introduced into the social conception of life the principle that is destroying it.

The object of authority and the justification for its existence lie in the restraint of those who aim at attaining their personal interests to the detriment of the interests of society.

But however power has been gained, those who possess it are in no way different from other men, and therefore no more disposed than others to subordinate their own interests to those of the society. On the contrary, having the power to do so at their disposal, they are more disposed than others to subordinate the public interests to their own. Whatever means men have devised for preventing those in authority from over-riding public interests for their own benefit, or for intrusting power only to the most faultless people, they have not so far succeeded in either of those aims.

All the methods of appointing authorities that have been tried, divine right, and election, and heredity, and balloting, and assemblies and parliaments and senate — have all proved ineffectual. Everyone knows that not one of these methods attains the aim either of intrusting power only to the incorruptible, or of preventing power from being abused. Everyone knows on the contrary that men in authority — be they emperors, ministers, governors, or police officers — are always, simply from the possession of power, more liable to be demoralized, that is, to subordinate public interests to their personal aims than those who have not the power to do so. Indeed, it could not be otherwise.

The state conception of life could be justified only so long as all men voluntarily sacrificed their personal interests to the public welfare. But so soon as there were individuals who would not voluntarily sacrifice their own interests, and authority, that is, violence, was needed to restrain them, then the disintegrating principle of the coercion of one set of people by another set entered into the social conception of the organization based on it.

For the authority of one set of men over another to attain its object of restraining those who override public interests for their personal ends, power ought only to be put into the hands of the impeccable, as it is supposed to be among the Chinese, and as it was supposed to be in the Middle Ages, and is even now supposed to be by those who believe in the consecration by anointing. Only under those conditions could the social organization be justified.

But since this is not the case, and on the contrary men in power are always far from being saints, through the very fact of their possession of power, the social organization based on power has no justification.

Even if there was once a time when, owing to the low standard of morals, and the disposition of men to violence, the existence of an authority to restrain such violence was an advantage, because the violence of government was less than the violence of individuals, one cannot but see that this advantage could not be lasting. As the disposition of individuals to violence diminished, and as the habits of the people became more civilized, and as power grew more social organization demoralized through lack of restraint, this advantage disappeared.

The whole history of the last two thousand years is nothing but the history of this gradual change of relation between the moral development of the masses on the one hand and the demoralization of governments on the other.

This, put simply, is how it has come to pass.

Men lived in families, tribes, and races, at feud with one another, plundering, outraging, and killing one another. These violent hostilities were carried on on a large and on a small scale: man against man, family against family, tribe against tribe, race against race, and people against people. The larger and stronger groups conquered and absorbed the weaker, and the larger and stronger they became, the more internal feuds disappeared and the more the continuity of the group seemed assured.

The members of a family or tribe, united into one community, are less hostile among themselves, and families and tribes do not die like one man, but have a continuity of existence. Between the members of one state, subject to a single authority, the strife between individuals seems still less and the life of the state seems even more secure.

Their association into larger and larger groups was not the result of the conscious recognition of the benefits of such associations, as it is said to be in the story of the Varyagi. It was produced, on one hand, by the natural growth of population, and, on the other, by struggle and conquest.

After conquest the power of the emperor puts an end to internal dissensions, and so the state conception of life justifies itself. But this justification is never more than temporary. Internal dissensions disappear only in proportion to the degree of oppression exerted by the authority over the dissentient individuals. The violence of internal feud crushed by authority reappears in authority itself, which falls into the hands of men who, like the rest, are frequently or always ready to sacrifice the public welfare to their personal interest, with the difference that their subjects cannot resist them, and thus they are exposed to all the demoralizing influence of authority. And thus the evil of violence, when it passes into the hands of authority, is always growing and growing, and in time becomes greater than the evil it is supposed to suppress, while, at the same time, the tendency to violence in the members of the society becomes weaker and weaker, so that the violence of authority is less and less needed.

Government authority, even if it does suppress private violence, always introduces into the life of men fresh forms of violence, which tend to become greater and greater in proportion to the duration and strength of the government.

So that though the violence of power is less noticeable in government than when it is employed by members of society against one another, because it finds expression in submission, and not in strife, it nevertheless exists, and often to a greater degree than in former days.

And it could not, be otherwise, since, apart from the demoralizing influence of power, the policy or even the unconscious tendency of those in power will always be to reduce their subjects to the extreme of weakness, for the weaker the oppressed, the less effort need be made to keep him in subjection.

And therefore the oppression of the oppressed always goes on growing up to the furthest limit, beyond which it cannot go without killing the goose with the golden eggs. And if the goose lays no more eggs, like the American Indians, negroes, and Fijians, then it is killed in spite of the sincere protests of philanthropists.

The most convincing example of this is to be found in the condition of the working classes of our epoch, who are in reality no better than the slaves of ancient times subdued by conquest.

In spite of the pretended efforts of the higher classes to ameliorate the position of the workers, all the working classes of the present day are kept down by the inflexible iron law by which they only get just what is barely necessary, so that they are forced to work without ceasing while still retaining strength enough to labor for their employers, who are really those who have conquered and enslaved them.

So it has always been. In ratio to the duration and increasing strength of authority its advantages for its subjects disappear and its disadvantages increase.

And this has been so, independently of the forms of government under which nations have lived. The only difference is that under a despotic form of government the authority is concentrated in a small number of oppressors and violence takes a cruder form; under constitutional monarchies and republics as in France and America authority is divided among a great number of oppressors and the forms assumed by violence is less crude, but its effect of making the disadvantages of authority greater than its advantages, and of enfeebling the oppressed to the furthest extreme to which they can be reduced with advantage to the oppressors, remains always the same.

Such has been and still is the condition of all the oppressed, but hitherto they have not recognized the fact. In the majority of instances they have believed in all simplicity that governments exist for their benefit; that they would be lost without a government; that the very idea of living without a government is a blasphemy which one hardly dare put into words; that this is the — for some reason terrible — doctrine of anarchism, with which a mental picture of all kinds of horrors is associated.

People have believed, as though it were something fully proved, and so needing no proof, that since all nations have hitherto developed in the form of states, that form of organization is an indispensable condition of the development of humanity.

And in that way it has lasted for hundreds and thousands of years, and governments — those who happened to be in power — have tried it, and are now trying more zealously than ever to keep their subjects in this error.

So it was under the Roman emperors and so it is now. In spite of the fact that the sense of the uselessness and even injurious effects of state violence is more and more penetrating into men’s consciousness, things might have gone on in the same way forever if governments were not under the necessity of constantly increasing their armies in order to maintain their power.

It is generally supposed that governments strengthen their forces only to defend the state from other states, in oblivion of the fact that armies are necessary, before all things, for the defense of governments from their own oppressed and enslaved subjects.

That has always been necessary, and has become more and more necessary with the increased diffusion of education among the masses, with the improved communication between people of the same and of different nationalities. It has become particularly indispensable now in the face of communism, socialism, anarchism, and the labor movement generally. Governments feel that it is so, and strengthen the force of their disciplined armies. [See Footnote]

[Footnote: The fact that in America the abuses of authority exist in spite of the small number of their troops not only fails to disprove this position, but positively confirms it. In America there are fewer soldiers than in other states. That is why there is nowhere else so little oppression of the working classes, and no country where the end of the abuses of government and of government itself seems so near. Of late as the combinations of laborers gain in strength, one hears more and more frequently the cry raised for the increase of the army, though the United States are not threatened with any attack from without. The upper classes know that an army of fifty thousand will soon be insufficient, and no longer relying on Pinkerton’s men, they feel that the security of their position depends on the increased strength of the army.

In the German Reichstag not long ago, in reply to a question why funds were needed for raising the salaries of the under-officers, the German Chancellor openly declared that trustworthy under-officers were necessary to contend against socialism. Caprivi only said aloud what every statesman knows and assiduously conceals from the people. The reason to which he gave expression is essentially the same as that which made the French kings and the popes engage Swiss and Scotch guards, and makes the Russian authorities of to-day so carefully distribute the recruits, so that the regiments from the frontiers are stationed in central districts, and the regiments from the center are stationed on the frontiers. The meaning of Caprivi’s speech, put into plain language, is that funds are needed, not to resist foreign foes, but to BUY UNDER-OFFICERS to be ready to act against the enslaved toiling masses.

Caprivi incautiously gave utterance to what everyone knows perfectly well, or at least feels vaguely if he does not recognize it, that is, that the existing order of life is as it is, not, as would be natural and right, because the people wish it to be so, but because it is so maintained by state violence, by the army with its BOUGHT UNDER-OFFICERS and generals.

If the laborer has no land, if he cannot use the natural right of every man to derive subsistence for himself and his family out of the land, that is not because the people wish it to be so, but because a certain set of men, the land-owners, have appropriated the right of giving or refusing admittance to the land to the laborers. And this abnormal order of things is maintained by the army. If the immense wealth produced by the labor of the working classes is not regarded as the property of all, but as the property of a few exceptional persons; if labor is taxed by authority and the taxes spent by a few on what they think fit; if strikes on the part of laborers are repressesd, while on the part of capitalists they are encouraged; if certain persons appropriate the right of choosing the form of the education, religious and secular, of children, and certain persons monopolize the right of making the laws all must obey, and so dispose of the lives and properties of other people — all this is not done because the people wish it and because it is what is natural and right, but because the government and ruling classes wish this to be so for their own benefit, and insist on its being so even by physical violence.

Everyone, if he does not recognize this now, will know that it is so at the first attempt at insubordination or at a revolution of the existing order.

Armies, then, are needed by governments and by the ruling classes above all to support the present order, which, far from being the result of the people’s needs, is often in direct antagonism to them, and is only beneficial to the government and ruling classes.

To keep their subjects in oppression and to be able to enjoy the fruits of their labor the government must have armed forces.

But there is not only one government. There are other governments, exploiting their subjects by violence in the same way, and always ready to pounce down on any other government and carry off the fruits of the toil of its enslaved subjects. And so every government needs an army also to protect its booty from its neighbor brigands. Every government is thus involuntarily reduced to the necessity of emulating one another in the increase of their armies. This increase is contagious, as Montesquieu pointed out 150 years ago.

Every increase in the army of one state, with the aim of self-defense against its subjects, becomes a source of danger for neighboring states and calls for a similar increase in their armies.

The armed forces have reached their present number of millions not only through the menace of danger from neighboring states, but principally through the necessity of subduing every effort at revolt on the part of the subjects.

Both causes, mutually dependent, contribute to the same result at once; troops are required against internal forces and also to keep up a position with other states. One is the result of the other. The despotism of a government always increases with the strength of the army and its external successes, and the aggressiveness of a government increases with its internal despotism.

The rivalry of the European states in constantly increasing their forces has reduced them to the necessity of having recourse to universal military service, since by that means the greatest possible number of soldiers is obtained at the least possible expense. Germany first hit on this device. And directly one state adopted it the others were obliged to do the same. And by this means all citizens are under arms to support the iniquities practiced upon them; all citizens have become their own oppressors.

Universal military service was an inevitable logical necessity, to which we were bound to come. But it is also the last expression of the inconsistency inherent in the social conception of life, when violence is needed to maintain it. This inconsistency has become obvious in universal military service. In fact, the whole significance of the social conception of life consists in man’s recognition of the barbarity of strife between individuals, and the transitoriness of personal life itself, and the transference of the aim of life to groups of persons. But with universal military service it comes to pass that men, after making every sacrifice to get rid of the cruelty of strife and the insecurity of existence, are called upon to face all the perils they had meant to avoid. And in addition to this the state, for whose sake individuals renounced their personal advantages, is exposed again to the same risks of insecurity and lack of permanence as the individual himself was in previous times.

Governments were to give men freedom from the cruelty of personal strife and security in the permanence of the state order of existence. But instead of doing that they expose the individuals to the same necessity of strife, substituting strife with individuals of other states for strife with neighbors. And the danger of destruction for the individual, and the state too, they leave just as it was.

Universal military service may be compared to the efforts of a man to prop up his falling house who so surrounds it and fills it with props and buttresses and planks and scaffolding that he manages to keep the house standing only by making it impossible to live in it.

In the same way universal military service destroys all the benefits of the social order of life which it is employed to maintain.

The advantages of social organization are security of property and labor and associated action for the improvement of existence — universal military service destroys all this.

The taxes raised from the people for war preparations absorb the greater part of the produce of labor which the army ought to defend.

The withdrawing of all men from the ordinary course of life destroys the possibility of labor itself. The danger of war, ever ready to break out, renders all reforms of life social life vain and fruitless.

In former days if a man were told that if he did not acknowledge the authority of the state, he would be exposed to attack from enemies domestic and foreign, that he would have to resist them alone, and would be liable to be killed, and that therefore it would be to his advantage to put up with some hardships to secure himself from these calamities, he might well believe it, seeing that the sacrifices he made to the state were only partial and gave him the hope of a tranquil existence in a permanent state. But now, when the sacrifices have been increased tenfold and the promised advantages are disappearing, it would be a natural reflection that submission to authority is absolutely useless.

But the fatal significance of universal military service, as the manifestation of the contradiction inherent in the social conception of life, is not only apparent in that. The greatest manifestation of this contradiction consists in the fact that every citizen in being made a soldier becomes a prop of the government organization, and shares the responsibility of everything the government does, even though he may not admit its legitimacy.

Governments assert that armies are needed above all for external defense, but that is not true. They are needed principally against their subjects, and every man, under universal military service, becomes an accomplice in all the acts of violence of the government against the citizens without any choice of his own.

To convince oneself of this one need only remember what things are done in every state, in the name of order and the public welfare, of which the execution always falls to the army. All civil outbreaks for dynastic or other party reasons, all the executions that follow on such disturbances, all repression of insurrections, and military intervention to break up meetings and to suppress strikes, all forced extortion of taxes, all the iniquitous distributions of land, all the restrictions on labor — are either carried out directly by the military or by the police with the army at their back. Anyone who serves his time in the army shares the responsibility of all these things, about which he is, in some cases, dubious, while very often they are directly opposed to his conscience. People are unwilling to be turned out of the land they have cultivated for generations, or they are unwilling to disperse when the government authority orders them, or they are unwilling to pay the taxes required of them, or to recognize laws as binding on them when they have had no hand in making them, or to be deprived of their nationality — and I, in the fulfillment of my military duty, must go and shoot them for it. How can I help asking myself when I take part in such punishments, whether they are just, and whether I ought to assist in carrying them out?

Universal service is the extreme limit of violence necessary for the support of the whole state organization, and it is the extreme limit to which submission on the part of the subjects can go. It is the keystone of the whole edifice, and its fall will bring it all down.

The time has come when the ever-growing abuse of power by governments and their struggles with one another has led to their demanding such material and even moral sacrifices from their subjects that everyone is forced to reflect and ask himself, “Can I make these sacrifices? And for the sake of what am I making them? I am expected for the sake of the state to make these sacrifices, to renounce everything that can be precious to man — peace, family, security, and human dignity.” What is this state, for whose sake such terrible sacrifices have to be made? And why is it so indispensably necessary? “The state,” they tell us, “is indispensably needed, in the first place, because without it we should not be protected against the attacks of evil-disposed persons; and secondly, except for the state we should be savages and should have neither religion, culture, education, nor commerce, nor means of communication, nor other social institutions; and thirdly, without the state to defend us we should be liable to be conquered and enslaved by neighboring peoples.”

“Except for the state,” they say, “we should be exposed to the attacks of evil-disposed persons in our own country.”

But who are these evil-disposed persons in our midst from whose attacks we are preserved by the state and its army? Even if, three or four centuries ago, when men prided themselves on their warlike prowess, when killing men was considered an heroic achievement, there were such persons; we know very well that there are no such persons now, that we do not nowadays carry or use firearms, but everyone professes humane principles and feels sympathy for his fellows, and wants nothing more than we all do — that is, to be left in peace to enjoy his existence undisturbed. So that nowadays there are no special malefactors from whom the state could defend us. If by these evil disposed persons is meant the men who are punished as criminals, we know very well that they are not a different kind of being like wild beasts among sheep, but are men just like ourselves, and no more naturally inclined to crimes than those against whom they commit them. We know now that threats and punishments cannot diminish their number; that that can only be done by change of environment and moral influence. So that the justification of state violence on the ground of the protection it gives us from evil-disposed persons, even if it had some foundation three or four centuries ago, has none whatever now. At present one would rather say on the contrary that the action of the state with its cruel methods of punishment, behind the general moral standard of the age, such as prisons, galleys, gibbets, and guillotines, tends rather to brutalize the people than to civilize them, and consequently rather to increase than diminish the number of malefactors.

“Except for the state,” they tell us, “we should not have any religion, education, culture, means of communication, and so on. Without the state men would not have been able to form the social institutions needed for doing any thing.” This argument too was well founded only some centuries ago.

If there was a time when people were so disunited, when they had so little means of communication and interchange of ideas, that they could not co-operate and agree together in any common action in commerce, economics, or education without the state as a center, this want of common action exists no longer. The great extension of means of communication and interchange of ideas has made men completely able to dispense with state aid in forming societies, associations, corporations, and congresses for scientific, economic, and political objects. Indeed government is more often an obstacle than an assistance in attaining these aims.

From the end of last century there has hardly been a single progressive movement of humanity which has not been retarded by the government. So it has been with abolition of corporal punishment, of trial by torture, and of slavery, as well as with the establishment of the liberty of the press and the right of public meeting. In our day governments not only fail to encourage, but directly hinder every movement by which people try to work out new forms of life for themselves. Every attempt at the solution of the problems of labor, land, politics, and religion meets with direct opposition on the part of government.

“Without governments nations would be enslaved by their neighbors.” It is scarcely necessary to refute this last argument. It carries its refutation on the face of it. The government, they tell us, with its army, is necessary to defend us from neighboring states who might enslave us. But we know this is what all governments say of one another, and yet we know that all the European nations profess the same principles of liberty and fraternity, and therefore stand in no need of protection against one another. And if defense against barbarous nations is meant, one-thousandth part of the troops now under arms would be amply sufficient for that purpose. We see that it is really the very opposite of what we have been told. The power of the state, far from being a security against the attacks of our neighbors, exposes us, on the contrary, to much greater danger of such attacks. So that every man who is led, through his compulsory service in the army, to reflect on the value of the state for whose sake he is expected to be ready to sacrifice his peace, security, and life, cannot fail to perceive that there is no kind of justification in modern times for such a sacrifice.

And it is not only from the theoretical standpoint that every man must see that the sacrifices demanded by the state have no justification. Even looking at it practically, weighing, that is to say, all the burdens laid on him by the state, no man can fail to see that for him personally to comply with state demands and serve in the army, would, in the majority of cases, be more disadvantageous than to refuse to do so.

If the majority of men choose to submit rather than to refuse, it is not the result of sober balancing of advantages and disadvantages, but because they are induced by a kind of hypnotizing process practiced upon them. In submitting they simply yield to the suggestions given them as orders, without thought or effort of will. To resist would need independent thought and effort of which every man is not capable. Even apart from the moral significance of compliance or non-compliance, considering material advantage only, non-compliance will be more advantageous in general.

Whoever I may be, whether I belong to the well-to-do class of the oppressors, or the working class of the oppressed, in either case the disadvantages of non-compliance are less and its advantages greater than those of compliance. If I belong to the minority of oppressors the disadvantages of non-compliance will consist in my being brought to judgment for refusing to perform my duties to the state, and if I am lucky, being acquitted or, as is done in the case of the Mennonites in Russia, being set to work out my military service at some civil occupation for the state; while if I am unlucky, I may be condemned to exile or imprisonment for two or three years (I judge by the cases that have occurred in Russia), possibly to even longer imprisonment, or possibly to death, though the probability of that latter is very remote.

So much for the disadvantages of non-compliance. The disadvantages of compliance will be as follows: if I am lucky I shall not be sent to murder my fellow-creatures, and shall not be exposed to great danger of being maimed and killed, but shall only be enrolled into military slavery. I shall be dressed up like a clown, I shall be at the beck and call of every man of a higher grade than my own from corporal to field-marshal, shall be put through any bodily contortions at their pleasure, and after being kept from one to five years I shall have for ten years afterward to be in readiness to undertake all of it again at any minute. If I am unlucky I may, in addition, be sent to war, where I shall be forced to kill men of foreign nations who have done me no harm, where I may be maimed or killed, or sent to certain destruction as in the case of the garrison of Sevastopol, and other cases in every war, or what would be most terrible of all, I may be sent against my own compatriots and have to kill my own brothers for some dynastic or other state interests which have absolutely nothing to do with me. So much for the comparative disadvantages.

The comparative advantages of compliance and non-compliance are as follows:

For the man who submits, the advantages will be that, after exposing himself to all the humiliation and performing all the barbarities required of him, he may, if he escapes being killed, get a decoration of red or gold tinsel to stick on his clown’s dress; he may, if he is very lucky, be put in command of hundreds of thousands of others as brutalized as himself; be called a field-marshal, and get a lot of money.

The advantages of the man who refuses to obey will consist in preserving his dignity as a man, gaining the approbation of good men, and above all knowing that he is doing the work of God, and so undoubtedly doing good to his fellow-men.

So much for the advantages and disadvantages of both lines of conduct for a man of the wealthy classes, an oppressor. For a man of the poor working class the advantages and disadvantages will be the same, but with a great increase of disadvantages. The disadvantages for the poor man who submits will be aggravated by the fact that he will by taking part in it, and, as it were, assenting to it strengthen the state of subjection in which he is held himself.

But no considerations as to how far the state is useful or beneficial to the men who help to support it by serving in the army, nor of the advantages or disadvantages for the individual of compliance or non-compliance with state demands, will decide the question of the continued existence or the abolition of government. This question will be finally decided beyond appeal by the religious consciousness or conscience of every man who is forced, whether he will or no, through universal conscription, to face the question whether the state is to continue to exist or not.

Chapter 8: Doctrine of Non-resistance to Evil by Force Must Inevitably Be Accepted by Men of the Present Day

Christianity is Not a System of Rules, but a New Conception of Life, and therefore it was Not Obligatory and was Not Accepted in its True Significance by All, but only by a Few — Christianity is, Moreover, Prophetic of the Destruction of the Pagan Life, and therefore of Necessity of the Acceptance of the Christian Doctrines — Non-resistance of Evil by Force is One Aspect of the Christian Doctrine, which must Inevitably in Our Times be Accepted by Men — Two Methods of Deciding Every Quarrel — First Method is to Find a Universal Definition of Evil, which All Must Accept, and to Resist this Evil by Force — Second Method is the Christian One of Complete Non-resistance by Force — Though the Failure of the First Method was Recognized since the Early Days of Christianity, it was Still Proposed, and only as Mankind has Progressed it has Become More and More Evident that there Cannot be any Universal Definition of Evil — This is Recognized by All at the Present Day, and if Force is Still Used to Resist Evil, it is Not Because it is Now Regarded as Right, but Because People Don’t Know How to Avoid It — The Difficulty of Avoiding It is the Result of the Subtle and Complex Character of the Government Use of Force — Force is Used in Four Ways: Intimidation, Bribery, Hypnotism, and Coercion by Force of Arms — State Violence Can Never be Suppressed by the Forcible Overthrow of the Government — Men are Led by the Sufferings of the Pagan Mode of Life to the Necessity of Accepting Christ’s Teaching with its Doctrine of Non-resistance by Force — The Consciousness of its Truth which is Diffused Throughout Our Society, Will also Bring About its Acceptance — This Consciousness is in Complete Contradiction with Our Life — This is Specially Obvious in Compulsory Military Service, but Through Habit and the Application of the Four Methods of Violence by the State, Men do not See this Inconsistency of Christianity with Life of a Soldier — They do Not even See It, though the Authorities Themselves Show all the Immorality of a Soldier’s Duties with Perfect Clearness — The Call to Military Service is the Supreme Test for Every Man, when the Choice is Offered Him, between Adopting the Christian Doctrine of Non-resistance, or Slavishly Submitting to the Existing State Organization — Men Usually Renounce All They Hold Sacred, and Submit to the Demands of Government, Seeming to See No Other Course Open to Them — For Men of the Pagan Conception of Life there is No Other Course Open, and Never Will Be, in Spite of the Growing Horrors of War — Society, Made Up of Such Men, Must Perish, and No Social Reorganization Can Save It — Pagan Life Has Reached Its Extreme Limit, and Will Annihilate Itself.

It is often said that if Christianity is a truth, it ought to have been accepted by everyone directly it appeared, and ought to have transformed men’s lives for the better. But this is like saying that if the seed were ripe it ought at once to bring forth stalls, flower, and fruit.

The Christian religion is not a legal system which, being imposed by violence, may transform men’s lives. Christianity is a new and higher conception of life. A new conception of life cannot be imposed on men; it can only be freely assimilated. And it can only be freely assimilated in two ways: one spiritual and internal, the other experimental and external.

Some people — a minority — by a kind of prophetic instinct divine the truth of the doctrine, surrender themselves to it and adopt it. Others — the majority — only through a long course of mistakes, experiments, and suffering are brought to recognize the truth of the doctrine and the necessity of adopting it.

And by this experimental external method the majority of Christian men have now been brought to this necessity of assimilating the doctrine. One sometimes wonders what necessitated the corruption of Christianity which is now the greatest obstacle to its acceptance in its true significance.

If Christianity had been presented to men in its true, uncorrupted form, it would not have been accepted by the majority, who would have been as untouched by it as the nations of Asia are now. The peoples who accepted it in its corrupt form were subjected to its slow but certain influence, and by a long course of errors and experiments and their resultant sufferings have now been brought to the necessity of assimilating it in its true significance.

The corruption of Christianity and its acceptance in its corrupt form by the majority of men was as necessary as it is that the seed should remain hidden for a certain time in the earth in order to germinate.

Christianity is at once a doctrine of truth and a prophecy. Eighteen centuries ago Christianity revealed to men the truth in which they ought to live, and at the same time foretold what human life would become if men would not live by it but continued to live by their previous principles, and what it would become if they accepted the Christian doctrine and carried it out in their lives.

Laying down in the Sermon on the Mount the principles by which to guide men’s lives, Christ said: “Whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, who built his house upon a rock; and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not, for it was founded upon a rock. And everyone that heareth these sayings, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, who built his house upon the sand; and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it” (Matt. vii. 24-27).

And now after eighteen centuries the prophecy has been fulfilled. Not having followed Christ’s teaching generally and its application to social life in non-resistance to evil, men have been brought in spite of themselves to the inevitable destruction foretold by Christ for those who do not fulfill his teaching.

People often think the question of non-resistance to evil by force is a theoretical one, which can be neglected. Yet this question is presented by life itself to all men, and calls for some answer from every thinking man. Ever since Christianity has been outwardly professed, this question is for men in their social life like the question which presents itself to a traveler when the road on which he has been journeying divides into two branches. He must go on and he cannot say: I will not think about it, but will go on just as I did before. There was one road, now there are two, and he must make his choice.

In the same way since Christ’s teaching has been known by men they cannot say: I will live as before and will not decide the question of resistance or non-resistance to evil by force. At every new, struggle that arises one must inevitably decide; am I, or am I not, to resist by force what I regard as evil.

The question of resistance or non-resistance to evil arose when the first conflict between men took place, since every conflict is nothing else than resistance by force to what each of the combatants regards as evil. But before Christ, men did not see that resistance by force to what each regards as evil, simply because one thinks evil what the other thinks good, is only one of the methods of settling the dispute, and that there is another method, that of not resisting evil by force at all.

Before Christ’s teaching, it seemed to men that the one only means of settling a dispute was by resistance to evil by force. And they acted accordingly, each of the combatants trying to convince himself and others that what each respectively regards as evil, is actually, absolutely evil.

And to do this from the earliest time men have devised definitions of evil and tried to make them binding on everyone. And such definitions of evil sometimes took the form of laws, supposed to have been received by supernatural means, sometimes of the commands of rulers or assemblies to whom infallibility was attributed. Men resorted to violence against others, and convinced themselves and others that they were directing their violence against evil recognized as such by all.

This means was employed from the earliest times, especially by those who had gained possession of authority, and for a long while its irrationality was not detected.

But the longer men lived in the world and the more complex their relations became, the more evident it was that to resist by force what each regarded as evil was irrational, that conflict was in no way lessened thereby, and that no human definitions can succeed in making what some regard as evil be accepted as such by others.

Already at the time Christianity arose, it was evident to a great number of people in the Roman Empire where it arose, that what was regarded as evil by Nero and Caligula could not be regarded as evil by others. Even at that time men had begun to understand that human laws, though given out for divine laws, were compiled by men, and cannot be infallible, whatever the external majesty with which they are invested, and that erring men are not rendered infallible by assembling together and calling themselves a senate or any other name. Even at that time this was felt and understood by many. And it was then that Christ preached his doctrine, which consisted not only of the prohibition of resistance to evil by force, but gave a new conception of life and a means of putting an end to conflict between all men, not by making it the duty of one section only of mankind to submit without conflict to what is prescribed to them by certain authorities, but by making it the duty of all — and consequently of those in authority — not to resort to force against anyone in any circumstances.

This doctrine was accepted at the time by only a very small number of disciples. The majority of men, especially all who were in power, even after the nominal acceptance of Christianity, continued to maintain for themselves the principle of resistance by force to what they regarded as evil. So it was under the Roman and Byzantine emperors, and so it continued to be later.

The insufficiency of the principle of the authoritative definition of evil and resistance to it by force, evident as it was in the early ages of Christianity, becomes still more obvious through the division of the Roman Empire into many states of equal authority, through their hostilities and the internal conflicts that broke out within them.

But men were not ready to accept the solution given by Christ, and the old definitions of evil, which ought to be resisted, continued to be laid down by means of making laws binding on all and enforced by forcible means. The authority who decided what ought to be regarded as evil and resisted by force was at one time the Pope, at another an emperor or king, an elective assembly or a whole nation. But both within and without the state there were always men to be found who did not accept as binding on themselves the laws given out as the decrees of a god, or made by men invested with a sacred character, or the institutions supposed to represent the will of the nation; and there were men who thought good what the existing authorities regarded as bad, and who struggled against the authorities with the same violence as was employed against them.

The men invested with religious authority regarded as evil what the men and institutions invested with temporal authority regarded as good and vice versa, and the struggle grew more and more intense. And the longer men used violence as the means of settling their disputes, the more obvious it became that it was an unsuitable means, since there could be no external authority able to define evil recognized by all.

Things went on like this for eighteen centuries, and at last reached the present position in which it is absolutely obvious that there is, and can be, no external definition of evil binding upon all. Men have come to the point of ceasing to believe in the possibility or even desirability of finding and establishing such a general definition. It has come to men in power ceasing to attempt to prove that what they regard as evil is evil, and simply declaring that they regard as evil what they don’t like, while their subjects no longer obey them because they accept the definition of evil laid down by them, but simply obey because they cannot help themselves. It was not because it was a good thing, necessary and beneficial to men, and the contrary course would have been an evil, but simply because it was the will of those in power that Nice was incorporated into France, and Lorraine into Germany, and Bohemia into Austria, and that Poland was divided, and Ireland and India ruled by the English government, and that the Chinese are attacked and the Africans slaughtered, and the Chinese prevented from immigrating by the Americans, and the Jews persecuted by the Russians, and that landowners appropriate lands they do not cultivate and capitalists enjoy the fruits of the labor of others. It has come to the present state of things; one set of men commit acts of violence no longer on the pretext of resistance to evil, but simply for their profit or their caprice, and another set submit to violence, not because they suppose, as was supposed in former times, that this violence was practised upon them for the sake of securing them from evil, but simply because they cannot avoid it.

If the Roman, or the man of mediaeval times, or the average Russian of fifty years ago, as I remember him, was convinced without a shade of doubt that the violence of authority was indispensable to preserve him from evil; that taxes, dues, serfage, prisons, scourging, knouts, executions, the army and war were what ought to be — we know now that one can seldom find a man who believes that all these means of violence preserve anyone from any evil whatever, and indeed does not clearly perceive that most of these acts of violence to which he is exposed, and in which he has some share, are in themselves a great and useless evil.

There is no one to-day who does not see the uselessness and injustice of collecting taxes from the toiling masses to enrich idle officials; or the senselessness of inflicting punishments on weak or depraved persons in the shape of transportation from one place to another, or of imprisonment in a fortress where, living in security and indolence, they only become weaker and more depraved; or the worse than uselessness and injustice, the positive insanity and barbarity of preparations for war and of wars, causing devastation and ruin, and having no kind of justification. Yet these forms of violence continue and are supported by the very people who see their uselessness, injustice, and cruelty, and suffer from them. If fifty years ago the idle rich man and the illiterate laborer were both alike convinced that their state of everlasting holiday for one and everlasting toil for the other was ordained by God himself, we know very well that nowadays, thanks to the growth of population and the diffusion of books and education, it would be hard to find in Europe or even in Russia, either among rich or poor, a man to whom in one shape or another a doubt as to the justice of this state of things had never presented itself. The rich know that they are guilty in the very fact of being rich, and try to expiate their guilt by sacrifices to art and science, as of old they expiated their sins by sacrifices to the Church. And even the larger half of the working people openly declare that the existing order is iniquitous and bound to be destroyed or reformed. One set of religious people of whom there are millions in Russia, the so-called sectaries, consider the existing social order as unjust and to be destroyed on the ground of the Gospel teaching taken in its true sense. Others regard it as unjust on the ground of the socialistic, communistic, or anarchistic theories, which are springing up in the lower strata of the working people. Violence no longer rests on the belief in its utility, but only on the fact of its having existed so long, and being organized by the ruling classes who profit by it, so that those who are under their authority cannot extricate themselves from it. The governments of our day — all of them, the most despotic and the liberal alike — have become what Herzen so well called “Ghenghis Khan with the telegraph;” that is to say, organizations of violence based on no principle but the grossest tyranny, and at the same time taking advantage of all the means invented by science for the peaceful collective social activity of free and equal men, used by them to enslave and oppress their fellows.

Governments and the ruling classes no longer take their stand on right or even on the semblance of justice, but on a skillful organization carried to such a point of perfection by the aid of science that everyone is caught in the circle of violence and has no chance of escaping from it. This circle is made up now of four methods of working upon men, joined together like the limes of a chain ring.

The first and oldest method is intimidation. This consists in representing the existing state organization — whatever it may be, free republic or the most savage despotism — as something sacred and immutable, and therefore following any efforts to alter it with the cruellest punishments. This method is in use now — as it has been from olden times — wherever there is a government: in Russia against the so-called Nihilists, in America against Anarchists, in France against Imperialists, Legitimists, Communards, and Anarchists.

Railways, telegraphs, telephones, photographs, and the great perfection of the means of getting rid of men for years, without killing them, by solitary confinement, where, hidden from the world, they perish and are forgotten, and the many other modern inventions employed by government, give such power that when once authority has come into certain hands, the police, open and secret, the administration and prosecutors, jailers and executioners of all kinds, do their work so zealously that there is no chance of overturning the government, however cruel and senseless it may be.

The second method is corruption. It consists in plundering the industrious working people of their wealth by means of taxes and distributing it in satisfying the greed of officials, who are bound in return to support and keep up the oppression of the people. These bought officials, from the highest ministers to the poorest copying clerks, make up an unbroken network of men bound together by the same interest — that of living at the expense of the people. They become the richer the more submissively they carry out the will of the government; and at all times and places, sticking at nothing, in all departments support by word and deed the violence of government, on which their own prosperity also rests.

The third method is what I can only describe as hypnotizing the people. This consists in checking the moral development of men, and by various suggestions keeping them back in the ideal of life, outgrown by mankind at large, on which the power of government rests. This hypnotizing process is organized at the present in the most complex manner, and starting from their earliest childhood, continues to act on men till the day of their death. It begins in their earliest years in the compulsory schools, created for this purpose, in which the children have instilled into them the ideas of life of their ancestors, which are in direct antagonism with the conscience of the modern world. In countries where there is a state religion, they teach the children the senseless blasphemies of the Church catechisms, together with the duty of obedience to their superiors. In republican states they teach them the savage superstition of patriotism and the same pretended obedience to the governing authorities.

The process is kept up during later years by the encouragement of religious and patriotic superstitions.

The religious superstition is encouraged by establishing, with money taken from the people, temples, processions, memorials, and festivals, which, aided by painting, architecture, music, and incense, intoxicate the people, and above all by the support of the clergy, whose duty consists in brutalizing the people and keeping them in a permanent state of stupefaction by their teaching, the solemnity of their services, their sermons, and their interference in private life — at births, deaths, and marriages. The patriotic superstition is encouraged by the creation, with money taken from the people, of national fêtes, spectacles, monuments, and festivals to dispose men to attach importance to their own nation, and to the aggrandizement of the state and its rulers, and to feel antagonism and even hatred for other nations. With these objects under despotic governments there is direct prohibition against printing and disseminating books to enlighten the people, and everyone who might rouse the people from their lethargy is exiled or imprisoned. Moreover, under every government without exception everything is kept back that might emancipate and everything encouraged that tends to corrupt the people, such as literary works tending to keep them in the barbarism of religious and patriotic superstition, all kinds of sensual amusements, spectacles, circuses, theaters, and even the physical means of inducing stupefaction, as tobacco and alcohol, which form the principal source of revenue of states. Even prostitution is encouraged, and not only recognized, but even organized by the government in the majority of states. So much for the third method.

The fourth method consists in selecting from all the men who have been stupefied and enslaved by the three former methods a certain number, exposing them to special and intensified means of stupefaction and brutalization, and so making them into a passive instrument for carrying out all the cruelties and brutalities needed by the government. This result is attained by taking them at the youthful age when men have not had time to form clear and definite principles of morals, and removing them from all natural and human conditions of life, home, family and kindred, and useful labor. They are shut up together in barracks, dressed in special clothes, and worked upon by cries, drums, music, and shining objects to go through certain daily actions invented for this purpose, and by this means are brought into an hypnotic condition in which they cease to be men and become mere senseless machines, submissive to the hypnotizer. These physically vigorous young men (in these days of universal conscription, all young men), hypnotized, armed with murderous weapons, always obedient to the governing authorities and ready for any act of violence at their command, constitute the fourth and principal method of enslaving men.

By this method the circle of violence is completed.

Intimidation, corruption, and hypnotizing bring people into a condition in which they are willing to be soldiers; the soldiers give the power of punishing and plundering them (and purchasing officials with the spoils), and hypnotizing them and converting them in time into these same soldiers again.

The circle is complete, and there is no chance of breaking through it by force.

Some persons maintain that freedom from violence, or at least a great diminution of it, may be gained by the oppressed forcibly overturning the oppressive government and replacing it by a new one under which such violence and oppression will be unnecessary, but they deceive themselves and others, and their efforts do not better the position of the oppressed, but only make it worse. Their conduct only tends to increase the despotism of government. Their efforts only afford a plausible pretext for government to strengthen their power.

Even if we admit that under a combination of circumstances specially unfavorable for the government, as in France in 1870, any government might be forcibly overturned and the power transferred to other hands, the new authority would rarely be less oppressive than the old one; on the contrary, always having to defend itself against its dispossessed and exasperated enemies, it would be more despotic and cruel, as has always been the rule in all revolutions.

While socialists and communists regard the individualistic, capitalistic organization of society as an evil, and the anarchists regard as an evil all government whatever, there are royalists, conservatives, and capitalists who consider any socialistic or communistic organization or anarchy as an evil, and all these parties have no means other than violence to bring men to agreement. Whichever of these parties were successful in bringing their schemes to pass, must resort to support its authority to all the existing methods of violence, and even invent new ones.

The oppressed would be another set of people, and coercion would take some new form; but the violence and oppression would be unchanged or even more cruel, since hatred would be intensified by the struggle, and new forms of oppression would have been devised. So it has always been after all revolutions and all attempts at revolution, all conspiracies, and all violent changes of government. Every conflict only strengthens the means of oppression in the hands of those who happen at a given moment to be in power.

The position of our Christian society, and especially the ideals most current in it, prove this in a strikingly convincing way.

There remains now only one sphere of human life not encroached upon by government authority — that is the domestic, economic sphere, the sphere of private life and labor. And even this is now — thanks to the efforts of communists and socialists — being gradually encroached upon by government, so that labor and recreation, dwellings, dress, and food will gradually, if the hopes of the reformers are successful, be prescribed and regulated by government.

The slow progress of eighteen centuries has brought the Christian nations again to the necessity of deciding the question they have evaded — the question of the acceptance or non-acceptance of Christ’s teaching, and the question following upon it in social life of resistance or non-resistance to evil by force. But there is this difference, that whereas formerly men could accept or refuse to accept the solution given by Christ, now that solution cannot be avoided, since it alone can save men from the slavery in which they are caught like a net.

But it is not only the misery of the position which makes this inevitable.

While the pagan organization has been proved more and more false, the truth of the Christian religion has been growing more and more evident.

Not in vain have the best men of Christian humanity, who apprehended the truth by spiritual intuition, for eighteen centuries testified to it in spite of every menace, every privation, and every suffering. By their martyrdom they passed on the truth to the masses, and impressed it on their hearts.

Christianity has penetrated into the consciousness of humanity, not only negatively by the demonstration of the impossibility of continuing in the pagan life, but also through its simplification, its increased clearness and freedom from the superstitions intermingled with it, and its diffusion through all classes of the population.

Eighteen centuries of Christianity have not passed without an effect even on those who accepted it only externally. These eighteen centuries have brought men so far that even while they continue to live the pagan life which is no longer consistent with the development of humanity, they not only see clearly all the wretchedness of their position, but in the depths of their souls they believe (they can only live through this belief) that the only salvation from this position is to be found in fulfilling the Christian doctrine in its true significance. As to the time and manner of salvation, opinions are divided according to the intellectual development and the prejudices of each society. But every man of the modern world recognizes that our salvation lies in fulfilling the law of Christ. Some believers in the supernatural character of Christianity hold that salvation will come when all men are brought to believe in Christ, whose second coming is at hand. Other believers in supernatural Christianity hold that salvation will come through the Church, which will draw all men into its fold, train them in the Christian virtues, and transform their life. A third section, who do not admit the divinity of Christ, hold that the salvation of mankind will be brought about by slow and gradual progress, through which the pagan principles of our existence will be replaced by the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity — that is, by Christian principles. A fourth section, who believe in the social revolution, hold that salvation will come when through a violent revolution men are forced into community of property, abolition of government, and collective instead of individual industry — that is to say, the realization of one side of the Christian doctrine. In one way or another all men of our day in their inner consciousness condemn the existing effete pagan order, and admit, often unconsciously and while regarding themselves as hostile to Christianity, that our salvation is only to be found in the application of the Christian doctrine, or parts of it, in its true significance to our daily life.

Christianity cannot, as its Founder said, be realized by the majority of men all at once; it must grow like a huge tree from a tiny seed. And so it has grown, and now has reached its full development, not yet in actual life, but in the conscience of men of to-day.

Now not only the minority, who have always comprehended Christianity by spiritual intuition, but all the vast majority who seem so far from it in their social existence recognize its true significance.

Look at individual men in their private life, listen to their standards of conduct in their judgment of one another; hear not only their public utterances, but the counsels given by parents and guardians to the young in their charge; and you will see that, far as their social life based on violence may be from realizing Christian truth, in their private life what is considered good by all without exception is nothing but the Christian virtues; what is considered as bad is nothing but the antichristian vices. Those who consecrate their lives self-sacrificingly to the service of humanity are regarded as the best men. The selfish, who make use of the misfortunes of others for their own advantage, are regarded as the worst of men.

Though some non-Christian ideals, such as strength, courage, and wealth, are still worshiped by a few who have not been penetrated by the Christian spirit, these ideals are out of date and are abandoned, if not by all, at least by all those regarded as the best people. There are no ideals, other than the Christian ideals, which are accepted by all and regarded as binding on all.

The position of our Christian humanity, if you look at it from the outside with all its cruelty and degradation of men, is terrible indeed. But if one looks at it within, in its inner consciousness, the spectacle it presents is absolutely different.

All the evil of our life seems to exist only because it has been so for so long; those who do the evil have not had time yet to learn how to act otherwise, though they do not want to act as they do.

All the evil seems to exist through some cause independent of the conscience of men.

Strange and contradictory as it seems, all men of the present day hate the very social order they are themselves supporting.

I think it is Max Müller who describes the amazement of an Indian convert to Christianity, who after absorbing the essence of the Christian doctrine came to Europe and saw the actual life of Christians. He could not recover from his astonishment at the complete contrast between the reality and what he had expected to find among Christian nations. If we feel no astonishment at the contrast between our convictions and our conduct, that is because the influences, tending to obscure the contrast, produce an effect upon us too. We need only look at our life from the point of view of that Indian, who understood Christianity in its true significance, without any compromises or concessions, we need but look at the savage brutalities of which our life is full, to be appalled at the contradictions in the midst of which we live often without observing them.

We need only recall the preparations for war, the mitrailleuses, the silver-gilt bullets, the torpedoes, and — the Red Cross; the solitary prison cells, the experiments of execution by electricity — and the care of the hygienic welfare of prisoners; the philanthropy of the rich, and their life, which produces the poor they are benefiting.

And these inconsistencies are not, as it might seem, because men pretend to be Christians while they are really pagans, but because of something lacking in men, or some kind of force hindering them from being what they already feel themselves to be in their consciousness, and what they genuinely wish to be. Men of the present day do not merely pretend to hate oppression, inequality, class distinction, and every kind of cruelty to animals as well as human beings. They genuinely detest all this, but they do not know how to put a stop to it, or perhaps cannot decide to give up what preserves it all, and seems to them necessary.

Indeed, ask every man separately whether he thinks it laudable and worthy of a man of this age to hold a position from which he receives a salary disproportionate to his work; to take from the people — often in poverty — taxes to be spent on constructing cannon, torpedoes, and other instruments of butchery, so as to make war on people with whom we wish to be at peace, and who feel the same wish in regard to us; or to receive a salary for devoting one’s whole life to constructing these instruments of butchery, or to preparing oneself and others for the work of murder. And ask him whether it is laudable and worthy of a man, and suitable for a Christian, to employ himself, for a salary, in seizing wretched, misguided, often illiterate and drunken, creatures because they appropriate the property of others — on a much smaller scale than we do — or because they kill men in a different fashion from that in which we undertake to do it — and shutting them in prison for it, ill treating them and killing them; and whether it is laudable and worthy of a man and a Christian to preach for a salary to the people not Christianity, but superstitions which one knows to be stupid and pernicious; and whether it is laudable and worthy of a man to rob his neighbor for his gratification of what he wants to satisfy his simplest needs, as the great landowners do; or to force him to exhausting labor beyond his strength to augment one’s wealth, as do factory owners and manufacturers; or to profit by the poverty of men to increase one’s gains, as merchants do. And everyone taken separately, especially if one’s remarks are directed at someone else, not himself, will answer, No! And yet the very man who sees all the baseness of those actions, of his own free will, uncoerced by anyone, often even for no pecuniary profit, but only from childish vanity, for a china cross, a scrap of ribbon, a bit of fringe he is allowed to wear, will enter military service, become a magistrate or justice of the peace, commissioner, archbishop, or beadle, though in fulfilling these offices he must commit acts the baseness and shamefulness of which he cannot fail to recognize.

I know that many of these men will confidently try to prove that they have reasons for regarding their position as legitimate and quite indispensable. They will say in their defense that authority is given by God, that the functions of the state are indispensable for the welfare of humanity, that property is not opposed to Christianity, that the rich young man was only commanded to sell all he had and give to the poor if he wished to be perfect, that the existing distribution of property and our commercial system must always remain as they are, and are to the advantage of all, and so on. But, however much they try to deceive themselves and others, they all know that what they are doing is opposed to all the beliefs which they profess, and in the depths of their souls, when they are left alone with their conscience, they are ashamed and miserable at the recollection of it, especially if the baseness of their action has been pointed out to them. A man of the present day, whether he believes in the divinity of Christ or not, cannot fail to see that to assist in the capacity of tzar, minister, governor, or commissioner in taking from a poor family its last cow for taxes to be spent on cannons, or on the pay and pensions of idle officials, who live in luxury and are worse than useless; or in putting into prison some man we have ourselves corrupted, and throwing his family on the streets; or in plundering and butchering in war; or in inculcating savage and idolatrous superstitious in the place of the law of Christ; or in impounding the cow found on one’s land, though it belongs to a man who has no land; or to cheat the workman in a factory, by imposing fines for accidentally spoiled articles; or making a poor man pay double the value for anything simply because he is in the direst poverty; — not a man of the present day can fail to know that all these actions are base and disgraceful, and that they need not do them. They all know it. They know that what they are doing is wrong, and would not do it for anything in the world if they had the power of resisting the forces which shut their eyes to the criminality of their actions and impel them to commit them.

In nothing is the pitch of inconsistency modern life has attained to so evident as in universal conscription, which is the last resource and the final expression of violence.

Indeed, it is only because this state of universal armament has been brought about gradually and imperceptibly, and because governments have exerted, in maintaining it, every resource of intimidation, corruption, brutalization, and violence, that we do not see its flagrant inconsistency with the Christian ideas and sentiments by which the modern world is permeated.

We are so accustomed to the inconsistency that we do not see all the hideous folly and immorality of men voluntarily choosing the profession of butchery as though it were an honorable career, of poor wretches submitting to conscription, or in countries where compulsory service has not been introduced, of people voluntarily abandoning a life of industry to recruit soldiers and train them as murderers. We know that all of these men are either Christians, or profess humane and liberal principles, and they know that they thus become partly responsible — through universal conscription, personally responsible — for the most insane, aimless, and brutal murders. And yet they all do it.

More than that, in Germany, where compulsory service first originated, Caprivi has given expression to what had been hitherto so assiduously concealed — that is, that the men that the soldiers will have to kill are not foreigners alone, but their own countrymen, the very working people from whom they themselves are taken. And this admission has not opened people’s eyes, has not horrified them! They still go like sheep to the slaughter, and submit to everything required of them.

And that is not all: the Emperor of Germany has lately shown still more clearly the duties of the army, by thanking and rewarding a soldier for killing a defenseless citizen who made his approach incautiously. By rewarding an action always regarded as base and cowardly even by men on the lowest level of morality, William has shown that a soldier’s chief duty — the one most appreciated by the authorities — is that of executioner; and not a professional executioner who kills only condemned criminals, but one ready to butcher any innocent man at the word of command.

And even that is not all. In 1892, the same William, the ENFANT TERRIBLE of state authority, who says plainly what other people only think, in addressing some soldiers gave public utterance to the following speech, which was reported next day in thousands of newspapers: “Conscripts!” he said, “you have sworn fidelity to ME before the altar and the minister of God! You are still too young to understand all the importance of what has been said here; let your care before all things be to obey the orders and instructions given you. You have sworn fidelity TO ME, lads of my guard; THAT MEANS THAT YOU ARE NOW MY SOLDIERS, that YOU HAVE GIVEN YOURSELVES TO ME BODY AND SOUL. For you there is now but one enemy, MY enemy. IN THESE DAYS OF SOCIALISTIC SEDITION IT MAY COME TO PASS THAT I COMMAND YOU TO FIRE ON YOUR OWN KINDRED, YOUR BROTHERS, EVEN YOUR OWN FATHERS AND MOTHERS — WHICH GOD FORBID! — even then you are bound to obey my orders without hesitation.”

This man expresses what all sensible rulers think, but studiously conceal. He says openly that the soldiers are in HIS service, at HIS disposal, and must be ready for HIS advantage to murder even their brothers and fathers.

In the most brutal words he frankly exposes all the horrors and criminality for which men prepare themselves in entering the army, and the depths of ignominy to which they fall in promising obedience. Like a bold hypnotizer, he tests the degree of insensibility of the hypnotized subject. He touches his skin with a red-hot iron; the skin smokes and scorches, but the sleeper does not awake.

This miserable man, imbecile and drunk with power, outrages in this utterance everything that can be sacred for a man of the modern world. And yet all the Christians, liberals, and cultivated people, far from resenting this outrage, did not even observe it.

The last, the most extreme test is put before men in its coarsest form. And they do not seem even to notice that it is a test, that there is any choice about it. They seem to think there is no course open but slavish submission. One would have thought these insane words, which outrage everything a man of the present day holds sacred, must rouse indignation. But there has been nothing of the kind.

All the young men through the whole of Europe are exposed year after year to this test, and with very few exceptions they renounce all that a man can hold sacred, all express their readiness to kill their brothers, even their fathers, at the bidding of the first crazy creature dressed up in a livery with red and gold trimming, and only wait to be told where and when they are to kill. And they actually are ready.

Every savage has something he holds sacred, something for which he is ready to suffer, something he will not consent to do. But what is it that is sacred to the civilized man of to-day? They say to him: “You must become my slave, and this slavery may force you to kill even your own father;” and he, often very well educated, trained in all the sciences at the university, quietly puts his head under the yoke. They dress him up in a clown’s costume, and order him to cut capers, turn and twist and bow, and kill — he does it all submissively. And when they let him go, he seems to shake himself and go back to his former life, and he continues to discourse upon the dignity of man, liberty, equality, and fraternity as before.

“Yes, but what is one to do?” people often ask in genuine perplexity. “If everyone would stand out it would be something, but by myself, I shall only suffer without doing any good to anyone.”

And that is true. A man with the social conception of life cannot resist. The aim of his life is his personal welfare. It is better for his personal welfare for him to submit, and he submits.

Whatever they do to him, however they torture or humiliate him, he will submit, for, alone, he can do nothing; he has no principle for the sake of which he could resist violence alone. And those who control them never allow them to unite together. It is often said that the invention of terrible weapons of destruction will put an end to war. That is an error. As the means of extermination are improved, the means of reducing men who hold the state conception of life to submission can be improved to correspond. They may slaughter them by thousands, by millions, they may tear them to pieces, still they will march to war like senseless cattle. Some will want beating to make them move, others will be proud to go if they are allowed to wear a scrap of ribbon or gold lace.

And of this mass of men so brutalized as to be ready to promise to kill their own parents, the social reformers — conservatives, liberals, socialists, and anarchists — propose to form a rational and moral society. What sort of moral and rational society can be formed out of such elements? With warped and rotten planks you cannot build a house, however you put them together. And to form a rational moral society of such men is just as impossible a task. They can be formed into nothing but a herd of cattle, driven by the shouts and whips of the herdsmen. As indeed they are.

So, then, we have on one side men calling themselves Christians, and professing the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and along with that ready, in the name of liberty, to submit to the most slavish degradation; in the name of equality, to accept the crudest, most senseless division of men by externals merely into higher and lower classes, allies and enemies; and, in the name of fraternity, ready to murder their brothers [see footnote].

[Footnote: The fact that among certain nations, as the English and the American, military service is not compulsory (though already one hears there are some who advocate that it should be made so) does not affect the servility of the citizens to the government in principle. Here we have each to go and kill or be killed, there they have each to give the fruit of their toil to pay for the recruiting and training of soldiers.]

The contradiction between life and conscience and the misery resulting from it have reached the extreme limit and can go no further. The state organization of life based on violence, the aim of which was the security of personal, family, and social welfare, has come to the point of renouncing the very objects for which it was founded — it has reduced men to absolute renunciation and loss of the welfare it was to secure.

The first half of the prophecy has been fulfilled in the generation of men who have not accepted Christ’s teaching, Their descendants have been brought now to the absolute necessity of patting the truth of the second half to the test of experience.

Chapter 9: Acceptance of the Christian Conception of Life Will Emancipate Men From the Miseries of Our Pagan Life

The External Life of Christian Peoples Remains Pagan Though they are Penetrated by Christian Consciousness — The Way Out of this Contradiction is by the Acceptance of the Christian Theory of Life — Only Through Christianity is Every Man Free, and Emancipated of All Human Authority — This Emancipation can be Effected by no Change in External Conditions of Life, but Only by a Change in the Conception of Life — The Christian Ideal of Life Requires Renunciation of all Violence, and in Emancipating the Man who Accepts it, Emancipates the Whole World from All External Authorities — The Way Out of the Present Apparently Hopeless Position is for Every Man who is Capable of Assimilating the Christian Conception of Life, to Accept it and Live in Accordance with it — But Men Consider this Way too Slow, and Look for Deliverance Through Changes in Material Conditions of Life Aided by Government — That Will Lead to No Improvement, as it is simply Increasing the Evil under which Men are Suffering — A Striking Instance of this is the Submission to Compulsory Military Service, which it would be More Advantageous for Every Man to Refuse than to Submit to — The Emancipation of Men Can Only be Brought About by each Individual Emancipating Himself, and the Examples of this Self-emancipation which are already Appearing Threaten the Destruction of Governmental Authority — Refusal to Comply with the Unchristian Demands of Government Undermines the Authority of the State and Emancipates Men — And therefore Cases of such Non-compliance are Regarded with more Dread by State Authorities than any Conspiracies or Acts of Violence — Examples of Non-compliance in Russia, in Regard to Oath of Allegiance, Payment of Taxes, Passports, Police Duties, and Military Service — Examples of such Non-compliance in other States — Governments do not Know how to Treat Men who Refuse to Comply with their Demands on Christian Grounds — Such People, without Striking a Blow, Undermine the very Basis of Government from Within — To Punish them is Equivalent to Openly Renouncing Christianity, and Assisting in Diffusing the Very Principle by which these Men justify their Non-compliance — So Governments are in a Helpless Position — Men who Maintain the Uselessness of Personal Independence, only Retard the Dissolution Dissolution of the Present State Organization Based on Force.

The position of the Christian peoples in our days has remained just as cruel as it was in the times of paganism. In many respects, especially in the oppression of the masses, it has become even more cruel than it was in the days of paganism.

But between the condition of men in ancient times and their condition in our days there is just the difference that we see in the world of vegetation between the last days of autumn and the first days of spring. In the autumn the external lifelessness in nature corresponds with its inward condition of death, while in the spring the external lifelessness is in sharp contrast with the internal state of reviving and passing into new forms of life.

In the same way the similarity between the ancient heathen life and the life of to-day is merely external: the inward condition of men in the times of heathenism was absolutely different from their inward condition at the present time.

Then the outward condition of cruelty and of slavery was in complete harmony with the inner conscience of men, and every step in advance intensified this harmony; now the outward condition of cruelty and of slavery is completely contradictory to the Christian consciousness of men, and every step in advance only intensifies this contradiction.

Humanity is passing through seemingly unnecessary, fruitless agonies. It is passing through something like the throes of birth. Everything is ready for the new life, but still the new life does not come.

There seems no way out of the position. And there would be none, except that a man (and thereby all men) is gifted with the power of forming a different, higher theory of life, which at once frees him from all the bonds by which he seems indissolubly fettered.

And such a theory is the Christian view of life made known to mankind eighteen hundred years ago.

A man need only make this theory of life his own, for the fetters which seemed so indissolubly forged upon him to drop off of themselves, and for him to feel himself absolutely free, just as a bird would feel itself free in a fenced-in place directly it tools to its wings.

People talk about the liberty of the Christian Church, about giving or not giving freedom to Christians. Underlying all these ideas and expressions there is some strange misconception. Freedom cannot be bestowed on or taken from a Christian or Christians. Freedom is an inalienable possession of the Christian.

If we talk of bestowing freedom on Christians or withholding it from them, we are obviously talking not of real Christians but of people who only call themselves Christians. A Christian cannot fail to be free, because the attainment of the aim he sets before himself cannot be prevented or even hindered by anyone or anything.

Let a man only understand his life as Christianity teaches him to understand it, let him understand, that is, that his life belongs not to him — not to his own individuality, nor to his family, nor to the state — but to him who has sent him into the world, and let him once understand that he must therefore fulfill not the law of his own individuality, nor his family, nor of the state, but the infinite law of him from whom he has come; and he will not only feel himself absolutely free from every human power, but will even cease to regard such power as at all able to hamper anyone.

Let a man but realize that the aim of his life is the fulfillment of God’s law, and that law will replace all other laws for him, and he will give it his sole allegiance, so that by that very allegiance every human law will lose all binding and controlling power in his eyes.

The Christian is independent of every human authority by the fact that he regards the divine law of love, implanted in the soul of every man, and brought before his consciousness by Christ, as the sole guide of his life and other men’s also.

The Christian may be subjected to external violence, he may be deprived of bodily freedom, he may be in bondage to his passions (he who commits sin is the slave of sin), but he cannot be in bondage in the sense of being forced by any danger or by any threat of external harm to perform an act which is against his conscience.

He cannot be compelled to do this, because the deprivations and sufferings which form such a powerful weapon against men of the state conception of life, have not the least power to compel him.

Deprivations and sufferings take from them the happiness for which they live; but far from disturbing the happiness of the Christian, which consists in the consciousness of fulfilling the will of God, they may even intensify it, when they are inflicted on him for fulfilling his will.

And therefore the Christian, who is subject only to the inner divine law, not only cannot carry out the enactments of the external law, when they are not in agreement with the divine law of love which he acknowledges (as is usually the case with state obligations), he cannot even recognize the duty of obedience to anyone or anything whatever, he cannot recognize the duty of what is called allegiance.

For a Christian the oath of allegiance to any government whatever — the very act which is regarded as the foundation of the existence of a state — is a direct renunciation of Christianity. For the man who promises unconditional obedience in the future to laws, made or to be made, by that very promise is in the most, positive manner renouncing Christianity, which means obeying in every circumstance of life only the divine law of love he recognizes within him.

Under the pagan conception of life it was possible to carry out the will of the temporal authorities, without infringing the law of God expressed in circumcisions, Sabbaths, fixed times of prayer, abstention from certain kinds of food, and so on. The one law was not opposed to the other. But that is just the distinction between the Christian religion and heathen religion. Christianity does not require of a man certain definite negative acts, but puts him in a new, different relation to men, from which may result the most diverse acts, which cannot be defined beforehand. And therefore the Christian not only cannot promise to obey the will of any other man, without knowing what will be required by that will; he not only cannot obey the changing laws of than, but he cannot even promise to do anything definite at a certain time, or to abstain from doing anything for a certain time. For he cannot know what at any time will be required of him by that Christian law of love, obedience to which constitutes the meaning of life for him. The Christian, in promising unconditional fulfillment of the laws of men in the future, would show plainly by that promise that the inner law of God does not constitute for him the sole law of his life.

For a Christian to promise obedience to men, or the laws of men, is just as though a workman bound to one employer should also promise to carry out every order that might be given him by outsiders. One cannot serve two masters.

The Christian is independent of human authority, because he acknowledges God’s authority alone. His law, revealed by Christ, he recognizes in himself, and voluntarily obeys it.

And this independence is gained, not by means of strife, not by the destruction of existing forms,of life, but only by a change in the interpretation of life. This independence results first from the Christian recognizing the law of love, revealed to him by his teacher, as perfectly sufficient for all human relations, and therefore he regards every use of force as unnecessary and unlawful; and secondly, from the fact that those deprivations and sufferings, or threats of deprivations and sufferings (which reduce the man of the social conception of life to the necessity of obeying) to the Christian from his different conception of life, present themselves merely as the inevitable conditions of existence. And these conditions, without striving against them by force, he patiently endures, like sickness, hunger, and every other hardship, but they cannot serve him as a guide for his actions. The only guide for the Christian’s actions is to be found in the divine principle living within him, which cannot be checked or governed by anything.

The Christian acts according to the words of the prophecy applied to his teacher: “He shall not strive, nor cry; neither shall any man hear his voice in the streets. A bruised reed shall he not break, and smoking flax shall he not quench, till he send forth judgment unto victory.” (Matt. xii. 19, 20.)

The Christian will not dispute with anyone, nor attack anyone, nor use violence against anyone. On the contrary, he will bear violence without opposing it. But by this very attitude to violence, he will not only himself be free, but will free the whole world from all external power.

“Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” If there were any doubt of Christianity being the truth, the perfect liberty, that nothing can curtail, which a man experiences directly he makes the Christian theory of life his own, would be an unmistakable proof of its truth.

Men in their present condition are like a swarm of bees hanging in a cluster to a branch. The position of the bees on the branch is temporary, and must inevitably be changed. They must start off and find themselves a habitation. Each of the bees knows this, and desires to change her own and the others’ position, but no one of them can do it till the rest of them do it. They cannot all start off at once, because one hangs on to another and hinders her from separating from the swarm, and therefore they all continue to hang there. It would seem that the bees could never escape from their position, just as it seems that worldly men, caught in the toils of the state conception of life, can never escape. And there would be no escape for the bees, if each of them were not a living, separate creature, endowed with wings of its own. Similarly there would be no escape for men, if each were not a living being endowed with the faculty of entering into the Christian conception of life.

If every bee who could fly, did not try to fly, the others, too, would never be stirred, and the swarm would never change its position. And if the man who has mastered the Christian conception of life would not, without waiting for other people, begin to live in accordance with this conception, mankind would never change its position. But only let one bee spread her wings, start off, and fly away, and after her another, and another, and the clinging, inert cluster would become a freely flying swarm of bees. Just in the same way, only let one man look at life as Christianity teaches him to look at it, and after him let another and another do the same, and the enchanted circle of existence in the state conception of life, from which there seemed no escape, will be broken through.

But men think that to set all men free by this means is too slow a process, that they must find some other means by which they could set all men free at once. It is just as though the bees who want to start and fly away should consider it too long a process to wait for all the swarm to start one by one; and should think they ought to find some means by which it would not be necessary for every separate bee to spread her wings and fly off, but by which the whole swarm could fly at once where it wanted to. But that is not possible; till a first, a second, a third, a hundredth bee spreads her wings and flies off of her own accord, the swarm will not fly off and will not begin its new life. Till every individual man makes the Christian conception of life his own, and begins to live in accord with it, there can be no solution of the problem of human life, and no establishment of a new form of life.

One of the most striking phenomena of our times is precisely this advocacy of slavery, which is promulgated among the masses, not by governments, in whom it is inevitable, but by men who, in advocating socialistic theories, regard themselves as the champions of freedom.

These people advance the opinion that the amelioration of life, the bringing of the facts of life into harmony with the conscience, will come, not as the result of the personal efforts of individual men, but of itself as the result of a certain possible reconstruction of society effected in some way or other. The idea is promulgated that men ought not to walk on their own legs where they want and ought to go, but that a kind of floor under their feet will be moved somehow, so that on it they can reach where they ought to go without moving their own legs. And, therefore, all their efforts ought to be directed, not to going so far as their strength allows in the direction they ought to go, but to standing still and constructing such a floor.

In the sphere of political economy a theory is propounded which amounts to saying that the worse things are the better they are; that the greater the accumulation of capital, and therefore the oppression of the workman, the nearer the day of emancipation, and, therefore, every personal effort on the part of a man to free himself from the oppression of capital is useless. In the sphere of government it is maintained that the greater the power of the government, which, according to this theory, ought to intervene in every department of private life in which it has not yet intervened, the better it will be, and that therefore we ought to invoke the interference of government in private life. In politics and international questions it is maintained that the improvement of the means of destruction, the multiplication of armaments, will lead to the necessity of making war by means of congresses, arbitration, and so on. And, marvelous to say, so great is the dullness of men, that they believe in these theories, in spite of the fact that the whole course of life, every step they take, shows how unworthy they are of belief.

The people are suffering from oppression, and to deliver them from this oppression they are advised to frame general measures for the improvement of their position, which measures are to be intrusted to the authorities, and themselves to continue to yield obedience to the authorities. And obviously all that results from this is only greater power in the hands of the authorities, and greater oppression resulting from it.

Not one of the errors of men carries them so far away from the aim toward which they are struggling as this very one. They do all kinds of different things for the attainment of their aim, but not the one simple obvious thing which is within reach of everyone. They devise the subtlest means for changing the position which is irksome to them, but not that simplest means, that everyone should refrain from doing what leads to that position.

I have been told a story of a gallant police officer, who came to a village where the peasants were in insurrection and the military had been called out, and he undertook to pacify the insurrection in the spirit of Nicholas I., by his personal influence alone. He ordered some loads of rods to be brought, and collecting all the peasants together into a barn, he went in with them, locking the door after him. To begin with, he so terrified the peasants by his loud threats that, reduced to submission by him, they set to work to flog one another at his command. And so they flogged one another until a simpleton was found who would not allow himself to be flogged, and shouted to his companions not to flog one another. Only then the fogging ceased, and the police officer made his escape. Well, this simpleton’s advice would never be followed by men of the state conception of life, who continue to flog one another, and teach people that this very act of self-castigation is the last word of human wisdom.

Indeed, can one imagine a more striking instance of men flogging themselves than the submissiveness with which men of our times will perform the very duties required of them to keep them in slavery, especially the duty of military service? We see people enslaving themselves, suffering from this slavery, and believing that it must be so, that it does not matter, and will not hinder the emancipation of men, which is being prepared somewhere, somehow, in spite of the ever-increasing growth of slavery.

In fact, take any man of the present time whatever (I don’t mean a true Christian, but an average man of the present day), educated or uneducated, believing or unbelieving, rich or poor, married or unmarried. Such a man lives working at his work, or enjoying his amusements, spending the fruits of his labors on himself or on those near to him, and, like everyone, hating every kind of restriction and deprivation, dissension and suffering. Such a man is going his way peaceably, when suddenly people come and say to him: First, promise and swear to us that you will slavishly obey us in everything we dictate to you, and will consider absolutely good and authoritative everything we plan, decide, and call law. Secondly, hand over a part of the fruits of your labors for us to dispose of — we will use the money to keep you in slavery, and to hinder you from forcibly opposing our orders. Thirdly, elect others, or be yourself elected, to take a pretended share in the government, knowing all the while that the government will proceed quite without regard to the foolish speeches you, and those like you, may utter, and knowing that its proceedings will be according to our will, the will of those who have the army in their hands. Fourthly, come at a certain time to the law courts and take your share in those senseless cruelties which we perpetrate on sinners, and those whom we have corrupted, in the shape of penal servitude, exile, solitary confinement, and death. And fifthly and lastly, more than all this, in spite of the fact that you maybe on the friendliest terms with people of other nations, be ready, directly we order you to do so, to regard those whom we indicate to you as your enemies; and be ready to assist, either in person or by proxy, in devastation, plunder, and murder of their men, women, children, and aged alike — possibly your own kinsmen or relations — if that is necessary to us.

One would expect that every man of the present day who has a grain of sense left, might reply to such requirements, “But why should I do all this?” One would think every right-minded man must say in amazement: “Why should I promise to yield obedience to everything that has been decreed first by Salisbury, then by Gladstone; one day by Boulanger, and another by Parliament; one day by Peter III., the next by Catherine, and the day after by Pougachef; one day by a mad king of Bavaria, another by William? Why should I promise to obey them, knowing them to be wicked or foolish people, or else not knowing them at all? Why am I to hand over the fruits of my labors to them in the shape of taxes, knowing that the money will be spent on the support of officials, prisons, churches, armies, on things that are harmful, and on my own enslavement? Why should I punish myself? Why should I go wasting my time and hoodwinking myself, giving to miscreant evildoers a semblance of legality, by taking part in elections, and pretending that I am taking part in the government, when I know very well that the real control of the government is in the hands of those who have got hold of the army? Why should I go to the law courts to take part in the trial and punishment of men because they have sinned, knowing, if I am a Christian, that the law of vengeance is replaced by the law of love, and, if I am an educated man, that punishments do not reform, but only deprave those on whom they are inflicted? And why, most of all, am I to consider as enemies the people of a neighboring nation, with whom I have hitherto lived and with whom I wish to live in love and harmony, and to kill and rob them, or to bring them to misery, simply in order that the keys of the temple at Jerusalem may be in the hands of one archbishop and not another, that one German and not another may be prince in Bulgaria, or that the English rather than the American merchants may capture seals?

And why, most of all, should I take part in person or hire others to murder my own brothers and kinsmen? Why should I flog myself? It is altogether unnecessary for me; it is hurtful to me, and from every point of view it is immoral, base, and vile. So why should I do this? If you tell me that if I do it not I shall receive some injury from someone, then, in the first place, I cannot anticipate from anyone an injury so great as the injury you bring on me if I obey you; and secondly, it is perfectly clear to me that if we our own selves do not flog ourselves, no one will flog us.

As for the government — that means the tzars, ministers, and officials with pens in their hands, who cannot force us into doing anything, as that officer of police compelled the peasants; the men who will drag us to the law court, to prison, and to execution, are not tzars or officials with pens in their hands, but the very people who are in the same position as we are. And it is just as unprofitable and harmful and unpleasant to them to be flogged as to me, and therefore there is every likelihood that if I open their eyes they not only would not treat me with violence, but would do just as I am doing.

Thirdly, even if it should come to pass that I had to suffer for it, even then it would be better for me to be exiled or sent to prison for standing up for common sense and right — which, if not to-day, at least within a very short time, must be triumphant — than to suffer for folly and wrong which must come to an end directly. And therefore, even in that case, it is better to run the risk of their banishing me, shutting me up in prison, or executing me, than of my living all my life in bondage, through my own fault, to wicked men. Better is this than the possibility of being destroyed by victorious enemies, and being stupidly tortured and killed by them, in fighting for a cannon, or a piece of land of no use to anyone, or for a senseless rag called a banner.

I don’t want to flog myself and I won’t do it. I have no reason to do it. Do it yourselves, if you want it done; but I won’t do it.

One would have thought that not religious or moral feeling alone, but the simplest common sense and foresight should impel every man of the present day to answer and to act in that way. But not so. Men of the state conception of life are of the opinion that to act in that way is not necessary, and is even prejudicial to the attainment of their object, the emancipation of men from slavery. They hold that we must continue, like the police officer’s peasants, to flog one another, consoling ourselves with the reflection that we are talking away in the assemblies and meetings, founding trades unions, marching through the streets on the 1st of May, getting up conspiracies, and stealthily teasing the government that is flogging us, and that through all this it will be brought to pass that, by enslaving ourselves in closer and closer bondage, we shall very soon be free.

Nothing hinders the emancipation of men from slavery so much as this amazing error. Instead of every man directing his energies to freeing himself, to transforming his conception of life, people seek for an external united method of gaining freedom, and continue to rivet their chains faster and faster.

It is much as if men were to maintain that to make up a fire there was no need to kindle any of the coals, but that all that was necessary was to arrange the coals in a certain order. Yet the fact that the freedom of all men will be brought about only through the freedom of individual persons, becomes more and more clear as time goes on. The freedom of individual men, in the name of the Christian conception of life, from state domination, which was formerly an exceptional and unnoticed phenomenon, has of late acquired threatening significance for state authorities.

If in a former age, in the Roman times, it happened that a Christian confessed his religion and refused to take part in sacrifices, and to worship the emperors or the gods; or in the Middle Ages a Christian refused to worship images, or to acknowledge the authority of the Pope — these cases were in the first place a matter of chance. A man might be placed under the necessity of confessing his faith, or he might live all his life without being placed under this necessity. But now all men, without exception, are subjected to this trial of their faith. Every man of the present day is under the necessity of taking part in the cruelties of pagan life, or of refusing all participation in them. And secondly, in those days cases of refusal to worship the gods or the images or the Pope were not incidents that had any material bearing on the state. Whether men worshiped or did not worship the gods or the images or the Pope, the state remained just as powerful. But now cases of refusing to comply with the unchristian demands of the government are striking at the very root of state authority, because the whole authority of the state is based on the compliance with these unchristian demands.

The sovereign powers of the world have in the course of time been brought into a position in which, for their own preservation, they must require from all men actions which cannot be performed by men who profess true Christianity.

And therefore in our days every profession of true Christianity, by any individual man, strikes at the most essential power of the state, and inevitably leads the way for the emancipation of all.

What importance, one might think, can one attach to such an incident as some dozens of crazy fellows, as people will call them, refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the government, refusing to pay taxes, to take part in law proceedings or in military service?

These people are punished and exiled to a distance, and life goes on in its old way. One might think there was no importance in such incidents; but yet, it is just those incidents, more than anything else, that will undermine the power of the state and prepare the way for the freedom of men. These are the individual bees, who are beginning to separate from the swarm, and are flying near it, waiting till the whole swarm can no longer be prevented from starting off after them. And the governments know this, and fear such incidents more than all the socialists, communists, and anarchists, and their plots and dynamite bombs.

A new reign is beginning. According to the universal rule and established order it is required that all the subjects should take the oath of allegiance to the new government. There is a general decree to that effect, and all are summoned to the council-houses to take the oath. All at once one man in Perm, another in Tula, a third in Moscow, and a fourth in Kalouga declare that they will not take the oath, and though there is no communication between them, they all explain their refusal on the same grounds — namely, that swearing is forbidden by the law of Christ, and that even if swearing had not been forbidden, they could not, in the spirit of the law of Christ, promise to perform the evil actions required of them in the oath, such as informing against all such as may act against the interests of the government, or defending their government with firearms or attacking its enemies. They are brought before rural police officers, district police captains, priests, and governors. They are admonished, questioned, threatened, and punished; but they adhere to their resolution, and do not take the oath. And among the millions of those who did take the oath, those dozens go on living who did not take the oath. And they are questioned:

“What, didn’t you take the oath?”

“No, I didn’t take the oath.”

“And what happened — nothing?”

“Nothing.”

The subjects of a state are all bound to pay taxes. And everyone pays taxes, till suddenly one man in Kharkov, another in Tver, and a third in Samara refuse to pay taxes — all, as though in collusion, saying the same thing. One says he will only pay when they tell him what object the money taken from him will be spent on. “If it is for good deeds,” he says, “he will give it of his own accord, and more even than is required of him. If for evil deeds, then he will give nothing voluntarily, because by the law of Christ, whose follower he is, he cannot take part in evil deeds.” The others, too, say the same in other words, and will not voluntarily pay the taxes.

Those who have anything to be taken have their property taken from them by force; as for those who have nothing, they are left alone.

“What, didn’t you pay the tax?”

“No, I didn’t pay it.”

“And what happened-nothing?”

“Nothing.”

There is the institution of passports. Everyone moving from his place of residence is bound to carry one, and to pay a duty on it. Suddenly people are to be found in various places declaring that to carry a passport is not necessary, that one ought not to recognize one’s dependence on a state which exists by means of force; and these people do not carry passports, or pay the duty on them. And again, it’s impossible to force those people by any means to do what is required. They send them to jail, and let them out again, and these people live without passports.

All peasants are bound to fill certain police offices — that of village constable, and of watchman, and so on. Suddenly in Kharkov a peasant refuses to perform this duty, justifying his refusal on the ground that by the law of Christ, of which he is a follower, he cannot put any man in fetters, lock him up, or drag him from place to place. The same declaration is made by a peasant in Tver, another in Tambov. These peasants are abused, beaten, shut up in prison, but they stick to their resolution and don’t fill these offices against their convictions. And at last they cease to appoint them as constables. And again nothing happens.

All citizens are obliged to take a share in law proceedings in the character of jurymen. Suddenly the most different people — mechanics, professors, tradesmen, peasants, servants, as though by agreement refuse to fill this office, and not on the grounds allowed as sufficient by law, but because any process at law is, according to their views, unchristian. They fine these people, trying not to let them have an opportunity of explaining their motives in public, and replace them by others. And again nothing can be done.

All young men of twenty-one years of age are obliged to draw lots for service in the army. All at once one young man in Moscow, another in Tver, a third in Kharkov, and a fourth in Kiev present themselves before the authorities, and, as though by previous agreement, declare that they will not take the oath, they will not serve because they are Christians. I will give the details of one of the first cases, since they have become more frequent, which I happen to know about [footnote: All the details of this case, as well as those preceding it, are authentic]. The same treatment has been repeated in every other case. A young man of fair education refuses in the Moscow Townhall to take the oath. No attention is paid to what he says, and it is requested that he should pronounce the words of the oath like the rest. He declines, quoting a particular passage of the Gospel in which swearing is forbidden. No attention is paid to his arguments, and he is again requested to comply with the order, but he does not comply with it. Then it is supposed that he is a sectary and therefore does not understand Christianity in the right sense, that is to say, not in the sense in which the priests in the pay of the government understand it. And the young man is conducted under escort to the priests, that they may bring him to reason. The priests begin to reason with him, but their efforts in Christ’s name to persuade him to renounce Christ obviously have no influence on him; he is pronounced incorrigible and sent back again to the army. He persists in not taking the oath and openly refuses to perform any military duties. It is a case that has not been provided for by the laws. To overlook such a refusal to comply with the demands of the authorities is out of the question, but to put such a case on a par with simple breach of discipline is also out of the question.

After deliberation among themselves, the military authorities decide to get rid of the troublesome young man, to consider him as a revolutionist, and they dispatch him under escort to the committee of the secret police. The police authorities and gendarmes cross-question him, but nothing that he says can be brought under the head of any of the misdemeanors which come under their jurisdiction. And there is no possibility of accusing him either of revolutionary acts or revolutionary plotting, since he declares that he does not wish to attack anything, but, on the contrary, is opposed to any use of force, and, far from plotting in secret, he seeks every opportunity of saying and doing all that he says and does in the most open manner. And the gendarmes, though they are bound by no hard-and-fast rules, still find no ground for a criminal charge in the young man, and, like the clergy, they send him back to the army. Again the authorities deliberate together, and decide to accept him though he has not taken the oath, and to enrol him among the soldiers. They put him into the uniform, enrol him, and send him under guard to the place where the army is quartered. There the chief officer of the division which he enters again expects the young man to perform his military duties, and again he refuses to obey, and in the presence of other soldiers explains the reason of his refusal, saying that he as a Christian cannot voluntarily prepare himself to commit murder, which is forbidden by the law of Moses.

This incident occurs in a provincial town. The case awakens the interest, and even the sympathy, not only of outsiders, but even of the officers. And the chief officers consequently do not decide to punish this refusal of obedience with disciplinary measures. To save appearances, though, they shut the young man up in prison, and write to the highest military authorities to inquire what they are to do. To refuse to serve in the army, in which the Tzar himself serves, and which enjoys the blessing of the Church, seems insanity from the official point of view. Consequently they write from Petersburg that, since the young man must be out of his mind, they must not use any severe treatment with him, but must send him to a lunatic asylum, that his mental condition may be inquired into and be scientifically treated. They send him to the asylum in the hope that he will remain there, like another young man, who refused ten years ago at Tver to serve in the army, and who was tortured in the asylum till he submitted. But even this step does not rid the military authorities of the inconvenient man. The doctors examine him, interest themselves warmly in his case, and naturally finding in him no symptoms of mental disease, send him back to the army. There they receive him, and making believe to have forgotten his refusal, and his motives for it, they again request him to go to drill, and again in the presence of the other soldiers he refuses and explains the reason of his refusal. The affair continues to attract more and more attention, both among the soldiers and the inhabitants of the town. Again they write to Petersburg, and thence comes the decree to transfer the young man to some division of the army stationed on the frontier, in some place where the army is under martial law, where he can be shot for refusing to obey, and where the matter can proceed without attracting observation, seeing that there are few Russians and Christians in such a distant part, but the majority are foreigners and Mohammedans. This is accordingly done. They transfer him to a division stationed on the Zacaspian border, and in company with convicts send him to a chief officer who is notorious for his harshness and severity.

All this time, through all these changes from place to place, the young man is roughly treated, kept in cold, hunger, and filth, and life is made burdensome to him generally. But all these sufferings do not compel him to change his resolution. On the Zacaspian border, where he is again requested to go on guard fully armed, he again declines to obey. He does not refuse to go and stand near the haystacks where they place him, but refuses to take his arms, declaring that he will not use violence in any case against anyone. All this takes place in the presence of the other soldiers. To let such a refusal pass unpunished is impossible, and the young man is put on his trial for breach of discipline. The trial takes place, and he is sentenced to confinement in the military prison for two years. He is again transferred, in company with convicts, by étape, to Caucasus, and there he is shut up in prison and falls under the irresponsible power of the jailer. There he is persecuted for a year and a half, but he does not for all that alter his decision not to bear arms, and he explains why he will not do this to everyone with whom he is brought in contact. At the end of the second year they set him free, before the end of his term of imprisonment, reckoning it contrary to law to keep him in prison after his time of military service was over, and only too glad to get rid of him as soon as possible.

Other men in various parts of Russia behave, as though by agreement, precisely in the same way as this young man, and in all these cases the government has adopted the same timorous, undecided, and secretive course of action. Some of these men are sent to the lunatic asylum, some are enrolled as clerks and transferred to Siberia, some are sent to work in the forests, some are sent to prison, some are fined. And at this very time some men of this kind are in prison, not charged with their real offense — that is, denying the lawfulness of the action of the government, but for non-fulfillment of special obligations imposed by government. Thus an officer of reserve, who did not report his change of residence, and justified this on the ground that he would not serve in the army any longer, was fined thirty rubles for non-compliance with the orders of the superior authority. This fine he also declined voluntarily to pay. In the same way some peasants and soldiers who have refused to be drilled and to bear arms have been placed under arrest on a charge of breach of discipline and insolence.

And cases of refusing to comply with the demands of government when they are opposed to Christianity, and especially cases of refusing to serve in the army, are occurring of late not in Russia only, but everywhere. Thus I happen to know that in Servia men of the so-called sect of Nazarenes steadily refuse to serve in the army, and the Austrian Government has been carrying on a fruitless contest with them for years, punishing them with imprisonment. In the year 1885 there were 130 such cases. I know that in Switzerland in the year 1890 there were men in prison in the castle of Chillon for declining to serve in the army, whose resolution was not shaken by their punishment. There have been such cases in Sweden, and the men who refused obedience were sent to prison in exactly the same way, and the government studiously concealed these cases from the people. There have been similar cases also in Prussia. I know of the case of a sub-lieutenant of the Guards, who in 1891 declared to the authorities in Berlin that he would not, as a Christian, continue to serve, and in spite of all admonitions, threats, and punishments he stuck to his resolution. In the south of France a society has arisen of late bearing the name of the Hinschists (these facts are taken from the PEACE HERALD, July, 1891), the members of which refuse to enter military service on the grounds of their Christian principles. At first they were enrolled in the ambulance corps, but now, as their numbers increase, they are subjected to punishment for non-compliance, but they still refuse to bear arms just the same.

The socialists, the communists, the anarchists, with their bombs and riots and revolutions, are not nearly so much dreaded by governments as these disconnected individuals coming from different parts, and all justifying their non-compliance on the grounds of the same religion, which is known to all the world. Every government knows by what means and in what manner to defend itself from revolutionists, and has resources for doing so, and therefore does not dread these external foes. But what are governments to do against men who show the uselessness, superfluousness, and perniciousness of all governments, and who do not contend against them, but simply do not need them and do without them, and therefore are unwilling to take any part in them? The revolutionists say: The form of government is bad in this respect and that respect; we must overturn it and substitute this or that form of government. The Christian says: I know nothing about the form of government, I don’t know whether it is good or bad, and I don’t want to overturn it precisely because I don’t know whether it is good or bad, but for the very same reason I don’t want to support it either. And I not only don’t want to, but I can’t, because what it demands of me is against my conscience.

All state obligations are against the conscience of a Christian — the oath of allegiance, taxes, law proceedings, and military service. And the whole power of the government rests on these very obligations.

Revolutionary enemies attack the government from without. Christianity does not attack it at all, but, from within, it destroys all the foundations on which government rests.

Among the Russian people, especially since the age of Peter I., the protest of Christianity against the government has never ceased, and the social organization has been such that men emigrate in communes to Turkey, to China, and to uninhabited lands, and not only feel no need of state aid, but always regard the state as a useless burden, only to be endured as a misfortune, whether it happens to be Turkish, Russian, or Chinese. And so, too, among the Russian people more and more frequent examples have of late appeared of conscious Christian freedom from subjection to the state. And these examples are the more alarming for the government from the fact that these non-compliant persons often belong not to the so-called lower uneducated classes, but are men of fair or good education; and also from the fact that they do not in these days justify their position by any mystic and exceptional views, as in former times, do not associate themselves with any superstitious or fanatic rites, like the sects who practice self-immolation by fire, or the wandering pilgrims, but put their refusal on the very simplest and clearest grounds, comprehensible to all, and recognized as true by all.

Thus they refuse the voluntary payment of taxes, because taxes are spent on deeds of violence — on the pay of men of violence — soldiers, on the construction of prisons, fortresses, and cannons. They as Christians regard it as sinful and immoral to have any hand in such deeds.

Those who refuse to take the oath of allegiance refuse because to promise obedience to authorities, that is, to men who are given to deeds of violence, is contrary to the sense of Christ’s teaching. They refuse to take the oath in the law courts, because oaths are directly forbidden by the Gospel. They refuse to perform police duties, because in the performance of these duties they must use force against their brothers and ill treat them, and a Christian cannot do that. They refuse to take part in trials at law, because they consider every appeal to law is fulfilling the law of vengeance, which is inconsistent with the Christian law of forgiveness and love. They refuse to take any part in military preparations and in the army, because they cannot be executioners, and they are unwilling to prepare themselves to be so.

The motives in all these cases are so excellent that, however despotic governments may be, they could hardly punish them openly. To punish men for refusing to act against their conscience the government must renounce all claim to good sense and benevolence. And they assure people that they only rule in the name of good sense and benevolence.

What are governments to do against such people?

Governments can of course flog to death or execute or keep in perpetual imprisonment all enemies who want to overturn them by violence, they can lavish gold on that section of the people who are ready to destroy their enemies. But what can they do against men who, without wishing to overturn or destroy anything, desire simply for their part to do nothing against the law of Christ, and who, therefore, refuse to perform the commonest state requirements, which are, therefore, the most indispensable to the maintenance of the state?

If they had been revolutionists, advocating and practicing violence and murder, their suppression would have been an easy matter; some of them could have been bought over, some could have been duped, some could have been overawed, and these who could not be bought over, duped, or overawed would have been treated as criminals, enemies of society, would have been executed or imprisoned, and the crowd would have approved of the action of the government. If they had been fanatics, professing some peculiar belief, it might have been possible, in disproving the superstitious errors mixed in with their religion, to attack also the truth they advocate. But what is to be done with men who profess no revolutionary ideas nor any peculiar religious dogmas, but merely because they are unwilling to do evil to any man, refuse to take the oath, to pay taxes, to take part in law proceedings, to serve in the army, to fulfill, in fact, any of the obligations upon which the whole fabric of a state rests? What is to done with such people? To buy them over with bribes is impossible; the very risks to which they voluntarily expose themselves show that they are incorruptible. To dupe them into believing that this is their duty to God is also impossible, since their refusal is based on the clear, unmistakable law of God, recognized even by those who are trying to compel men to act against it. To terrify them by threats is still less possible, because the deprivations and sufferings to which they are subjected only strengthen their desire to follow the faith by which they are commanded: to obey God rather than men, and not to fear those who can destroy the body, but to fear him who can destroy body and soul. To kill them or keep them in perpetual imprisonment is also impossible. These men have friends, and a past; their way of thinking and acting is well known; they are known by everyone for good, gentle, peaceable people, and they cannot be regarded as criminals who must be removed for the safety of society. And to put men to death who are regarded as good men is to provoke others to champion them and justify their refusal. And it is only necessary to explain the reasons of their refusal to make clear to everyone that these reasons have the same force for all other men, and that they all ought to have done the same long ago. These cases put the ruling powers into a desperate position. They see that the prophecy of Christianity is coming to pass, that it is loosening the fetters of those in chains, and setting free them that are in bondage, and that this must inevitably be the end of all oppressors. The ruling authorities see this, they know that their hours are numbered, and they can do nothing. All that they can do to save themselves is only deferring the hour of their downfall. And this they do, but their position is none the less desperate.

It is like the position of a conqueror who is trying to save a town which has been been set on fire by its own inhabitants. Directly he puts out the conflagration in one place, it is alight in two other places; directly he gives in to the fire and cuts off what is on fire from a large building, the building itself is alight at both ends. These separate fires may be few, but they are burning with a flame which, however small a spark it starts from, never ceases till it has set the whole ablaze.

Thus it is that the ruling authorities are in such a defenseless position before men who advocate Christianity, that but little is necessary to overthrow this sovereign power which seems so powerful, and has held such an exalted position for so many centuries. And yet social reformers are busy promulgating the idea that it is not necessary and is even pernicious and immoral for every man separately to work out his own freedom. As though, while one set of men have been at work a long while turning a river into a new channel, and had dug out a complete water-course and had only to open the floodgates for the water to rush in and do the rest, another set of men should come along and begin to advise them that it would be much better, instead of letting the water out, to construct a machine which would ladle the water up from one side and pour it over the other side.

But the thing has gone too far. Already ruling governments feel their weak and defenseless position, and men of Christian principles are awakening from their apathy, and already begin to feel their power.

“I am come to send a fire on the earth,” said Christ, “and what will I, if it be already kindled?”

And this fire is beginning to burn.

Chapter 10: Evil Cannot Be Suppressed by the Physical Force of the Government — the Moral Progress of Humanity is Brought About Not Only by Individual Recognition of Truth, but Also Through the Establishment of a Public Opinion

Christianity Destroys the State — But Which is Most Necessary:

Christianity or the State? — There are Some who Assert the

Necessity of a State Organization, and Others who Deny it, both

Arguing from same First Principles — Neither Contention can be

Proved by Abstract Argument — The Question must be Decided by the

Stage in the Development of Conscience of Each Man, which will

either Prevent or Allow him to Support a Government Organization —

Recognition of the Futility and Immorality of Supporting a State

Organization Contrary to Christian Principles will Decide the

Question for Every Man, in Spite of any Action on Part of the

State — Argument of those who Defend the Government, that it is a

Form of Social Life, Needed to Protect the Good from the Wicked,

till all Nations and all Members of each Nation have Become

Christians — The Most Wicked are Always those in Power — The whole

History of Humanity is the History of the Forcible Appropriation

of Power by the Wicked and their Oppression of the Good — The

Recognition by Governments of the Necessity of Opposing Evil by

Force is Equivalent to Suicide on their Part — The Abolition of

State-violence cannot Increase the Sum Total of Acts of Violence —

The Suppression of the Use of Force is not only Possible, but is

even Taking Place before Our Eyes — But it will Never be Suppressed

by the Violence of Government, but through Men who have Attained

Power by Evidence Recognizing its Emptiness and Becoming Better

and Less Capable of Using Force — Individual Men and also Whole

Nations Pass Through this Process — By this Means Christianity is

Diffused Through Consciousness of Men, not only in Spite of Use of

Violence by Government, but even Through its Action,and therefore

the Suppression is not to be Dreaded, but is Brought About by the

National Progress of Life — Objection of those who Defend State

Organization that Universal Adoption of Christianity is hardly

Likely to be Realized at any Time — The General Adoption of the

Truths of Christianity is being Brought About not only by the

Gradual and Inward Means,that is, by Knowledge of the Truth,

Prophetic Insight, and Recognition of the Emptiness of Power, and

Renunciation of it by Individuals, but also by Another External

Means, the Acceptance of a New Truth by Whole Masses of Men on a

Lower Level of Development Through Simple Confidence in their

Leaders — When a Certain Stage in the Diffusion of a Truth has been

Reached, a Public Opinion is Created which Impels a Whole Mass of

Men, formerly Antagonistic to the New Truth, to Accept it — And

therefore all Men may Quickly be Brought to Renounce the use of

Violence when once a Christian Public Opinion is Established — The

Conviction of Force being Necessary Hinders the Establishment of a

Christian Public Opinion — The Use of Violence Leads Men to

Distrust the Spiritual Force which is the Only Force by which they

Advance — Neither Nations nor Individuals have been really

Subjugated by Force, but only by Public Opinion, which no Force

can Resist — Savage Nations and Savage Men can only be Subdued by

the Diffusion of a Christian Standard among them, while actually

Christian Nations in order to Subdue them do all they can to

Destroy a Christian Standard — These Fruitless Attempts to Civilize

Savages Cannot be Adduced as Proofs that Men Cannot be Subdued by

Christianity — Violence by Corrupting Public Opinion, only Hinders

the Social Organization from being What it Ought to Be — And by the

Use of Violence being Suppressed, a Christian Public Opinion would

be Established — Whatever might be the Result of the Suppression of

Use of Force, this Unknown Future could not be Worse than the

Present Condition, and so there is no Need to Dread it — To Attain

Knowledge of the Unknown, and to Move Toward it, is the Essence of

Life.

Christianity in its true sense puts an end to government. So it was understood at its very commencement; it was for that cause that Christ was crucified. So it has always been understood by people who were not under the necessity of justifying a Christian government. Only from the time that the heads of government assumed an external and nominal Christianity, men began to invent all the impossible, cunningly devised theories by means of which Christianity can be reconciled with government. But no honest and serious-minded man of our day can help seeing the incompatibility of true Christianity — the doctrine of meekness, forgiveness of injuries, and love — with government, with its pomp, acts of violence, executions, and wars. The profession of true Christianity not only excludes the possibility of recognizing government, but even destroys its very foundations.

But if it is so, and we are right in saying that Christianity is incompatible with government, then the question naturally presents itself: which is more necessary to the good of humanity, in which way is men’s happiness best to be secured, by maintaining the organization of government or by destroying it and replacing it by Christianity?

Some people maintain that government is more necessary for humanity, that the destruction of the state organization would involve the destruction of all that humanity has gained, that the state has been and still is the only form in which humanity can develop. The evil which we see among peoples living under a government organization they attribute not to that type of society, but to its abuses, which, they say, can be corrected without destroying it, and thus humanity, without discarding the state organization, can develop and attain a high degree of happiness. And men of this way of thinking bring forward in support of their views arguments which they think irrefutable drawn from history, philosophy, and even religion. But there are men who hold on the contrary that, as there was a time when humanity lived without government, such an organization is temporary, and that a time must come when men need a new organization, and that that time has come now. And men of this way of thinking also bring forward in support of their views arguments which they think irrefutable from philosophy, history, and religion.

Volumes may be written in defense of the former view (and volumes indeed have long ago been written and more will still be written on that side), but much also can be written against it (and much also, and most brilliantly, has been written — though more recently — on this side).

And it cannot be proved, as the champions of the state maintain, that the destruction of government involves a social chaos, mutual spoliation and murder, the destruction of all social institutions, and the return of mankind to barbarism. Nor can it be proved as the opponents of government maintain that men have already become so wise and good that they will not spoil or murder one another, but will prefer peaceful associations to hostilities; that of their own accord, unaided by the state, they will make all the arrangements that they need, and that therefore government, far from being any aid, under show of guarding men exerts a pernicious and brutalizing influence over them. It is impossible to prove either of these contentions by abstract reasoning. Still less possible is it to prove them by experiment, since the whole matter turns on the question, ought we to try the experiment? The question whether or not the time has come to make an end of government would be unanswerable, except that there exists another living means of settling it beyond dispute.

We may dispute upon the question whether the nestlings are ready to do without the mother-hen and to come out of the eggs, or whether they are not yet advanced enough. But the young birds will decide the question without any regard for our arguments when they find themselves cramped for space in the eggs. Then they will begin to try them with their beaks and come out of them of their own accord.

It is the same with the question whether the time has come to do away with the governmental type of society and to replace it by a new type. If a man, through the growth of a higher conscience, can no longer comply with the demands of government, he finds himself cramped by it and at the same time no longer needs its protection. When this comes to pass, the question whether men are ready to discard the governmental type is solved. And the conclusion will be as final for them as for the young birds hatched out of the eggs. Just as no power in the world can put them back into the shells, so can no power in the world bring men again under the governmental type of society when once they have outgrown it.

“It may well be that government was necessary and is still necessary for all the advantages which you attribute to it,” says the man who has mastered the Christian theory of life. “I only know that on the one hand, government is no longer necessary for ME, and on the other hand, I can no longer carry out the measures that are necessary to the existence of a government. Settle for yourselves what you need for your life. I cannot prove the need or the harm of governments in general. I know only what I need and do not need, what I can do and what I cannot. I know that I do not need to divide myself off from other nations, and therefore I cannot admit that I belong exclusively to any state or nation, or that I owe allegiance to any government. I know that I do not need all the government institutions organized within the state, and therefore I cannot deprive people who need my labor to give it in the form of taxes to institutions which I do not need, which for all I know may be pernicious. I know that I have no need of the administration or of courts of justice founded upon force, and therefore I can take no part in either. I know that I do not need to attack and slaughter other nations or to defend myself from them with arms, and therefore I can take no part in wars or preparations for wars. It may well be that there are people who cannot help regarding all this as necessary and indispensable. I cannot dispute the question with them, I can only speak for myself; but I can say with absolute certainty that I do not need it, and that I cannot do it. And I do not need this and I cannot do it, not because such is my own, my personal will, but because such is the will of him who sent me into life, and gave me an indubitable law for my conduct through life.”

Whatever arguments may be advanced in support of the contention that the suppression of government authority would be injurious and would lead to great calamities, men who have once outgrown the governmental form of society cannot go back to it again. And all the reasoning in the world cannot make the man who has outgrown the governmental form of society take part in actions disallowed by his conscience, any more than the full-grown bird can be made to return into the egg-shell.

“But even it be so,” say the champions of the existing order of things, “still the suppression of government violence can only be possible and desirable when all men have become Christians. So long as among people nominally Christians there are unchristian wicked men, who for the gratification of their own lusts are ready to do harm to others, the suppression of government authority, far from being a blessing to others, would only increase their miseries. The suppression of the governmental type of society is not only undesirable so long as there is only a minority of true Christians; it would not even be desirable if the whole of a nation were Christians, but among and around them were still unchristian men of other nations. For these unchristian men would rob, outrage, and kill the Christians with impunity and would make their lives miserable. All that would result, would be that the bad would oppress and outrage the good with impunity. And therefore the authority of government must not be suppressed till all the wicked and rapacious people in the world are extinct. And since this will either never be, or at least cannot be for a long time to come, in spite of the efforts of individual Christians to be independent of government authority, it ought to be maintained in the interests of the majority. The champions of government assert that without it the wicked will oppress and outrage the good, and that the power of the government enables the good to resist the wicked.”

But in this assertion the champions of the existing order of things take for granted the proposition they want to prove. When they say that except for the government the bad would oppress the good, they take it for granted that the good are those who at the present time are in possession of power, and the bad are those who are in subjection to it. But this is just what wants proving. It would only be true if the custom of our society were what is, or rather is supposed to be, the custom in China; that is, that the good always rule, and that directly those at the head of government cease to be better than those they rule over, the citizens are bound to remove them. This is supposed to be the custom in China. In reality it is not so and can never be so. For to remove the heads of a government ruling by force, it is not the right alone, but the power to do so that is needed. So that even in China this is only an imaginary custom. And in our Christian world we do not even suppose such a custom, and we have nothing on which to build up the supposition that it is the good or the superior who are in power; in reality it is those who have seized power and who keep it for their own and their retainers’ benefit.

The good cannot seize power, nor retain it; to do this men must love power. And love of power is inconsistent with goodness; but quite consistent with the very opposite qualities — pride, cunning, cruelty.

Without the aggrandizement of self and the abasement of others, without hypocrisies and deceptions, without prisons, fortresses, executions, and murders, no power can come into existence or be maintained.

“If the power of government is suppressed the more wicked will oppress the less wicked,” say the champions of state authority. But when the Egyptians conquered the Jews, the Romans conquered the Greeks, and the Barbarians conquered the Romans, is it possible that all the conquerors were always better than those they conquered? And the same with the transitions of power within a state from one personage to another: has the power always passed from a worse person to a better one? When Louis XVI. was removed and Robespierre came to power, and afterward Napoleon — who ruled then, a better man or a worse? And when were better men in power, when the Versaillist party or when the Commune was in power? When Charles I. was ruler, or when Cromwell? And when Peter III. was Tzar, or when he was killed and Catherine was Tzaritsa in one-half of Russia and Pougachef ruled the other? Which was bad then, and which was good? All men who happen to be in authority assert that their authority is necessary to keep the bad from oppressing the good, assuming that they themselves are the good PAR EXCELLENCE, who protect other good people from the bad.

But ruling means using force, and using force means doing to him to whom force is used, what he does not like and what he who uses the force would certainly not like done to himself. Consequently ruling means doing to others what we would we would not they should do unto us, that is, doing wrong.

To submit means to prefer suffering to using force. And to prefer suffering to using force means to be good, or at least less wicked than those who do unto others what they would not like themselves.

And therefore, in all probability, not the better but the worse have always ruled and are ruling now. There may be bad men among those who are ruled, but it cannot be that those who are better have generally ruled those who are worse.

It might be possible to suppose this with the inexact heathen definition of good; but with the clear Christian definition of good and evil, it is impossible to imagine it.

If the more or less good, and the more or less bad cannot be distinguished in the heathen world, the Christian conception of good and evil has so clearly defined the characteristics of the good and the wicked, that it is impossible to confound them. According to Christ’s teaching the good are those who are meek and long-suffering, do not resist evil by force, forgive injuries, and love their enemies; those are wicked who exalt themselves, oppress, strive, and use force. Therefore by Christ’s teaching there can be no doubt whether the good are to be found among rulers or ruled, and whether the wicked are among the ruled or the rulers. Indeed it is absurd even to speak of Christians ruling.

Non-Christians, that is those who find the aim of their lives in earthly happiness, must always rule Christians, the aim of whose lives is the renunciation of such earthly happiness.

This difference has always existed and has become more and more defined as the Christian religion has been more widely diffused and more correctly understood.

The more widely true Christianity was diffused and the more it

penetrated men’s conscience, the more impossible it was for

Christians to be rulers, and the easier it became for non-

Christians to rule them.

“To get rid of governmental violence in a society in which all are not true Christians, will only result in the wicked dominating the good and oppressing them with impunity,” say the champions of the existing order of things. But it has never been, and cannot be otherwise. So it has always been from the beginning of the world, and so it is still. THE WICKED WILL ALWAYS DOMINATE THE GOOD, AND WILL ALWAYS OPPRESS THEM. Cain overpowered Abel, the cunning Jacob oppressed the guileless Esau and was in his turn deceived by Laban, Caiaphas and Pilate oppressed Christ, the Roman emperors oppressed Seneca, Epictetus, and the good Romans who lived in their times. John IV. with his favorites, the syphilitic drunken Peter with his buffoons, the vicious Catherine with her paramours, ruled and oppressed the industrious religious Russians of their times.

William is ruling over the Germans, Stambouloff over the

Bulgarians, the Russian officials over the Russian people. The

Germans have dominated the Italians, now they dominate the

Hungarians and Slavonians; the Turks have dominated and still

dominate the Slavonians and Greeks; the English dominate the

Hindoos, the Mongolians dominate the Chinese.

So that whether governmental violence is suppressed or not, the position of good men, in being oppressed by the wicked, will be unchanged.

To terrify men with the prospect of the wicked dominating the good is impossible, for that is just what has always been, and is now, and cannot but be.

The whole history of pagan times is nothing but a recital of the incidents and means by which the more wicked gained possession of power over the less wicked, and retained it by cruelties and deceptions, ruling over the good under the pretense of guarding the right and protecting the good from the wicked. All the revolutions in history are only examples of the more wicked seizing power and oppressing the good. In declaring that if their authority did not exist the more wicked would oppress the good, the ruling authorities only show their disinclination to let other oppressors come to power who would like to snatch it from them.

But in asserting this they only accuse themselves, say that their power, i. e., violence, is needed to defend men from other possible oppressors in the present or the future [see footnote].

[Footnote: I may quote in this connection the amazingly naive and comic declaration of the Russian authorities, the oppressors of other nationalities — the Poles, the Germans of the Baltic provinces, and the Jews. The Russian Government has oppressed its subjects for centuries, and has never troubled itself about the Little Russians of Poland, or the Letts of the Baltic provinces, or the Russian peasants, exploited by everyone. And now it has all of a sudden become the champion of the oppressed — the very oppressed whom it is itself oppressing.]

The weakness of the use of violence lies in the fact that all the arguments brought forward by oppressors in their own defense can with even better reason be advanced against them. They plead the danger of violence — most often imagined in the future — but they are all the while continuing to practice actual violence themselves. “You say that men used to pillage and murder in the past, and that you are afraid that they will pillage and murder one another if your power were no more. That may happen — or it may not happen. But the fact that you ruin thousands of men in prisons, fortresses, galleys, and exile, break up millions of families and ruin millions of men, physically as well as morally, in the army, that fact is not an imaginary but a real act of violence, which, according to your own argument, one ought to oppose by violence. And so you are yourselves these wicked men against whom, according to your own argument, it is absolutely necessary to use violence,” the oppressed are sure to say to their oppressors. And non-Christian men always do say, and think and act on this reasoning. If the oppressed are more wicked than their oppressors, they attack them and try to overthrow them; and in favorable circumstances they succeed in overthrowing them, or what is more common, they rise into the ranks of the oppressors and assist in their acts of violence.

So that the very violence which the champions of government hold up as a terror — pretending that except for its oppressive power the wicked would oppress the good — has really always existed and will exist in human society. And therefore the suppression of state violence cannot in any case be the cause of increased oppression of the good by the wicked.

If state violence ceased, there would be acts of violence perhaps on the part of different people, other than those who had done deeds of violence before. But the total amount of violence could not in any case be increased by the mere fact of power passing from one set of men to another.

“State violence can only cease when there are no more wicked men in society,” say the champions of the existing order of things, assuming in this of course that since there will always be wicked men, it can never cease. And that would be right enough if it were the case, as they assume, that the oppressors are always the best of men, and that the sole means of saving men from evil is by violence. Then, indeed, violence could never cease. But since this is not the case, but quite the contrary, that it is not the better oppress the worse, but the worse oppress the better, and since violence will never put an end to evil, and there is, moreover, another means of putting an end to it, the assertion that violence will never cease is incorrect. The use of violence grows less and less and evidently must disappear. But this will not come to pass, as some champions of the existing order imagine, through the oppressed becoming better and better under the influence of government (on the contrary, its influence causes their continual degradation), but through the fact that all men are constantly growing better and better of themselves, so that even the most wicked, who are in power, will become less and less wicked, till at last they are so good as to be incapable of using violence.

The progressive movement of humanity does not proceed from the better elements in society seizing power and making those who are subject to them better, by forcible means, as both conservatives and revolutionists imagine. It proceeds first and principally from the fact that all men in general are advancing steadily and undeviatingly toward a more and more conscious assimilation of the Christian theory of life; and secondly, from the fact that, even apart from conscious spiritual life, men are unconsciously brought into a more Christian attitude to life by the very process of one set of men grasping the power, and again being replaced by others.

The worse elements of society, gaining possession of power, under the sobering influence which always accompanies power, grow less and less cruel, and become incapable of using cruel forms of violence. Consequently others are able to seize their place, and the same process of softening and, so to say, unconscious Christianizing goes on with them. It is something like the process of ebullition. The majority of men, having the non-Christian view of life, always strive for power and struggle to obtain it. In this struggle the most cruel, the coarsest, the least Christian elements of society overpower the most gentle, well-disposed, and Christian, and rise by means of their violence to the upper ranks of society. And in them is Christ’s prophecy fulfilled: “Woe to you that are rich! woe unto you that are full! woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you!” For the men who are in possession of power and all that results from it — glory and wealth — and have attained the various aims they set before themselves, recognize the vanity of it all and return to the position from which they came. Charles V., John IV., Alexander I., recognizing the emptiness and the evil of power, renounced it because they were incapable of using violence for their own benefit as they had done.

But they are not the solitary examples of this recognition of the emptiness and evil of power. Everyone who gains a position of power he has striven for, every general, every minister, every millionaire, every petty official who has gained the place he has coveted for ten years, every rich peasant who has laid by some hundred rubles, passes through this unconscious process of softening.

And not only individual men, but societies of men, whole nations, pass through this process.

The seductions of power, and all the wealth, honor, and luxury it gives, seem a sufficient aim for men’s efforts only so long as they are unattained. Directly a man reaches them he sees all their vanity, and they gradually lose all their power of attraction. They are like clouds which have form and beauty only from the distance; directly one ascends into them, all their splendor vanishes.

Men who are in possession of power and wealth, sometimes even those who have gained for themselves their power and wealth, but more often their heirs, cease to be so eager for power, and so cruel in their efforts to obtain it.

Having learnt by experience, under the operation of Christian influence, the vanity of all that is gained by violence, men sometimes in one, sometimes in several generations lose the vices which are generated by the passion for power and wealth. They become less cruel and so cannot maintain their position, and are expelled from power by others less Christian and more wicked. Thus they return to a rank of society lower in position, but higher in morality, raising thereby the average level of Christian consciousness in men. But directly after them again the worst, coarsest, least Christian elements of society rise to the top, and are subjected to the same process as their predecessors, and again in a generation or so, seeing the vanity of what is gained by violence, and having imbibed Christianity, they come down again among the oppressed, and their place is again filled by new oppressors, less brutal than former oppressors, though more so than those they oppress. So that, although power remains externally the same as it was, with every change of the men in power there is a constant increase of the number of men who have been brought by experience to the necessity of assimilating the Christian conception of life, and with every change — though it is the coarsest, crudest, and least Christian who come into possession of power, they are less coarse and cruel and more Christian than their predecessors when they gained possession of power.

Power selects and attracts the worst elements of society, transforms them, improves and softens them, and returns them to society.

“Such is the process by means of which Christianity, in spite of the hindrances to human progress resulting from the violence of power, gains more and more hold of men. Christianity penetrates to the consciousness of men, not only in spite of the violence of power, but also by means of it.

And therefore the assertion of the champions of the state, that if the power of government were suppressed the wicked would oppress the good, not only fails to show that that is to be dreaded, since it is just what happens now, but proves, on the contrary, that it is governmental power which enables the wicked to oppress the good, and is the evil most desirable to suppress, and that it is being gradually suppressed in the natural course of things.

“But if it be true that governmental power will disappear when those in power become so Christian that they renounce power of their own accord, and there are no men found willing to take their place, and even if this process is already going on,” say the champions of the existing order, “when will that come to pass? If, after eighteen hundred years, there are still so many eager for power, and so few anxious to obey, there seems no likelihood of its happening very soon — or indeed of its ever happening at all.

“Even if there are, as there have always been, some men who prefer renouncing power to enjoying it, the mass of men in reserve, who prefer dominion to subjection, is so great that it is difficult to imagine a time when the number will be exhausted.

“Before this Christianizing process could so affect all men one after another that they would pass from the heathen to the Christian conception of life, and would voluntarily abandon power and wealth, it would be necessary that all the coarse, half-savage men, completely incapable of appreciating Christianity or acting upon it, of whom there are always a great many in every Christian society, should be converted to Christianity. More than this, all the savage and absolutely non-Christian peoples, who are so numerous outside the Christian world, must also be converted. And therefore, even if we admit that this Christianizing process will some day affect everyone, still, judging by the amount of progress it has made in eighteen hundred years, it will be many times eighteen centuries before it will do so. And it is therefore impossible and unprofitable to think at present of anything so impracticable as the suppression of authority. We ought only to try to put authority into the best hands.”

And this criticism would be perfectly just, if the transition from one conception of life to another were only accomplished by the single process of all men, separately and successively, realizing, each for himself, the emptiness of power, and reaching Christian truth by the inner spiritual path. That process goes on unceasingly, and men are passing over to Christianity one after another by this inner way.

But there is also another external means by which men reach

Christianity and by which the transition is less gradual.

This transition from one organization of life to another is not accomplished by degrees like the sand running through the hourglass grain after grain. It is more like the water filling a vessel floating on water. At first the water only runs in slowly on one side, but as the vessel grows heavier it suddenly begins to sink, and almost instantaneously fills with water.

It is just the same with the transitions of mankind from one conception — and so from one organization of life — to another. At first only gradually and slowly, one after another, men attain to the new truth by the inner spiritual way, and follow it out in life. But when a certain point in the diffusion of the truth has been reached, it is suddenly assimilated by everyone, not by the inner way, but, as it were, involuntarily.

That is why the champions of the existing order are wrong in arguing that, since only a small section of mankind has passed over to Christianity in eighteen centuries, it must be many times eighteen centuries before all the remainder do the same. For in that argument they do not take into account any other means, besides the inward spiritual one, by which men assimilate a new truth and pass from one order of life to another.

Men do not only assimilate a truth through recognizing it by prophetic insight, or by experience of life. When the truth has become sufficiently widely diffused, men at a lower stage of development accept it all at once simply through confidence in those who have reached it by the inner spiritual way, and are applying it to life.

Every new truth, by which the order of human life is changed and humanity is advanced, is at first accepted by only a very small number of men who understand it through inner spiritual intuition. The remainder of mankind who accepted on trust the preceding truth on which the existing order is based, are always opposed to the diffusion of the new truth.

But seeing that, to begin with, men do not stand still, but are steadily advancing to a greater recognition of the truth and a closer adaptation of their life to it, and secondly, all men in varying degrees according to their age, their education, and their race are capable of understanding the new truths, at first those who are nearest to the men who have attained the new truth by spiritual intuition, slowly and one by one, but afterward more and more quickly, pass over to the new truth. Thus the number of men who accept the new truth becomes greater and greater, and the truth becomes more and more comprehensible.

And thus more confidence is aroused in the remainder, who are at a less advanced stage of capacity for understanding the truth. And it becomes easier for them to grasp it, and an increasing number accept it.

And so the movement goes on more and more quickly, and on an ever-increasing scale, like a snowball, till at last a public opinion in harmony with the new truth is created, and then the whole mass of men is carried over all at once by its momentum to the new truth and establishes a new social order in accordance with it.

Those men who accept a new truth when it has gained a certain degree of acceptance, always pass over all at once in masses. They are like the ballast with which every ship is always loaded, at once to keep it upright and enable it to sail properly. If there were no ballast, the ship would not be low enough in the water, and would shift its position at the slightest change in its conditions. This ballast, which strikes one at first as superfluous and even as hindering the progress of the vessel, is really indispensable to its good navigation.

It is the same with the mass of mankind, who not individually, but always in a mass, under the influence of a new social idea pass all at once from one organization of life to another. This mass always hinders, by its inertia, frequent and rapid revolutions in the social order which have not been sufficiently proved by human experience. And it delays every truth a long while till it has stood the test of prolonged struggles, and has thoroughly permeated the consciousness of humanity.

And that is why it is a mistake to say that because only a very small minority of men has assimilated Christianity in eighteen centuries, it must take many times as many centuries for all mankind to assimilate it, and that since that time is so far off we who live in the present need not even think about it. It is a mistake, because the men at a lower stage of culture, the, men and the nations who are represented as the obstacle to the realization of the Christian order of life, are the very people who always pass over in masses all at once to any truth that has once been recognized by public opinion.

And therefore the transformation of human life, through which men in power will renounce it, and there will be none anxious to take their place, will not come only by all men consciously and separately assimilating the Christian conception of life. It will come when a Christian public opinion has arisen, so definite and easily comprehensible as to reach the whole of the inert mass, which is not able to attain truth by its own intuition, and therefore is always under the sway of public opinion.

Public opinion arises spontaneously and spreads for hundreds and thousands of years, but it has the power of working on men by infection, and with great rapidity gains a hold on great numbers of men.

“But,” say the champions of the existing order, “even if it is true that public opinion, when it has attained a certain degree of definiteness and precision, can convert the inert mass of men outside the Christian world — the non-Christian races — as well as the coarse and depraved who are living in its midst, what proofs have we that this Christian public opinion has arisen and is able to replace force and render it unnecessary.

“We must not give up force, by which the existing order is maintained, and by relying on the vague and impalpable influence of public opinion expose Christians to the risk of being pillaged, murdered, and outraged in every way by the savages inside and outside of civilized society.

“Since, even supported by the use of force, we can hardly control the non-Christian elements which are always ready to pour down on us and to destroy all that has been gained by civilization, is it likely that public opinion could take the place of force and render us secure? And besides, how are we to find the moment when public opinion has become strong enough to be able to replace the use of force? To reject the use of force and trust to public opinion to defend us would be as insane as to remove all weapons of defense in a menagerie, and then to let loose all the lions and tigers, relying on the fact that the animals seemed peaceable when kept in their cages and held in check by red-hot irons. And therefore people in power, who have been put in positions of authority by fate or by God, have not the right to run the risk, ruining all that has been gained by civilization, just because they want to try an experiment to see whether public opinion is or is not able to replace the protection given by authority.”

A French writer, forgotten now, Alphonse Karr, said somewhere, trying to show the impossibility of doing away with the death penalty: “Que messieurs les assassins commencent par nous donner l’exemple.” Often have I heard this BON MOT repeated by men who thought that these words were a witty and convincing argument against the abolition of capital punishment. And yet all the erroneousness of the argument of those who consider that governments cannot give up the use of force till all people are capable of doing the same, could not be more clearly expressed than it is in that epigram.

“Let the murderers,” say the champions of state violence, “set us the example by giving up murder and then we will give it up.” But the murderers say just the same, only with much more right. They say: “Let those who have undertaken to teach us and guide us set us the example of giving up legal murder, and then we will imitate them.” And they say this, not as a jest, but seriously, because it is the actual state of the case.

“We cannot give up the use of violence, because we are surrounded by violent ruffians.” Nothing in our days hinders the progress of humanity and the establishment of the organization corresponding to its present development more than this false reasoning. Those in authority are convinced that men are only guided and only progress through the use of force, and therefore they confidently make use of it to support the existing organization. The existing order is maintained, not by force, but by public opinion, the action of which is disturbed by the use of force. So that the effect of using force is to disturb and to weaken the very thing it tries to maintain.

Violence, even in the most favorable case, when it is not used simply for some personal aims of those in power, always punishes under the one inelastic formula of the law what has long before been condemned by public opinion. But there is this difference, that while public opinion censures and condemns all the acts opposed to the moral law, including the most varied cases in its reprobation, the law which rests on violence only condemns and punishes a certain very limited range of acts, and by so doing seems to justify all other acts of the same kind which do not come under its scope.

Public opinion ever since the time of Moses has regarded covetousness, profligacy, and cruelty as wrong, and censured them accordingly. And it condemns every kind of manifestation of covetousness, not only the appropriation of the property of others by force or fraud or trickery, but even the cruel abuse of wealth; it condemns every form of profligacy, whether with concubine, slave, divorced woman, or even one’s own wife; it condemns every kind of cruelty, whether shown in blows, in ill-treatment, or in murder, not only of men, but even of animals. The law resting on force only punishes certain forms of covetousness, such as robbery and swindling, certain forms of profligacy and cruelty, such as conjugal infidelity, murder, and wounding. And in this way it seems to countenance all the manifestations of covetousness, profligacy, and cruelty which do not come under its narrow definition.

But besides corrupting public opinion, the use of force leads men to the fatal conviction that they progress, not through the spiritual impulse which impels them to the attainment of truth and its realization in life, and which constitutes the only source of every progressive movement of humanity, but by means of violence, the very force which, far from leading men to truth, always carries them further away from it. This is a fatal error, because it leads men to neglect the chief force underlying their life — their spiritual activity — and to turn all their attention and energy to the use of violence, which is superficial, sluggish, and most generally pernicious in its action.

They make the same mistake as men who, trying to set a steam engine in motion, should turn its wheels round with their hands, not suspecting that the underlying cause of its movement was the expansion of the steam, and not the motion of the wheels. By turning the wheels by hand and by levers they could only produce a semblance of movement, and meantime they would be wrenching the wheels and so preventing their being fit for real movement.

That is just what people are doing who think to make men advance by means of external force.

They say that the Christian life cannot be established without the use of violence, because there are savage races outside the pale of Christian societies in Africa and in Asia (there are some who even represent the Chinese as a danger to civilization), and that in the midst of Christian societies there are savage, corrupt, and, according to the new theory of heredity, congenital criminals. And violence, they say, is necessary to keep savages and criminals from annihilating our civilization.

But these savages within and without Christian society, who are such a terror to us, have never been subjugated by violence, and are not subjugated by it now. Nations have never subjugated other nations by violence alone. If a nation which subjugated another was on a lower level of civilization, it has never happened that it succeeded in introducing its organization of life by violence. On the contrary, it was always forced to adopt the organization of life existing in the conquered nation. If ever any of the nations conquered by force have been really subjugated, or even nearly so, it has always been by the action of public opinion, and never by violence, which only tends to drive a people to further rebellion.

When whole nations have been subjugated by a new religion, and have become Christian or Mohammedan, such a conversion has never been brought about because the authorities made it obligatory (on the contrary, violence has much oftener acted in the opposite direction), but because public opinion made such a change inevitable. Nations, on the contrary, who have been driven by force to accept the faith of their conquerors have always remained antagonistic to it.

It is just the same with the savage elements existing in the midst of our civilized societies. Neither the increased nor the diminished severity of punishment, nor the modifications of prisons, nor the increase of police will increase or diminish the number of criminals. Their number will only be diminished by the change of the moral standard of society. No severities could put an end to duels and vendettas in certain districts. It spite of the number of Tcherkesses executed for robbery, they continue to be robbers from their youth up, for no maiden will marry a Tcherkess youth till he has given proof of his bravery by carrying off a horse, or at least a sheep. If men cease to fight duels, and the Tcherkesses cease to be robbers, it will not be from fear of punishment (indeed, that invests the crime with additional charm for youth), but through a change in the moral standard of public opinion. It is the same with all other crimes. Force can never suppress what is sanctioned by public opinion. On the contrary, public opinion need only be in direct opposition to force to neutralize the whole effect of the use of force. It has always been so and always will be in every case of martyrdom.

What would happen if force were not used against hostile nations and the criminal elements of society we do not know. But we do know by prolonged experience that neither enemies nor criminals have been successfully suppressed by force.

And indeed how could nations be subjugated by violence who are led by their whole education, their traditions, and even their religion to see the loftiest virtue in warring with their oppressors and fighting for freedom? And how are we to suppress by force acts committed in the midst of our society which are regarded as crimes by the government and as daring exploits by the people?

To exterminate such nations and such criminals by violence is possible, and indeed is done, but to subdue them is impossible.

The sole guide which directs men and nations has always been and is the unseen, intangible, underlying force, the resultant of all the spiritual forces of a certain people, or of all humanity, which finds its outward expression in public opinion.

The use of violence only weakens this force, hinders it and corrupts it, and tries to replace it by another which, far from being conducive to the progress of humanity, is detrimental to it.

To bring under the sway of Christianity all the savage nations outside the pale of the Christian world — all the Zulus, Mandchoos, and Chinese, whom many regard as savages — and the savages who live in our midst, there is only ONE MEANS. That means is the propagation among these nations of the Christian ideal of society, which can only be realized by a Christian life, Christian actions, and Christian examples. And meanwhile, though this is the ONE ONLY MEANS of gaining a hold over the people who have remained non-Christian, the men of our day set to work in the directly opposite fashion to attain this result.

To bring under the sway of Christianity savage nations who do not attack us and whom we have therefore no excuse for oppressing, we ought before all things to leave them in peace, and in case we need or wish to enter into closer relations with them, we ought only to influence them by Christian manners and Christian teaching, setting them the example of the Christian virtues of patience, meekness, endurance, purity, brotherhood, and love. Instead of that we begin by establishing among them new markets for our commerce, with the sole aim of our own profit; then we appropriate their lands, i. e., rob them; then we sell them spirits, tobacco, and opium, i. e., corrupt them; then we establish our morals among them, teach them the use of violence and new methods of destruction, i, e., we teach them nothing but the animal law of strife, below which man cannot sink, and we do all we can to conceal from them all that is Christian in us. After this we send some dozens of missionaries prating to them of the hypocritical absurdities of the Church, and then quote the failure of our efforts to turn the heathen to Christianity as an incontrovertible proof of the impossibility of applying the truths of Christianity in practical life.

It is just the same with the so-called criminals living in our midst. To bring these people under the sway of Christianity there is one only means, that is, the Christian social ideal, which can only be realized among them by true Christian teaching and supported by a true example of the Christian life. And to preach this Christian truth and to support it by Christian example we set up among them prisons, guillotines, gallows, preparations for murder; we diffuse among the common herd idolatrous superstitions to stupefy them; we sell them spirits, tobacco, and opium to brutalize them; we even organize legalized prostitution; we give land to those who do not need it; we make a display of senseless luxury in the midst of suffering poverty; we destroy the possibility of anything like a Christian public opinion, and studiously try to suppress what Christian public opinion is existing. And then, after having ourselves assiduously corrupted men, we shut them up like wild beasts in places from which they cannot escape, and where they become still more brutalized, or else we kill them. And these very men whom we have corrupted and brutalized by every means, we bring forward as a proof that one cannot deal with criminals except by brute force.

We are just like ignorant doctors who put a man, recovering from illness by the force of nature, into the most unfavorable conditions of hygiene, and dose him with the most deleterious drugs, and then assert triumphantly that their hygiene and their drugs saved his life, when the patient would have been well long before if they had left him alone.

Violence, which is held up as the means of supporting the Christian organization of life, not only fails to produce that effect, it even hinders the social organization of life from being what it might and ought to be. The social organization is as good as it is not as a result of force, but in spite of it.

And therefore the champions of the existing order are mistaken in arguing that since, even with the aid of force, the bad and non-Christian elements of humanity can hardly be kept from attacking us, the abolition of the use of force and the substitution of public opinion for it would leave humanity quite unprotected.

They are mistaken, because force does not protect humanity, but, on the contrary, deprives it of the only possible means of really protecting itself, that is, the establishment and diffusion of a Christian public opinion. Only by the suppression of violence will a Christian public opinion cease to be corrupted, and be enabled to be diffused without hindrance, and men will then turn their efforts in the spiritual direction by which alone they can advance.

“But how are we to cast off the visible tangible protection of an armed policeman, and trust to something so intangible as public opinion? Does it yet exist? Moreover, the condition of things in which we are living now, we know, good or bad; we know its shortcomings and are used to it, we know what to do, and how to behave under present conditions. But what will happen when we give it up and trust ourselves to something invisible and intangible, and altogether unknown?”

The unknown world on which they are entering in renouncing their habitual ways of life appears itself as dreadful to them. It is all very well to dread the unknown when our habitual position is sound and secure. But our position is so far from being secure that we know, beyond all doubt, that we are standing on the brink of a precipice. If we must be afraid let us be afraid of what is really alarming, and not what we imagine as alarming.

Fearing to make the effort to detach ourselves from our perilous position because the future is not fully clear to us, we are like passengers in a foundering ship who, through being afraid to trust themselves to the boat which would carry them to the shore, shut themselves up in the cabin and refuse to come out of it; or like sheep, who, terrified by their barn being on fire, huddle in a corner and do not go out of the wide-open door.

We are standing on the threshold of the murderous war of social revolution, terrific in its miseries, beside which, as those who are preparing it tell us, the horrors of 1793 will be child’s play. And can we talk of the danger threatening us from the warriors of Dahomey, the Zulus, and such, who live so far away and are not dreaming of attacking us, and from some thousands of swindlers, thieves, and murderers, brutalized and corrupted by ourselves, whose number is in no way lessened by all our sentences, prisons, and executions?

Moreover this dread of the suppression of the visible protection of the policeman is essentially a sentiment of townspeople, that is, of people who are living in abnormal and artificial conditions. People living in natural conditions of life, not in towns, but in the midst of nature, and carrying on the struggle with nature, live without this protection and know how little force can protect us from the real dangers with which we are surrounded. There is something sickly in this dread, which is essentially dependent on the artificial conditions in which many of us live and have been brought up.

A doctor, a specialist in insanity, told a story that one summer day when he was leaving the asylum, the lunatics accompanied him to the street door. “Come for a walk in the town with me?” the doctor suggested to them. The lunatics agreed, and a small band followed the doctor. But the further they proceeded along the street where healthy people were freely moving about, the more timid they became, and they pressed closer and closer to the doctor, hindering him from walking. At last they all began to beg him to take them back to the asylum, to their meaningless but customary way of life, to their keepers, to blows, strait waistcoats, and solitary cells.

This is just how men of to-day huddle in terror and draw back to their irrational manner of life, their factories, law courts, prisons, executions, and wars, when Christianity calls them to liberty, to the free, rational life of the future coming age.

People ask, “How will our security be guaranteed when the existing organization is suppressed? What precisely will the new organization be that is to replace it? So long as we do not know precisely how our life will be organized, we will not stir a step forward.”

An explorer going to an unknown country might as well ask for a detailed map of the country before he would start.

If a man, before he passed from one stage to another, could know his future life in full detail, he would have nothing to live for. It is the same with the life of humanity. If it had a programme of the life which awaited it before entering a new stage, it would be the surest sign that it was not living, nor advancing, but simply rotating in the same place.

The conditions of the new order of life cannot be known by us because we have to create them by our own labors. That is all that life is, to learn the unknown, and to adapt our actions to this new knowledge.

That is the life of each individual man, and that is the life of human societies and of humanity.

Chapter 11: Christian Conception of Life Has Already Arisen in Our Society, and Will Infallibly Put an End to the Present Organization of Our Life Based on Force — When That Will Be

The Condition and Organization of our Society are Terrible, but they Rest only on Public Opinion, and can be Destroyed by it — Already Violence is Regarded from a Different Point of View; the Number of those who are Ready to Serve the Government is Diminishing; and even the Servants of Government are Ashamed of their Position, and so often Do Not Perform their Duties — These Facts are all Signs of the Rise of a Public Opinion, which Continually Growing will Lead to No One being Willing to Enter Government Service — Moreover, it Becomes More and More Evident that those Offices are of No Practical Use — Men already Begin to Understand the Futility of all Institutions Based on Violence, and if a Few already Understand it, All will One Day Understand it — The Day of Deliverance is Unknown, but it Depends on Men Themselves, on how far Each Man Lives According to the Light that is in Him.

The position of Christian humanity with its prisons, galleys, gibbets, its factories and accumulation of capital, its taxes, churches, gin-palaces, licensed brothels, its ever-increasing armament and its millions of brutalized men, ready, like chained dogs, to attack anyone against whom their master incites them, would be terrible indeed if it were the product of violence, but it is pre-eminently the product of public opinion. And what has been established by public opinion can be destroyed by public opinion — and, indeed, is being destroyed by public opinion.

Money lavished by hundreds of millions, tens of millions of disciplined troops, weapons of astounding destructive power, all organizations carried to the highest point of perfection, a whole army of men charged with the task of deluding and hypnotizing the people, and all this, by means of electricity which annihilates distance, under the direct control of men who regard such an organization of society not only as necessary for profit, but even for self-preservation, and therefore exert every effort of their ingenuity to preserve it — what an invincible power it would seem! And yet we need only imagine for a moment what will really inevitably come to pass, that is, the Christian social standard replacing the heathen social standard and established with the same power and universality, and the majority of men as much ashamed of taking any part in violence or in profiting by it, as they are to-day of thieving, swindling, begging, and cowardice; and at once we see the whole of this complex, and seemingly powerful organization of society falls into ruins of itself without a struggle.

And to bring this to pass, nothing new need be brought before men’s minds. Only let the mist, which veils from men’s eyes the true meaning of certain acts of violence, pass away, and the Christian public opinion which is springing up would overpower the extinct public opinion which permitted and justified acts of violence. People need only come to be as much ashamed to do deeds of violence, to assist in them or to profit by them, as they now are of being, or being reputed a swindler, a thief, a coward, or a beggar. And already this change is beginning to take place. We do not notice it just as we do not notice the movement of the earth, because we are moved together with everything around us.

It is true that the organization of society remains in its principal features just as much an organization based on violence as it was one thousand years ago, and even in some respects, especially in the preparation for war and in war itself, it appears still more brutal. But the rising Christian ideal, which must at a certain stage of development replace the heathen ideal of life, already makes its influence felt. A dead tree stands apparently as firmly as ever — it may even seem firmer because it is harder — but it is rotten at the core, and soon must fall. It is just so with the present order of society, based on force. The external aspect is unchanged. There is the same division of oppressors and oppressed, but their view of the significance and dignity of their respective positions is no longer what it once was.

The oppressors, that is, those who take part in government, and those who profit by oppression, that is, the rich, no longer imagine, as they once did, that they are the elect of the world, and that they constitute the ideal of human happiness and greatness, to attain which was once the highest aim of the oppressed.

Very often now it is not the oppressed who strive to attain the position of the oppressors, and try to imitate them, but on the contrary the oppressors who voluntarily abandon the advantages of their position, prefer the condition of the oppressed, and try to resemble them in the simplicity of their life.

Not to speak of the duties and occupations now openly despised, such as that of spy, agent of secret police, moneylender, and publican, there are a great number of professions formerly regarded as honorable, such as those of police officials, courtiers, judges, and administrative functionaries, clergymen, military officers, speculators, and bankers, which are no longer considered desirable positions by everyone, and are even despised by a special circle of the most respected people. There are already men who voluntarily abandon these professions which were once reckoned irreproachable, and prefer less lucrative callings which are in no way connected with the use of force. And there are even rich men who, not through religious sentiment, but simply through special sensitiveness to the social standard that is springing up, relinquish their inherited property, believing that a man can only justly consume what he has gained by his own labor.

The position of a government official or of a rich man is no longer, as it once was, and still is among non-Christian peoples, regarded as necessarily honorable and deserving of respect, and under the special blessing of God. The most delicate and moral people (they are generally also the most cultivated) avoid such positions and prefer more humble callings that are not dependent on the use of force.

The best of our young people, at the age when they are still uncorrupted by life and are choosing a career, prefer the calling of doctor, engineer, teacher, artist, writer, or even that of simple farmer living on his own labor, to legal, administrative, clerical, and military positions in the pay of government, or to an idle existence living on their incomes.

Monuments and memorials in these days are mostly not erected in honor of government dignitaries, or generals, or still less of rich men, but rather of artists, men of science, and inventors, persons who have nothing in common with the government, and often have even been in conflict with it. They are the men whose praises are celebrated in poetry, who are honored by sculpture and received with triumphant jubilations.

The best men of our day are all striving for such places of honor. Consequently the class from which the wealthy and the government officials are drawn grows less in number and lower in intelligence and education, and still more in moral qualities. So that nowadays the wealthy class and men at the head of government do not constitute, as they did in former days, the ÉLITE of society; on the contrary, they are inferior to the middle class.

In Russia and Turkey as in America and France, however often the government change its officials, the majority of them are self-seeking and corrupt, of so low a moral standard that they do not even come up the elementary requirements of common honesty expected by the government. One may often nowadays hear from persons in authority the naïve complaint that the best people are always, by some strange — as it seems to them — fatality, to be found in the camp of the opposition. As though men were to complain that those who accepted the office of hangman were — by some strange fatality — all persons of very little refinement or beauty of character.

The most cultivated and refined people of our society are not nowadays to be found among the very rich, as used formerly to be the rule. The rich are mostly coarse money grubbers, absorbed only, in increasing their hoard, generally by dishonest means, or else the degenerate heirs of such money grubbers, who, far from playing any prominent part in society, are mostly treated with general contempt.

And besides the fact that the class from which the servants of government and the wealthy are drawn grows less in number and lower in caliber, they no longer themselves attach the same importance to their positions as they once did; often they are ashamed of the ignominy of their calling and do not perform the duties they are bound to perform in their position. Kings and emperors scarcely govern at all; they scarcely ever decide upon an internal reform or a new departure in foreign politics. They mostly leave the decision of such questions to government institutions or to public opinion. All their duties are reduced to representing the unity and majesty of government. And even this duty they perform less and less successfully. The majority of them do not keep up their old unapproachable majesty, but become more and more democratized and even vulgarized, casting aside the external prestige that remained to them, and thereby destroying the very thing it was their function to maintain.

It is just the same with the army. Military officers of the highest rank, instead of encouraging in their soldiers the brutality and ferocity necessary for their work, diffuse education among the soldiers, inculcate humanity, and often even themselves share the socialistic ideas of the masses and denounce war. In the last plots against the Russian Government many of the conspirators were in the army. And the number of the disaffected in the army is always increasing. And it often happens (there was a case, indeed, within the last few days) that when called upon to quell disturbances they refuse to fire upon the people. Military exploits are openly reprobated by the military themselves, and are often the subject of jests among them.

It is the same with judges and public prosecutors. The judges, whose duty it is to judge and condemn criminals, conduct the proceedings so as to whitewash them as far as possible. So that the Russian Government, to procure the condemnation of those whom they want to punish, never intrust them to the ordinary tribunals, but have them tried before a court martial, which, is only a parody of justice. The prosecutors Themselves often refuse to proceed, and even when they do proceed, often in spite of the law, really defend those they ought to be accusing. The learned jurists whose business it is to justify the violence of authority, are more and more disposed to deny the right of punishment and to replace it by theories of irresponsibility and even of moral insanity, proposing to deal with those they call criminals by medical treatment only.

Jailers and overseers of galleys generally become the champions of those whom they ought to torture. Police officers and detectives are continually assisting the escape of those they ought to arrest. The clergy preach tolerance, and even sometimes condemn the use of force, and the more educated among them try in their sermons to avoid the very deception which is the basis of their position and which it is their duty to support. Executioners refuse to perform their functions, so that in Russia the death penalty cannot be carried out for want of executioners. And in spite of all the advantages bestowed on these men, who are selected from convicts, there is a constantly diminishing number of volunteers for the post. Governors, police officials, tax collectors often have compassion on the people and try to find pretexts for not collecting the tax from them. The rich are not at ease in spending their wealth only on themselves, and lavish it on works of public utility. Landowners build schools and hospitals on their property, and some even give up the ownership of their land and transfer it to the cultivators, or establish communities upon it. Millowners and manufacturers build hospitals, schools, savings banks, asylums, and dwellings for their workpeople. Some of them form co-operative associations in which they have shares on the same terms as the others. Capitalists expend a part of their capital on educational, artistic, philanthropic, and other public institutions. And many, who are not equal to parting with their wealth in their lifetime, leave it in their wills to public institutions.

All these phenomena might seem to be mere exceptions, except that they can all be referred to one common cause. Just as one might fancy the first leaves on the budding trees in April were exceptional if we did not know that they all have a common cause, the spring, and that if we see the branches on some trees shooting and turning green, it is certain that it will soon be so with all.

So it is with the manifestation of the Christian standard of opinion on force and all that is based on force. If this standard already influences some, the most impressionable, and impels each in his own sphere to abandon advantages based on the use of force, then its influence will extend further and further till it transforms the whole order of men’s actions and puts it into accord with the Christian ideal which is already a living force in the vanguard of humanity.

And if there are now rulers, who do not decide on any step on their own authority, who try to be as unlike monarchs, and as like plain mortals as possible, who state their readiness to give up their prerogatives and become simply the first citizens of a republic; if there are already soldiers who realize all the sin and harm of war, and are not willing to fire on men either of their own or a foreign country; judges and prosecutors who do not like to try and to condemn criminals; priests, who abjure deception; tax-gatherers who try to perform as little as they can of their duties, and rich men renouncing their wealth — then the same thing will inevitably happen to other rulers, other soldiers, other judges, priests, tax-gatherers, and rich men. And when there are no longer men willing to fill these offices, these offices themselves will disappear too.

But this is not the only way in which public opinion is leading men to the abolition of the prevailing order and the substitution of a new order. As the positions based on the rule of force become less attractive and fewer men are found willing to fill them, the more will their uselessness be apparent.

Everywhere throughout the Christian world the same rulers, and the same governments, the same armies, the same law courts, the same tax-gatherers, the same priests, the same rich men, landowners, manufacturers, and capitalists, as ever, but the attitude of the world to them, and their attitude to themselves is altogether changed.

The same sovereigns have still the same audiences and interviews, hunts and banquets, and balls and uniforms; there are the same diplomats and the same deliberations on alliances and wars; there are still the same parliaments, with the same debates on the Eastern question and Africa, on treaties and violations of treaties, and Home Rule and the eight-hour day; and one set of ministers replacing another in the same way, and the same speeches and the same incidents. But for men who observe how one newspaper article has more effect on the position of affairs than dozens of royal audiences or parliamentary sessions, it becomes more and more evident that these audiences and interviews and debates in parliaments do not direct the course of affairs, but something independent of all that, which cannot be concentrated in one place.

The same generals and officers and soldiers, and cannons and fortresses, and reviews and maneuvers, but no war breaks out. One year, ten, twenty years pass by. And it becomes less and less possible to rely on the army for the pacification of riots, and more and more evident, consequently, that generals, and officers, and soldiers are only figures in solemn processions — objects of amusement for governments — a sort of immense — and far too expensive — CORPS DE BALLET.

The same lawyers and judges, and the same assizes, but it becomes more and more evident that the civil courts decide cases on the most diverse grounds, but regardless of justice, and that criminal trials are quite senseless, because the punishments do not attain the objects aimed at by the judges themselves. These institutions therefore serve no other purpose than to provide a means of livelihood for men who are not capable of doing anything more useful.

The same priests and archbishops and churches and synods, but it becomes more and more evident that they have long ago ceased to believe in what they preach, and therefore they can convince no one of the necessity of believing what they don’t believe themselves.

The same tax collectors, but they are less and less capable of taking men’s property from them by force, and it becomes more and more evident that people can collect all that is necessary by voluntary subscription without their aid.

The same rich men, but it becomes more and more evident that they can only be of use by ceasing to administer their property in person and giving up to society the whole or at least a part of their wealth.

And when all this has become absolutely evident to everyone, it will be natural for men to ask themselves: “But why should we keep and maintain all these kings, emperors, presidents, and members of all sorts of senates and ministries, since nothing comes of all their debates and audiences? Wouldn’t it be better, as some humorist suggested, to make a queen of india-rubber?”

And what good to us are these armies with their generals and bands and horses and drums? And what need is there of them when there is no war, and no one wants to make war? and if there were a war, other nations would not let us gain any advantage from it; while the soldiers refuse to fire on their fellow-countrymen.

And what is the use of these lawyers and judges who don’t decide civil cases with justice and recognize themselves the uselessness of punishments in criminal cases?

And what is the use of tax collectors who collect the taxes unwillingly, when it is easy to raise all that is wanted without them?

What is the use of the clergy, who don’t believe in what they preach?

And what is the use of capital in the hands of private persons, when it can only be of use as the property of all?

And when once people have asked themselves these questions they cannot help coming to some decision and ceasing to support all these institutions which are no longer of use.

But even before those who support these institutions decide to abolish them, the men who occupy these positions will be reduced to the necessity of throwing them up.

Public opinion more and more condemns the use of force, and therefore men are less and less willing to fill positions which rest on the use of force, and if they do occupy them, are less and less able to make use of force in them. And hence they must become more and more superfluous.

I once took part in Moscow in a religious meeting which used to take place generally in the week after Easter near the church in the Ohotny Row. A little knot of some twenty men were collected together on the pavement, engaged in serious religious discussion. At the same time there was a kind of concert going on in the buildings of the Court Club in the same street, and a police officer noticing the little group collected near the church sent a mounted policeman to disperse it. It was absolutely unnecessary for the officer to disperse it. A group of twenty men was no obstruction to anyone, but he had been standing there the whole morning, and he wanted to do something. The policeman, a young fellow, with a resolute flourish of his right arm and a clink of his saber, came up to us and commanded us severely: “Move on! what’s this meeting about?” Everyone looked at the policeman, and one of the speakers, a quiet man in a peasant’s dress, answered with a calm and gracious air, “We are speaking of serious matters, and there is no need for us to move on; you would do better, young man, to get off your horse and listen. It might do you good”; and turning round he continued his discourse. The policeman turned his horse and went off without a word.

That is just what should be done in all cases of violence.

The officer was bored, he had nothing to do. He had been put, poor fellow, in a position in which he had no choice but to give orders. He was shut off from all human existence; he could do nothing but superintend and give orders, and give orders and superintend, though his superintendence and his orders served no useful purpose whatever. And this is the position in which all these unlucky rulers, ministers, members of parliament, governors, generals, officers, archbishops, priests, and even rich men find themselves to some extent already, and will find themselves altogether as time goes on. They can do nothing but give orders, and they give orders and send their messengers, as the officer sent the policeman, to interfere with people. And because the people they hinder turn to them and request them not to interfere, they fancy they are very useful indeed.

But the time will come and is coming when it will be perfectly evident to everyone that they are not of any use at all, and only a hindrance, and those whom they interfere with will say gently and quietly to them, like my friend in the street meeting, “Pray don’t interfere with us.” And all the messengers and those who send them too will be obliged to follow this good advice, that is to say, will leave off galloping about, with their arms akimbo, interfering with people, and getting off their horses and removing their spurs, will listen to what is being said, and mixing with others, will take their place with them in some real human work.

The time will come and is inevitably coming when all institutions based on force will disappear through their uselessness, stupidity, and even inconvenience becoming obvious to all.

The time must come when the men of our modern world who fill offices based upon violence will find themselves in the position of the emperor in Andersen’s tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” when the child seeing the emperor undressed, cried in all simplicity, “Look, he is naked!” And then all the rest, who had seen him and said nothing, could not help recognizing it too.

The story is that there was once an emperor, very fond of new clothes. And to him came two tailors, who promised to make him some extraordinary clothes. The emperor engages them and they begin to sew at them, but they explain that the clothes have the extraordinary property of remaining invisible to anyone who is unfit for his position. The courtiers come to look at the tailors’ work and see nothing, for the men are plying their needles in empty space. But remembering the extraordinary property of the clothes, they all declare they see them and are loud in their admiration. The emperor does the same himself. The day of the procession comes in which the emperor is to go out in his new clothes. The emperor undresses and puts on his new clothes, that is to say, remains naked, and naked he walks through the town. But remembering the magic property of the clothes, no one ventures to say that he has nothing on till a little child cries out: “Look, he is naked!”

This will be exactly the situation of all who continue through inertia to fill offices which have long become useless directly someone who has no interest in concealing their uselessness exclaims in all simplicity: “But these people have been of no use to anyone for a long time past!”

The condition of Christian humanity with its fortresses, cannons, dynamite, guns, torpedoes, prisons, gallows, churches, factories, customs offices, and palaces is really terrible. But still cannons and guns will not fire themselves, prisons will not shut men up of themselves, gallows will not hang them, churches will not delude them, nor customs offices hinder them, and palaces and factories are not built nor kept up of themselves. All those things are the work of men. If men come to understand that they ought not to do these things, then they will cease to be. And already they are beginning to understand it. Though all do not understand it yet, the advanced guard understand and the rest will follow them. And the advanced guard cannot cease to understand what they have once understood; and what they understand the rest not only can but must inevitably understand hereafter.

So that the prophecy that the time will come when men will be taught of God, will learn war no more, will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into reaping-hooks, which means, translating it into our language, the fortresses, prisons, barracks, palaces, and churches will remain empty, and all the gibbets and guns and cannons will be left unused, is no longer a dream, but the definite new form of life to which mankind is approaching with ever-increasing rapidity.

But when will it be?

Eighteen hundred years ago to this question Christ answered that the end of the world (that is, of the pagan organization of life) shall come when the tribulation of men is greater than it has ever been, and when the Gospel of the kingdom of God, that is, the possibility of a new organization of life, shall be preached in the world unto all nations. (Matt. xxiv. 3-28.) But of that day and hour knoweth no man but the Father only (Matt. xxiv. 3-6), said Christ. For it may come any time, in such an hour as ye think not.

To the question when this hour cometh Christ answers that we cannot know, but just because we cannot know when that hour is coming we ought to be always ready to meet it, just as the master ought to watch who guards his house from thieves, as the virgins ought to watch with lamps alight for the bridegroom; and further, we ought to work with all the powers given us to bring that hour to pass, as the servants ought to work with the talents intrusted to them. (Matt. xxiv. 43, and xxvi. 13, 14-30.) And there could be no answer but this one. Men cannot know when the day and the hour of the kingdom of God will come, because its coming depends on themselves alone.

The answer is like that of the wise man who, when asked whether it was far to the town, answered, “Walk!”

How can we tell whether it is far to the goal which humanity is approaching, when we do not know how men are going toward it, while it depends on them whether they go or do not go, stand still, slacken their pace or hasten it? All we can know is what we who make up mankind ought to do, and not to do, to bring about the coming of the kingdom of God. And that we all know. And we need only each begin to do what we ought to do, we need only each live with all the light that is in us, to bring about at once the promised kingdom of God to which every man’s heart is yearning.

Chapter 12: Conclusion — Repent Ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand

1. Chance Meeting with a Train Carrying Soldiers to Restore Order Among the Famishing Peasants — Reason of the Expedition — How the Decisions of the Higher Authorities are Enforced in Cases of Insubordination on Part of the Peasants — What Happened at Orel, as an Example of How the Rights of the Propertied Classes are Maintained by Murder and Torture — All the Privileges of the Wealthy are Based on Similar Acts of Violence.

2. The Elements that Made up the Force Sent to Toula, and the Conduct of the Men Composing it — How these Men Could Carry Out such Acts — The Explanation is Not to be Found in Ignorance, Conviction, Cruelty, Heartlessness, or Want of Moral Sense — They do these Things Because they are Necessary to Support the Existing Order, which they Consider it Every Man’s Duty to Support — The Basis of this Conviction that the Existing Order is Necessary and Inevitable — In the Upper Classes this Conviction is Based on the Advantages of the Existing Order for Themselves — But what Forces Men of the Lower Classes to Believe in the Immutability of the Existing Order, from which they Derive no Advantage, and which they Aid in Maintaining, Facts Contrary to their Conscience? — This is the Result of the Lower Classes being Deluded by the Upper, Both as to the Inevitability of the Existing Order and the Lawfulness of the Acts of Violence Needed to Maintain it — Deception in General — Special Form of Deception in Regard to Military Service — Conscription.

3. How can Men Allow that Murder is Permissible while they Preach Principles of Morality, and How can they Allow of the Existence in their Midst of a Military Organization of Physical Force which is a Constant Menace to Public Security? — It is only Allowed by the Upper Classes, who Profit by this Organization, Because their Privileges are Maintained by it — The Upper Classes Allow it, and the Lower Classes Carry it into Effect in Spite of their Consciousness of the Immorality of the Deeds of Violence, the More Readily Because Through the Arrangements of the Government the Moral Responsibility for such Deeds is Divided among a Great Number of Participants in it, and Everyone Throws the Responsibility on Someone Else — Moreover, the Sense of Moral Responsibility is Lost through the Delusion of Inequality, and the Consequent Intoxication of Power on the Part of Superiors, and Servility on the Part of Inferiors — The Condition of these Men, Acting against the Dictates of their Conscience, is Like that of Hypnotized Subjects Acting by Suggestion — The Difference between this Obedience to Government Suggestion, and Obedience to Public Opinion, and to the Guidance of Men of a Higher Moral Sense — The Existing Order of Society, which is the Result of an Extinct Public Opinion and is Inconsistent with the Already Existing Public Opinion of the Future, is only Maintained by the Stupefaction of the Conscience, Produced Spontaneously by Self-interest in the Upper Classes and Through Hypnotizing in the Lower Classes — The Conscience or the Common Sense of such Men may Awaken, and there are Examples of its Sudden Awakening, so that one can Never be Sure of the Deeds of Violence they are Prepared for — It Depends Entirely on the Point which the Sense of the Unlawfulness of Acts of Violence has Reached, and this Sense may Spontaneously Awaken in Men, or may be Reawakened by the Influence of Men of more Conscience.

4. Everything Depends on the Strength of the Consciousness of

Christian Truths in Each Individual Man — The Leading Men of Modern

Times, however, do not Think it Necessary to Preach or Practice

the Truths of Christianity, but Regard the Modification of the

External Conditions of Existence within the Limit Imposed by

Governments as Sufficient to Reform the Life of Humanity — On this

Scientific Theory of Hypocrisy, which has Replaced the Hypocrisy

of Religion, Men of the Wealthy Classes Base their Justification

of their Position — Through this Hypocrisy they can Enjoy the

Exclusive Privileges of their Position by Force and Fraud, and

Still Pretend to be Christians to One Another and be Easy in their

Minds — This Hypocrisy Allows Men who Preach Christianity to Take

Part in Institutions Based on Violence — No External Reformation of

Life will Render it Less Miserable — Its Misery the Result of

Disunion Caused by Following Lies, not the Truth — Union only

Possible in Truth — Hypocrisy Hinders this Union, since Hypocrites

Conceal from themselves and Others the Truth they Know — Hypocrisy

Turns all Reforms of Life to Evil — Hypocrisy Distorts the Idea of

Good and Evil, and so Stands in the Way of the Progress of Men

toward Perfection — Undisguised Criminals and Malefactors do Less

Harm than those who Live by Legalized Violence, Disguised by

Hypocrisy — All Men Feel the Iniquity of our Life, and would Long

Ago have Transformed it if it had not been Dissimulated by

Hypocrisy — But Seem to have Reached the Extreme Limits of

Hypocrisy, and we Need only Make an Effort of Conscience to Awaken

as from a Nightmare to a Different Reality.

5. Can Man Make this Effort? — According to the Hypocritical Theory of the Day, Man is not Free to Transform his Life — Man is not Free in his Actions, but he is Free to Admit or to Deny the Truth he Knows — When Truth is Once Admitted, it Becomes the Basis of Action — Man’s Threefold Relation to Truth — The Reason of the Apparent Insolubility of the Problem of Free Will — Man’s Freedom Consists in the Recognition of the Truth Revealed to him. There is no Other Freedom — Recognition of Truth Gives Freedom, and Shows the Path Along which, Willingly or Unwillingly by Mankind, Man Must Advance — The Recognition of Truth and Real Freedom Enables Man to Share in the Work of God, not as the Slave, but as the Creator of Life — Men Need only Make the Effort to Renounce all Thought of Bettering the External Conditions of Life and Bend all their Efforts to Recognizing and Preaching the Truth they Know, to put an End to the Existing Miserable State of Things, and to Enter upon the Kingdom of God so far as it is yet Accessible to Man — All that is Needed is to Make an End of Lying and Hypocrisy — But then what Awaits us in the Future? — What will Happen to Humanity if Men Follow the Dictates of their Conscience, and how can Life go on with the Conditions of Civilized Life to which we are Accustomed? — All Uneasiness on these Points may be Removed by the Reflection that Nothing True and Good can be Destroyed by the Realization of Truth, but will only be Freed from the Alloy of Falsehood.

6. Our Life has Reached the Extreme Limit of Misery and Cannot be Improved by any Systems of Organization — All our Life and all our Institutions are Quite Meaningless — Are we Doing what God Wills of us by Preserving our Privileges and Duties to Government? — We are put in this Position not Because the World is so Made and it is Inevitable, but Because we Wish it to be so, Because it is to the Advantage of Some of us — Our Conscience is in Opposition to our Position and all our Conduct, and the Way Out of the Contradiction is to be Found in the Recognition of the Christian Truth: Do Not unto Others what you Would Not they should Do unto You — As our Duties to Self Must be Subordinated to our Duties to Others, so Must our Duties to Others be Subordinated to our Duties to God — The Only Way Out of our Position Lies, if not in Renouncing our Position and our Privileges, at Least in Recognizing our Sin and not Justifying it nor Disguising it — The Only Object of Life is to Learn the Truth and to Act on it — Acceptance of the Position and of State Action Deprives Life of all Object — It is God’s Will that we should Serve Him in our Life, that is, that we should Bring About the Greatest Unity of all that has Life, a Unity only Possible in Truth.

I was finishing this book, which I had been working at for two years, when I happened on the 9th of September to be traveling by rail through the governments of Toula and Riazan, where the peasants were starving last year and where the famine is even more severe now. At one of the railway stations my train passed an extra train which was taking a troop of soldiers under the conduct of the governor of the province, together with muskets, cartridges, and rods, to flog and murder these same famishing peasants.

The punishment of flogging by way of carrying the decrees of the authorities into effect has been more and more frequently adopted of late in Russia, in spite of the fact that corporal punishment was abolished by law thirty years ago.

I had heard of this, I had even read in the newspapers of the fearful floggings which had been inflicted in Tchernigov, Tambov, Saratov, Astrakhan, and Orel, and of those of which the governor of Nijni-Novgorod, General Baranov, had boasted. But I had never before happened to see men in the process of carrying out these punishments.

And here I saw the spectacle of good Russians full of the Christian spirit traveling with guns and rods to torture and kill their starving brethren. The reason for their expedition was as follows:

On one of the estates of a rich landowner the peasants had common rights on the forest, and having always enjoyed these rights, regarded the forest as their own, or at least as theirs in common with the owner. The landowner wished to keep the forest entirely to himself and began to fell the trees. The peasants lodged a complaint. The judges in the first instance gave an unjust decision (I say unjust on the authority of the lawyer and governor, who ought to understand the matter), and decided the case in favor of the landowner. All the later decisions, even that of the senate, though they could see that the matter had been unjustly decided, confirmed the judgment and adjudged the forest to the landowner. He began to cut down the trees, but the peasants, unable to believe that such obvious injustice could be done them by the higher authorities, did not submit to the decision and drove away the men sent to cut down the trees, declaring that the forest belonged to them and they would go to the Tzar before they would let them cut it down.

The matter was referred to Petersburg, and the order was transmitted to the governor to carry the decision of the court into effect. The governor asked for a troop of soldiers. And here were the soldiers with bayonets and cartridges, and moreover, a supply of rods, expressly prepared for the purpose and heaped up in one of the trucks, going to carry the decision of the higher authorities into effect.

The decisions of the higher authorities are carried into effect by means of murder or torture, or threats of one or the other, according to whether they offer resistance or not.

In the first case if the peasants offer resistance the practice is in Russia, and it is the same everywhere where a state organization and private property exist, as follows. The governor delivers an address in which he demands submission. The excited crowd, generally deluded by their leaders, don’t understand a word of what the representative of authority is saying in the pompous official language, and their excitement continues. Then the governor announces that if they do not submit and disperse, he will be obliged to have recourse to force. If the crowd does not disperse even on this, the governor gives the order to fire over the heads of the crowd. If the crowd does not even then disperse, the governor gives the order to fire straight into the crowd; the soldiers fire and the killed and wounded fall about the street. Then the crowd usually runs away in all directions, and the troops at the governor’s command take those who are supposed to be the ringleaders and lead them off under escort. Then they pick up the dying, the wounded, and the dead, covered with blood, sometimes women and children among them. The dead they bury and the wounded they carry to the hospital. Those whom they regard as the ringleaders they take to the town hall and have them tried by a special court-martial. And if they have had recourse to violence on their side, they are condemned to be hanged. And then the gallows is erected. And they solemnly strangle a few defenseless creatures.

This is what has often been done in Russia, and is and must always be done where the social order is based on force.

But in the second case, when the peasants do submit, something quite special, peculiar to Russia, takes place. The governor arrives on the scene of action and delivers an harangue to the people, reproaching them for their insubordination, and either stations troops in the houses of the villages, where sometimes for a whole month the soldiers drain the resources of the peasants, or contenting himself with threats, he mercifully takes leave of the people, or what is the most frequent course, he announces that the ringleaders must be punished, and quite arbitrarily without any trial selects a certain number of men, regarded as ringleaders, and commands them to be flogged in his presence.

In order to give an idea of how such things are done I will describe a proceeding of the kind which took place in Orel, and received the full approval of the highest authorities.

This is what took place in Orel. Just as here in the Toula province, a landlord wanted to appropriate the property of the peasants and just in the same way the peasants opposed it. The matter in dispute was a fall of water, which irrigated the peasants’ fields, and which the landowner wanted to cut off and divert to turn his mill. The peasants rebelled against this being done. The land owner laid a complaint before the district commander, who illegally (as was recognized later even by a legal decision) decided the matter in favor of the landowner, and allowed him to divert the water course. The landowner sent workmen to dig the conduit by which the water was to be let off to turn the mill. The peasants were indignant at this unjust decision, and sent their women to prevent the landowner’s men from digging this conduit. The women went to the dykes, overturned the carts, and drove away the men. The landowner made a complaint against the women for thus taking the law into their own hands. The district commander made out an order that from every house throughout the village one woman was to be taken and put in prison. The order was not easily executed. For in every household there were several women, and it was impossible to know which one was to be arrested. Consequently the police did not carry out the order. The landowner complained to the governor of the neglect on the part of the police, and the latter, without examining into the affair, gave the chief official of the police strict orders to carry out the instructions of the district commander without delay. The police official, in obedience to his superior, went to the village and with the insolence peculiar to Russian officials ordered his policemen to take one woman out of each house. But since there were more than one woman in each house, and there was no knowing which one was sentenced to imprisonment, disputes and opposition arose. In spite of these disputes and opposition, however, the officer of police gave orders that some woman, whichever came first, should be taken from each household and led away to prison. The peasants began to defend their wives and mothers, would not let them go, and beat the police and their officer. This was a fresh and terrible crime: resistance was offered to the authorities. A report of this new offense was sent to the town. And so this governor — precisely as the governor of Toula was doing on that day — with a battalion of soldiers with guns and rods, hastily brought together by means of telegraphs and telephones and railways, proceeded by a special train to the scene of action, with a learned doctor whose duty it was to insure the flogging being of an hygienic character. Herzen’s prophecy of the modern Ghenghis Khan with his telegrams is completely realized by this governor.

Before the town hall of the district were the soldiery, a battalion of police with their revolvers slung round them with red cords, the persons of most importance among the peasants, and the culprits. A crowd of one thousand or more people were standing round. The governor, on arriving, stepped out of his carriage, delivered a prepared harangue, and asked for the culprits and a bench. The latter demand was at first not understood. But a police constable whom the governor always took about with him, and who undertook to organize such executions — by no means exceptional in that province — explained that what was meant was a bench for flogging. A bench was brought as well as the rods, and then the executioners were summoned (the latter had been selected beforehand from some horsestealers of the same village, as the soldiers refused the office). When everything was ready, the governor ordered the first of the twelve culprits pointed out by the landowner as the most guilty to come forward. The first to come forward was the head of a family, a man of forty who had always stood up manfully for the rights of his class, and therefore was held in the greatest esteem by all the villagers. He was led to the bench and stripped, and then ordered to lie down.

The peasant attempted to supplicate for mercy, but seeing it was useless, he crossed himself and lay down. Two police constables hastened to hold him down. The learned doctor stood by, in readiness to give his aid and his medical science when they should be needed. The convicts spit into their hands, brandished the rods, and began to flog. It seemed, however, that the bench was too narrow, and it was difficult to keep the victim writhing in torture upon it. Then the governor ordered them to bring another bench and to put a plank across them. Soldiers, with their hands raised to their caps, and respectful murmurs of “Yes, your Excellency,” hasten obediently to carry out this order. Meanwhile the tortured man, half naked, pale and scowling, stood waiting, his eyes fixed on the ground and his teeth chattering. When another bench had been brought they again made him lie down, and the convicted thieves again began to flog him.

The victim’s back and thighs and legs, and even his sides, became more and more covered with scars and wheals, and at every blow there came the sound of the deep groans which he could no longer restrain. In the crowd standing round were heard the sobs of wives, mothers, children, the families of the tortured man and of all the others picked out for punishment.

The miserable governor, intoxicated with power, was counting the strokes on his fingers, and never left off smoking cigarettes, while several officious persons hastened on every opportunity to offer him a burning match to light them. When more than fifty strokes had been given, the peasant ceased to shriek and writhe, and the doctor, who had been educated in a government institution to serve his sovereign and his country with his scientific attainments, went up to the victim, felt his pulse, listened to his heart, and announced to the representative of authority that the man undergoing punishment had lost consciousness, and that, in accordance with the conclusions of science, to continue the punishment would endanger the victim’s life. But the miserable governor, now completely intoxicated by the sight of blood, gave orders that the punishment should go on, and the flogging was continued up to seventy strokes, the number which the governor had for some reason fixed upon as necessary. When the seventieth stroke had been reached, the governor said “Enough! Next one!” And the mutilated victim, his back covered with blood, was lifted up and carried away unconscious, and another was led up. The sobs and groans of the crowd grew louder. But the representative of the state continued the torture.

Thus they flogged each of them up to the twelfth, and each of them received seventy strokes. They all implored mercy, shrieked and groaned. The sobs and cries of the crowd of women grew louder and more heart-rending, and the men’s faces grew darker and darker. But they were surrounded by troops, and the torture did not cease till it had reached the limit which had been fixed by the caprice of the miserable half-drunken and insane creature they called the governor.

The officials, and officers, and soldiers not only assisted in it, but were even partly responsible for the affair, since by their presence they prevented any interference on the part of the crowd.

When I inquired of one of the governors why they made use of this kind of torture when people had already submitted and soldiers were stationed in the village, he replied with the important air of a man who thoroughly understands all the subtleties of statecraft, that if the peasants were not thoroughly subdued by flogging, they would begin offering opposition to the decisions of authorities again. When some of them had been thoroughly tortured, the authority of the state would be secured forever among them.

And so that was why the Governor of Toula was going in his turn with his subordinate officials, officers, and soldiers to carry out a similar measure. By precisely the same means, i. e., by murder and torture, obedience to the decision of the higher authorities was to be secured. And this decision was to enable a young landowner, who had an income of one hundred thousand, to gain three thousand rubles more by stealing a forest from a whole community of cold and famished peasants, to spend it, in two or three weeks in the saloons of Moscow, Petersburg, or Paris. That was what those people whom I met were going to do.

After my thoughts had for two years been turned in the same direction, fate seemed expressly to have brought me face to face for the first time in my life with a fact which showed me absolutely unmistakably in practice what had long been clear to me in theory, that the organization of ur society rests, not as people interested in maintaining the present order of things like to imagine, on certain principles of jurisprudence, but on simple brute force, on the murder and torture of men.

People who own great estates or fortunes, or who receive great revenues drawn from the class who are in want even of necessities, the working class, as well as all those who like merchants, doctors, artists, clerks, learned professors, coachmen, cooks, writers, valets, and barristers, make their living about these rich people, like to believe that the privileges they enjoy are not the result of force, but of absolutely free and just interchange of services, and that their advantages, far from being gained by such punishments and murders as took place in Orel and several parts of Russia this year, and are always taking place all over Europe and America, have no kind of connection with these acts of violence. They like to believe that their privileges exist apart and are the result of free contract among people; and that the violent cruelties perpetrated on the people also exist apart and are the result of some general judicial, political, or economical laws. They try not to see that they all enjoy their privileges as a result of the same fact which forces the peasants who have tended the forest, and who are in the direct need of it for fuel, to give it up to a rich landowner who has taken no part in caring for its growth and has no need of it whatever — the fact, that is, that if they don’t give it up they will be flogged or killed.

And yet if it is clear that it was only by means of menaces, blows, or murder, that the mill in Orel was enabled to yield a larger income, or that the forest which the peasants had planted became the property of a landowner, it should be equally clear that all the other exclusive rights enjoyed by the rich, by robbing the poor of their necessities, rest on the same basis of violence. If the peasants, who need land to maintain their families, may not cultivate the land about their houses, but one man, a Russian, English, Austrian, or any other great landowner, possesses land enough to maintain a thousand families, though he does not cultivate it himself, and if a merchant profiting by the misery of the cultivators, taking corn from them at a third of its value, can keep this corn in his granaries with perfect security while men are starving all around him, and sell it again for three times its value to the very cultivators he bought it from, it is evident that all this too comes from the same cause. And if one man may not buy of another a commodity from the other side of a certain fixed line, called the frontier, without paying certain duties on it to men who have taken no part whatever in its production — and if men are driven to sell their last cow to pay taxes which the government distributes among its functionaries, and spends on maintaining soldiers to murder these very taxpayers-it would appear self-evident that all this does not come about as the result of any abstract laws, but is based on just what was done in Orel, and which may be done in Toula, and is done periodically in one form or another throughout the whole world wherever there is a government, and where there are rich and poor.

Simply because torture and murder are not employed in every instance of oppression by force, those who enjoy the exclusive privileges of the ruling classes persuade themselves and others that their privileges are not based on torture and murder, but on some mysterious general causes, abstract laws, and so on. Yet one would think it was perfectly clear that if men, who consider it unjust (and all the working classes do consider it so nowadays), still pay the principal part of the produce of their labor away to the capitalist and the landowner, and pay taxes, though they know to what a bad use these taxes are put, they do so not from recognition of abstract laws of which they have never heard, but only because they know they will be beaten and killed if they don’t do so.

And if there is no need to imprison, beat, and kill men every time the landlord collects his rents, every time those who are in want of bread have to pay a swindling merchant three times its value, every time the factory hand has to be content with a wage less than half of the profit made by the employer, and every time a poor man pays his last ruble in taxes, it is because so many men have been beaten and killed for trying to resist these demands, that the lesson has now been learnt very thoroughly.

Just as a trained tiger, who does not eat meat put under his nose, and jumps over a stick at the word of command, does not act thus because he likes it, but because he remembers the red-hot irons or the fast with which he was punished every time he did not obey; so men submitting to what is disadvantageous or even ruinous to them, and considered by them as unjust, act thus because they remember what they suffered for resisting it.

As for those who profit by the privileges gained by previous acts of violence, they often forget and like to forget how these privileges were obtained. But one need only recall the facts of history, not the history of the exploits of different dynasties of rulers, but real history, the history of the oppression of the majority by a small number of men, to see that all the advantages the rich have over the poor are based on nothing but flogging, imprisonment, and murder.

One need but reflect on the unceasing, persistent struggle of all to better their material position, which is the guiding motive of men of the present day, to be convinced that the advantages of the rich over the poor could never and can never be maintained by anything but force.

There may be cases of oppression, of violence, and of punishments, though they are rare, the aim of which is not to secure the privileges of the propertied classes. But one may confidently assert that in any society where, for every man living in ease, there are ten exhausted by labor, envious, covetous, and often suffering with their families from direct privation, all the privileges of the rich, all their luxuries and superfluities, are obtained and maintained only by tortures, imprisonment, and murder.

The train I met on the 9th of September going with soldiers, guns, cartridges, and rods, to confirm the rich landowner in the possession of a small forest which he had taken from the starving peasants, which they were in the direst need of, and he was in no need of at all, was a striking proof of how men are capable of doing deeds directly opposed to their principles and their conscience without perceiving it.

The special train consisted of one first-class carriage for the governor, the officials, and officers, and several luggage vans crammed full of soldiers. The latter, smart young fellows in their clean new uniforms, were standing about in groups or sitting swinging their legs in the wide open doorways of the luggage vans. Some were smoking, nudging each other, joking, grinning, and laughing, others were munching sunflower seeds and spitting out the husks with an air of dignity. Some of them ran along the platform to drink some water from a tub there, and when they met the officers they slackened their pace, made their stupid gesture of salutation, raising their hands to their heads with serious faces as though they were doing something of the greatest importance. They kept their eyes on them till they had passed by them, and then set off running still more merrily, stamping their heels on the platform, laughing and chattering after the manner of healthy, good-natured young fellows, traveling in lively company.

They were going to assist at the murder of their fathers or grandfathers just as if they were going on a party of pleasure, or at any rate on some quite ordinary business.

The same impression was produced by the well-dressed functionaries and officers who were scattered about the platform and in the first-class carriage. At a table covered with bottles was sitting the governor, who was responsible for the whole expedition, dressed in his half-military uniform and eating something while he chatted tranquilly about the weather with some acquaintances he had met, as though the business he was upon was of so simple and ordinary a character that it could not disturb his serenity and his interest in the change of weather.

At a little distance from the table sat the general of the police. He was not taking any refreshment, and had an impenetrable bored expression, as though he were weary of the formalities to be gone through. On all sides officers were bustling noisily about in their red uniforms trimmed with gold; one sat at a table finishing his bottle of beer, another stood at the buffet eating a cake, and brushing the crumbs off his uniform, threw down his money with a self-confident air; another was sauntering before the carriages of our train, staring at the faces of the women.

All these men who were going to murder or to torture the famishing and defenseless creatures who provide them their sustenance had the air of men who knew very well that they were doing their duty, and some were even proud, were “glorying” in what they were doing.

What is the meaning of it?

All these people are within half an hour of reaching the place where, in order to provide a wealthy young man with three thousand rubles stolen from a whole community of famishing peasants, they may be forced to commit the most horrible acts one can conceive, to murder or torture, as was done in Orel, innocent beings, their brothers. And they see the place and time approaching with untroubled serenity.

To say that all these government officials, officers, and soldiers do not know what is before them is impossible, for they are prepared for it. The governor must have given directions about the rods, the officials must have sent an order for them, purchased them, and entered the item in their accounts. The military officers have given and received orders about cartridges. They all know that they are going to torture, perhaps to kill, their famishing fellow-creatures, and that they must set to work within an hour.

To say, as is usually said, and as they would themselves repeat, that they are acting from conviction of the necessity for supporting the state organization, would be a mistake. For in the first place, these men have probably never even thought about state organization and the necessity of it; in the second place, they cannot possibly be convinced that the act in which they are taking part will tend to support rather than to ruin the state; and thirdly, in reality the majority, if not all, of these men, far from ever sacrificing their own pleasure or tranquillity to support the state, never let slip an opportunity of profiting at the expense of the state in every way they can increase their own pleasure and ease. So that they are not acting thus for the sake of the abstract principle of the state.

What is the meaning of it?

Yet I know all these men. If I don’t know all of them personally, I know their characters pretty nearly, their past, and their way of thinking. They certainly all have mothers, some of them wives and children. They are certainly for the most part good, kind, even tender-hearted fellows, who hate every sort of cruelty, not to speak of murder; many of them would not kill or hurt an animal. Moreover, they are all professed Christians and regard all violence directed against the defenseless as base and disgraceful.

Certainly not one of them would be capable in everyday life, for his own personal profit, of doing a hundredth part of what the Governor of Orel did. Every one of them would be insulted at the supposition that he was capable of doing anything of the kind in private life.

And yet they are within half an hour of reaching the place where they may be reduced to the inevitable necessity of committing this crime.

What is the meaning of it?

But it is not only these men who are going by train prepared for murder and torture. How could the men who began the whole business, the landowner, the commissioner, the judges, and those who gave the order and are responsible for it, the ministers, the Tzar, who are also good men, professed Christians, how could they elaborate such a plan and assent to it, knowing its consequences? The spectators even, who took no part in the affair, how could they, who are indignant at the sight of any cruelty in private life, even the overtaxing of a horse, allow such a horrible deed to be perpetrated? How was it they did not rise in indignation and bar the roads, shouting, “No; flog and kill starving men because they won’t let their last possession be stolen from them without resistance, that we won’t allow!” But far from anyone doing this, the majority, even of those who were the cause of the affair, such as the commissioner, the landowner, the judge, and those who took part in it and arranged it, as the governor, the ministers, and the Tzar, are perfectly tranquil and do not even feel a prick of conscience. And apparently all the men who are going to carry out this crime are equally undisturbed.

The spectators, who one would suppose could have no personal interest in the affair, looked rather with sympathy than with disapproval at all these people preparing to carry out this infamous action. In the same compartment with me was a wood merchant, who had risen from a peasant. He openly expressed aloud his sympathy with such punishments. “They can’t disobey the authorities,” he said; “that’s what the authorities are for. Let them have a lesson; send their fleas flying! They’ll give over making commotions, I warrant you. That’s what they want.”

What is the meaning of it?

It is not possible to say that all these people who have provoked or aided or allowed this deed are such worthless creatures that, knowing all the infamy of what they are doing, they do it against their principles, some for pay and for profit, others through fear of punishment. All of them in certain circumstances know how to stand up for their principles. Not one of these officials would steal a purse, read another man’s letter, or put up with an affront without demanding satisfaction. Not one of these officers would consent to cheat at cards, would refuse to pay a debt of honor, would betray a comrade, run away on the field of battle, or desert the flag. Not one of these soldiers would spit out the holy sacrament or eat meat on Good Friday. All these men are ready to face any kind of privation, suffering, or danger rather than consent to do what they regard as wrong. They have therefore the strength to resist doing what is against their principles.

It is even less possible to assert that all these men are such brutes that it is natural and not distasteful to them to do such deeds. One need only talk to these people a little to see that all of them, the landowner even, and the judge, and the minister and the Tzar and the government, the officers and the soldiers, not only disapprove of such things in the depth of their soul, but suffer from the consciousness of their participation in them when they recollect what they imply. But they try not to think about it.

One need only talk to any of these who are taking part in the affair from the landowner to the lowest policeman or soldier to see that in the depth of their soul they all know it is a wicked thing, that it would be better to have nothing to do with it, and are suffering from the knowledge.

A lady of liberal views, who was traveling in the same train with us, seeing the governor and the officers in the first-class saloon and learning the object of the expedition, began, intentionally raising her voice so that they should hear, to abuse the existing order of things and to cry shame on men who would take part in such proceedings. Everyone felt awkward, none knew where to look, but no one contradicted her. They tried to look as though such remarks were not worth answering. But one could see by their faces and their averted eyes that they were ashamed. I noticed the same thing in the soldiers. They too knew that what they were sent to do was a shameful thing, but they did not want to think about what was before them.

When the wood merchant, as I suspect insincerely only to show that he was a man of education, began to speak of the necessity of such measures, the soldiers who heard him all turned away from him, scowling and pretending not to hear.

All the men who, like the landowner, the commissioner, the minister, and the Tzar, were responsible for the perpetration of this act, as well as those who were now going to execute it, and even those who were mere spectators of it, knew that it was a wickedness, and were ashamed of taking any share in it, and even of being present at it.

Then why did they do it, or allow it to be done?

Ask them the question. And the landowner who started the affair, and the judge who pronounced a clearly unjust even though formally legal decision, and those who commanded the execution of the decision, and those who, like the policemen, soldiers, and peasants, will execute the deed with their own hands, flogging and killing their brothers, all who have devised, abetted, decreed, executed, or allowed such crimes, will make substantially the same reply.

The authorities, those who have started, devised, and decreed the matter, will say that such acts are necessary for the maintenance of the existing order; the maintenance of the existing order is necessary for the welfare of the country and of humanity, for the possibility of social existence and human progress.

Men of the poorer class, peasants and soldiers, who will have to execute the deed of violence with their own hands, say that they do so because it is the command of their superior authority, and the superior authority knows what he is about. That those are in authority who ought to be in authority, and that they know what they are doing appears to them a truth of which there can be no doubt. If they could admit the possibility of mistake or error, it would only be in functionaries of a lower grade; the highest authority on which all the rest depends seems to them immaculate beyond suspicion.

Though expressing the motives of their conduct differently, both those in command and their subordinates are agreed in saying that they act thus because the existing order is the order which must and ought to exist at the present time, and that therefore to support it is the sacred duty of every man.

On this acceptance of the necessity and therefore immutability of the existing order, all who take part in acts of violence on the part of government base the argument always advanced in their justification. “Since the existing order is immutable,” they say, “the refusal of a single individual to perform the duties laid upon him will effect no change in things, and will only mean that some other man will be put in his place who may do the work worse, that is to say, more cruelly, to the still greater injury of the victims of the act of violence.”

This conviction that the existing order is the necessary and therefore immutable order, which it is a sacred duty for every man to support, enables good men, of high principles in private life, to take part with conscience more or less untroubled in crimes such as that perpetrated in Orel, and that which the men in the Toula train were going to perpetrate.

But what is this conviction based on? It is easy to understand that the landowner prefers to believe that the existing order is inevitable and immutable, because this existing order secures him an income from his hundreds and thousands of acres, by means of which he can lead his habitual indolent and luxurious life.

It is easy to understand that the judge readily believes in the necessity of an order of things through which he receives a wage fifty times as great as the most industrious laborer can earn, and the same applies to all the higher officials. It is only under the existing RÉGIME that as governor, prosecutor, senator, members of the various councils, they can receive their several thousands of rubles a year, without which they and their families would at once sink into ruin, since if it were not for the position they occupy they would never by their own abilities, industry, or acquirements get a thousandth part of their salaries. The minister, the Tzar, and all the higher authorities are in the same position. The only distinction is that the higher and the more exceptional their position, the more necessary it is for them to believe that the existing order is the only possible order of things. For without it they would not only be unable to gain an equal position, but would be found to fall lower than all other people. A man who has of his own free will entered the police force at a wage of ten rubles, which he could easily earn in any other position, is hardly dependent on the preservation of the existing RÉGIME, and so he may not believe in its immutability. But a king or an emperor, who receives millions for his post, and knows that there are thousands of people round him who would like to dethrone him and take his place, who knows that he will never receive such a revenue or so much honor in any other position, who knows, in most cases through his more or less despotic rule, that if he were dethroned he would have to answer for all his abuse of power — he cannot but believe in the necessity and even sacredness of the existing order. The higher and the more profitable a man’s position, the more unstable it becomes, and the more terrible and dangerous a fall from it for him, the more firmly the man believes in the existing order, and therefore with the more ease of conscience can such a man perpetrate cruel and wicked acts, as though they were not in his own interest, but for the maintenance of that order.

This is the case with all men in authority, who occupy positions more profitable than they could occupy except for the present RÉGIME, from the lowest police officer to the Tzar. All of them are more or less convinced that the existing order is immutable, because — the chief consideration — it is to their advantage. But the peasants, the soldiers, who are at the bottom of the social scale, who have no kind of advantage from the existing order, who are in the very lowest position of subjection and humiliation, what forces them to believe that the existing order in which they are in their humble and disadvantageous position is the order which ought to exist, and which they ought to support even at the cost of evil actions contrary to their conscience?

What forces these men to the false reasoning that the existing order is unchanging, and that therefore they ought to support it, when it is so obvious, on the contrary, that it is only unchanging because they themselves support it?

What forces these peasants, taken only yesterday from the plow and dressed in ugly and unseemly costumes with blue collars and gilt buttons, to go with guns and sabers and murder their famishing fathers and brothers? They gain no kind of advantage and can be in no fear of losing the position they occupy, because it is worse than that from which they have been taken.

The persons in authority of the higher orders — landowners, merchants, judges, senators, governors, ministers, tzars, and officers — take part in such doings because the existing order is to their advantage. In other respects they are often good and kind-hearted men, and they are more able to take part in such doings because their share in them is limited to suggestions, decisions, and orders. These persons in authority never do themselves what they suggest, decide, or command to be done. For the most part they do not even see how all the atrocious deeds they have suggested and authorized are carried out. But the unfortunate men of the lower orders, who gain no kind of advantage from the existing RÉGIME, but, on the contrary, are treated with the utmost contempt, support it even by dragging people with their own hands from their families, handcuffing them, throwing them in prison, guarding them, shooting them.

Why do they do it? What forces them to believe that the existing order is unchanging and they must support it?

All violence rests, we know, on those who do the beating, the handcuffing, the imprisoning, and the killing with their own hands. If there were no soldiers or armed policemen, ready to kill or outrage anyone as they are ordered, not one of those people who sign sentences of death, imprisonment, or galley-slavery for life would make up his mind to hang, imprison, or torture a thousandth part of those whom, quietly sitting in his study, he now orders to be tortured in all kinds of ways, simply because he does not see it nor do it himself, but only gets it done at a distance by these servile tools.

All the acts of injustice and cruelty which are committed in the ordinary course of daily life have only become habitual because there are these men always ready to carry out such acts of injustice and cruelty. If it were not for them, far from anyone using violence against the immense masses who are now ill-treated, those who now command their punishment would not venture to sentence them, would not even dare to dream of the sentences they decree with such easy confidence at present. And if it were not for these men, ready to kill or torture anyone at their commander’s will, no one would dare to claim, as all the idle landowners claim with such assurance, that a piece of land, surrounded by peasants, who are in wretchedness from want of land, is the property of a man who does not cultivate it, or that stores of corn taken by swindling from the peasants ought to remain untouched in the midst of a population dying of hunger because the merchants must make their profit. If it were not for these servile instruments at the disposal of the authorities, it could never have entered the head of the landowner to rob the peasants of the forest they had tended, nor of the officials to think they are entitled to their salaries, taken from the famishing people, the price of their oppression; least of all could anyone dream of killing or exiling men for exposing falsehood and telling the truth. All this can only be done because the authorities are confidently assured that they have always these servile tools at hand, ready to carry all their demands into effect by means of torture and murder.

All the deeds of violence of tyrants from Napoleon to the lowest commander of a company who fires upon a crowd, can only be explained by the intoxicating effect of their absolute power over these slaves. All force, therefore, rests on these men, who carry out the deeds of violence with their own hands, the men who serve in the police or the army, especially the army, for the police only venture to do their work because the army is at their back.

What, then, has brought these masses of honest men, on whom the whole thing depends, who gain nothing by it, and who have to do these atrocious deeds with their own hands, what has brought them to accept the amazing delusion that the existing order, unprofitable, ruinous, and fatal as it is for them, is the order which ought to exist?

Who has led them into this amazing delusion?

They can never have persuaded themselves that they ought to do what is against their conscience, and also the source of misery and ruin for themselves, and all their class, who make up nine-tenths of the population.

“How can you kill people, when it is written in God’s commandment: ‘Thou shalt not kill’?” I have often inquired of different soldiers. And I always drove them to embarrassment and confusion by reminding them of what they did not want to think about. They knew they were bound by the law of God, “Thou shalt not kill,” and knew too that they were bound by their duty as soldiers, but had never reflected on the contradiction between these duties. The drift of the timid answers I received to this question was always approximately this: that killing in war and executing criminals by command of the government are not included in the general prohibition of murder. But when I said this distinction was not made in the law of God, and reminded them of the Christian duty of fraternity, forgiveness of injuries, and love, which could not be reconciled with murder, the peasants usually agreed, but in their turn began to ask me questions. “How does it happen,” they inquired, “that the government [which according to their ideas cannot do wrong] sends the army to war and orders criminals to be executed.” When I answered that the government does wrong in giving such orders, the peasants fell into still greater confusion, and either broke off the conversation or else got angry with me.

“They must have found a law for it. The archbishops know as much about it as we do, I should hope,” a Russian soldier once observed to me. And in saying this the soldier obviously set his mind at rest, in the full conviction that his spiritual guides had found a law which authorized his ancestors, and the tzars and their descendants, and millions of men, to serve as he was doing himself, and that the question I had put him was a kind of hoax or conundrum on my part.

Everyone in our Christian society knows, either by tradition or by revelation or by the voice of conscience, that murder is one of the most fearful crimes a man can commit, as the Gospel tells us, and that the sin of murder cannot be limited to certain persons, that is, murder cannot be a sin for some and not a sin for others. Everyone knows that if murder is a sin, it is always a sin, whoever are the victims murdered, just like the sin of adultery, theft, or any other. At the same time from their childhood up men see that murder is not only permitted, but even sanctioned by the blessing of those whom they are accustomed to regard as their divinely appointed spiritual guides, and see their secular leaders with calm assurance organizing murder, proud to wear murderous arms, and demanding of others in the name of the laws of the country, and even of God, that they should take part in murder. Men see that there is some inconsistency here, but not being able to analyze it, involuntarily assume that this apparent inconsistency is only the result of their ignorance. The very grossness and obviousness of the inconsistency confirms them in this conviction.

They cannot imagine that the leaders of civilization, the educated classes, could so confidently preach two such opposed principles as the law of Christ and murder. A simple uncorrupted youth cannot imagine that those who stand so high in his opinion, whom he regards as holy or learned men, could for any object whatever mislead him so shamefully. But this is just what has always been and always is done to him. It is done (1) by instilling, by example and direct instruction, from childhood up, into the working people, who have not time to study moral and religious questions for themselves, the idea that torture and murder are compatible with Christianity, and that for certain objects of state, torture and murder are not only admissible, but ought to be employed; and (2) by instilling into certain of the people, who have either voluntarily enlisted or been taken by compulsion into the army, the idea that the perpetration of murder and torture with their own hands is a sacred duty, and even a glorious exploit, worthy of praise and reward.

The general delusion is diffused among all people by means of the catechisms or books, which nowadays replace them, in use for the compulsory education of children. In them it is stated that violence, that is, imprisonment and execution, as well as murder in civil or foreign war in the defense and maintenance of the existing state organization (whatever that may be, absolute or limited monarchy, convention, consulate, empire of this or that Napoleon or Boulanger, constitutional monarchy, commune or republic) is absolutely lawful and not opposed to morality and Christianity.

This is stated in all catechisms or books used in schools. And men are so thoroughly persuaded of it that they grow up, live and die in that conviction without once entertaining a doubt about it.

This is one form of deception, the general deception instilled into everyone, but there is another special deception practiced upon the soldiers or police who are picked out by one means or another to do the torturing and murdering necessary to defend and maintain the existing RÉGIME.

In all military instructions there appears in one form or another what is expressed in the Russian military code in the following words:

ARTICLE 87. To carry out exactly and without comment the orders of a superior officer means: to carry out an order received from a superior officer exactly without considering whether it is good or not, and whether it is possible to carry it out. The superior officer is responsible for the consequences of the order he gives.

ARTICLE 88. The subordinate ought never to refuse to carry out the orders of a superior officer except when he sees clearly that in carrying out his superior officer’s command, he breaks [the law of God, one involuntarily expects; not at all] HIS OATH OF FIDELITY AND ALLEGIANCE TO THE TZAR.

It is here said that the man who is a soldier can and ought to carry out all the orders of his superior without exception. And as these orders for the most part involve murder, it follows that he ought to break all the laws of God and man. The one law he may not break is that of fidelity and allegiance to the man who happens at a given moment to be in power.

Precisely the same thing is said in other words in all codes of military instruction. And it could not be otherwise, since the whole power of the army and the state is based in reality on this delusive emancipation of men from their duty to God and their conscience, and the substitution of duty to their superior officer for all other duties.

This, then, is the foundation of the belief of the lower classes that the existing RÉGIME so fatal for them is the RÉGIME which ought to exist, and which they ought therefore to support even by torture and murder.

This belief is founded on a conscious deception practiced on them by the higher classes.

And it cannot be otherwise. To compel the lower classes, which are more numerous, to oppress and ill treat themselves, even at the cost of actions opposed to their conscience, it was necessary to deceive them. And it has been done accordingly.

Not many days ago I saw once more this shameless deception being openly practiced, and once more I marveled that it could be practiced so easily and impudently.

At the beginning of November, as I was passing through Toula, I saw once again at the gates of the Zemsky Courthouse the crowd of peasants I had so often seen before, and heard the drunken shouts of the men mingled with the pitiful lamentations of their wives and mothers. It was the recruiting session.

I can never pass by the spectacle. It attracts me by a kind of fascination of repulsion. I again went into the crowd, took my stand among the peasants, looked about and asked questions. And once again I was amazed that this hideous crime can be perpetrated so easily in broad daylight and in the midst of a large town.

As the custom is every year, in all the villages and hamlets of the one hundred millions of Russians, on the 1st of November, the village elders had assembled the young men inscribed on the lists, often their own sons among them, and had brought them to the town.

On the road the recruits have been drinking without intermission, unchecked by the elders, who feel that going on such an insane errand, abandoning their wives and mothers and renouncing all they hold sacred in order to become a senseless instrument of destruction, would be too agonizing if they were not stupefied with spirits.

And so they have come, drinking, swearing, singing, fighting and scuffling with one another. They have spent the night in taverns. In the morning they have slept off their drunkenness and have gathered together at the Zemsky Court-house.

Some of them, in new sheepskin pelisses, with knitted scarves round their necks, their eyes swollen from drinking, are shouting wildly to one another to show their courage; others, crowded near the door, are quietly and mournfully waiting their turn, between their weeping wives and mothers (I had chanced upon the day of the actual enrolling, that is, the examination of those whose names are on the list); others meantime were crowding into the hall of the recruiting office.

Inside the office the work was going on rapidly. The door is opened and the guard calls Piotr Sidorov. Piotr Sidorov starts, crosses himself, and goes into a little room with a glass door, where the conscripts undress. A comrade of Piotr Sidorov’s, who has just been passed for service, and come naked out of the revision office, is dressing hurriedly, his teeth chattering. Sidorov has already heard the news, and can see from his face too that he has been taken. He wants to ask him questions, but they hurry him and tell him to make haste and undress. He throws off his pelisse, slips his boots off his feet, takes off his waistcoat and draws his shirt over his head, and naked, trembling all over, and exhaling an odor of tobacco, spirits, and sweat, goes into the revision office, not knowing what to do with his brawny bare arms.

Directly facing him in the revision office hangs in a great gold frame a portrait of the Tzar in full uniform with decorations, and in the corner a little portrait of Christ in a shirt and a crown of thorns. In the middle of the room is a table covered with green cloth, on which there are papers lying and a three-cornered ornament surmounted by an eagle the zertzal. Round the table are sitting the revising officers, looking collected and indifferent. One is smoking a cigarette; another is looking through some papers. Directly Sidorov comes in, a guard goes up to him, places him under the measuring frame, raising him under his chin, and straightening his legs.

The man with the cigarette — he is the doctor — comes up, and without looking at the recruit’s face, but somewhere beyond it, feels his body over with an air of disgust, measures him, tests him, tells the guard to open his mouth, tells him to breathe, to speak. Someone notes something down. At last without having once looked him in the face the doctor says, “Right. Next one!” and with a weary air sits down again at the table. The soldiers again hustle and hurry the lad. He somehow gets into his trousers, wraps his feet in rags, puts on his boots, looks for his scarf and cap, and bundles his pelisse under his arm. Then they lead him into the main hall, shutting him off apart from the rest by a bench, behind which all the conscripts who have been passed for service are waiting. Another village lad like himself, but from a distant province, now a soldier armed with a gun with a sharp-pointed bayonet at the end, keeps watch over him, ready to run him through the body if he should think of trying to escape.

Meantime the crowd of fathers, mothers, and wives, hustled by the police, are pressing round the doors to hear whose lad has been taken, whose is let off. One of the rejected comes out and announces that Piotr is taken, and at once a shrill cry is heard from Piotr’s young wife, for whom this word “taken” means separation for four or five years, the life of a soldier’s wife as a servant, often a prostitute.

But here comes a man along the street with flowing hair and in a peculiar dress, who gets out of his droskhy and goes into the Zemsky Court-house. The police clear a way for him through the crowd. It is the “reverend father” come to administer the oath. And this “father,” who has been persuaded that he is specially and exclusively devoted to the service of Christ, and who, for the most part, does not himself see the deception in which he lives, goes into the hall where the conscripts are waiting. He throws round him a kind of curtain of brocade, pulls his long hair out over it, opens the very Gospel in which swearing is forbidden, takes the cross, the very cross on which Christ was crucified because he would not do what this false servant of his is telling men to do, and puts them on the lectern. And all these unhappy, defenseless, and deluded lads repeat after him the lie, which he utters with the assurance of familiarity.

He reads and they repeat after him:

“I promise and swear by Almighty God upon his holy Gospel,” etc., “to defend,” etc., and that is, to murder anyone I am told to, and to do everything I am told by men I know nothing of, and who care nothing for me except as an instrument for perpetrating the crimes by which they are kept in their position of power, and my brothers in their condition of misery. All the conscripts repeat these ferocious words without thinking. And then the so-called “father” goes away with a sense of having correctly and conscientiously done his duty. And all these poor deluded lads believe that these nonsensical and incomprehensible words which they have just uttered set them free for the whole time of their service from their duties as men, and lay upon them fresh and more binding duties as soldiers.

And this crime is perpetrated publicly and no one cries out to the deceiving and the deceived: “Think what you are doing; this is the basest, falsest lie, by which not bodies only, but souls too, are destroyed.”

No one does this. On the contrary, when all have been enrolled, and they are to be let out again, the military officer goes with a confident and majestic air into the hall where the drunken, cheated lads are shut up, and cries in a bold, military voice: “Your health, my lads! I congratulate you on ‘serving the Tzar!’” And they, poor fellows (someone has given them a hint beforehand), mutter awkwardly, their voices thick with drink, something to the effect that they are glad.

Meantime the crowd of fathers, mothers, and wives is standing at the doors waiting. The women keep their tearful eyes fixed on the doors. They open at last, and out come the conscripts, unsteady, but trying to put a good face on it. Here are Piotr and Vania and Makar trying not to look their dear ones in the face. Nothing is heard but the wailing of the wives and mothers. Some of the lads embrace them and weep with them, others make a show of courage, and others try to comfort them.

The wives and mothers, knowing that they will be left for three, four, or five years without their breadwinners, weep and rehearse their woes aloud. The fathers say little. They only utter a clucking sound with their tongues and sigh mournfully, knowing that they will see no more of the steady lads they have reared and trained to help them, that they will come back not the same quiet hard-working laborers, but for the most part conceited and demoralized, unfitted for their simple life.

And then all the crowd get into their sledges again and move away down the street to the taverns and pot-houses, and louder than ever sounds the medley of singing and sobbing, drunken shouts, and the wailing of the wives and mothers, the sounds of the accordeon and oaths. They all turn into the taverns, whose revenues go to the government, and the drinking bout begins, which stifles their sense of the wrong which is being done them.

For two or three weeks they go on living at home, and most of that time they are “jaunting,” that is, drinking.

On a fixed day they collect them, drive them together like a flock of sheep, and begin to train them in the military exercises and drill. Their teachers are fellows like themselves, only deceived and brutalized two or three years sooner. The means of instruction are: deception, stupefaction, blows, and vodka. And before a year has passed these good, intelligent, healthy-minded lads will be as brutal beings as their instructors.

“Come, now, suppose your father were arrested and tried to make his escape?” I asked a young soldier.

“I should run him through with my bayonet,” he answered with the foolish intonation peculiar to soldiers; “and if he made off, I ought to shoot him,” he added, obviously proud of knowing what he must do if his father were escaping.

And when a good-hearted lad has been brought to a state lower than that of a brute, he is just what is wanted by those who use him as an instrument of violence. He is ready; the man has been destroyed and a new instrument of violence has been created. And all this is done every year, every autumn, everywhere, through all Russia in broad daylight in the midst of large towns, where all may see it, and the deception is so clever, so skillful, that though all men know the infamy of it in their hearts, and see all its horrible results, they cannot throw it off and be free.

When one’s eyes are opened to this awful deception practiced upon us, one marvels that the teachers of the Christian religion and of morals, the instructors of youth, or even the good-hearted and intelligent parents who are to be found in every society, can teach any kind of morality in a society in which it is openly admitted (it is so admitted, under all governments and all churches) that murder and torture form an indispensable element in the life of all, and that there must always be special men trained to kill their fellows, and that any one of us may have to become such a trained assassin.

How can children, youths, and people generally be taught any kind of morality — not to speak of teaching in the spirit of Christianity — side by side with the doctrine that murder is necessary for the public weal, and therefore legitimate, and that there are men, of whom each of us may have to be one, whose duty is to murder and torture and commit all sorts of crimes at the will of those who are in possession of authority. If this is so, and one can and ought to murder and torture, there is not, and cannot be, any kind of moral law, but only the law that might is right. And this is just how it is. In reality that is the doctrine — justified to some by the theory of the struggle for existence — which reigns in our society.

And, indeed, what sort of ethical doctrine could admit the legitimacy of murder for any object whatever? It is as impossible as a theory of mathematics admitting that two is equal to three.

There may be a semblance of mathematics admitting that two is equal to three, but there can be no real science of mathematics. And there can only be a semblance of ethics in which murder in the shape of war and the execution of criminals is allowed, but no true ethics. The recognition of the life of every man as sacred is the first and only basis of all ethics.

The doctrine of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth has been abrogated by Christianity, because it is the justification of immorality, and a mere semblance of equity, and has no real meaning. Life is a value which has no weight nor size, and cannot be compared to any other, and so there is no sense in destroying a life for a life. Besides, every social law aims at the amelioration of man’s life. What way, then, can the annihilation of the life of some men ameliorate men’s life? Annihilation of life cannot be a means of the amelioration of life; it is a suicidal act.

To destroy another life for the sake of justice is as though a man, to repair the misfortune of losing one arm, should cut off the other arm for the sake of equity.

But putting aside the sin of deluding men into regarding the most awful crime as a duty, putting aside the revolting sin of using the name and authority of Christ to sanction what he most condemned, not to speak of the curse on those who cause these “little ones” to offend — how can people who cherish their own way of life, their progress, even from the point of view of their personal security, allow the formation in their midst of an overwhelming force as senseless, cruel, and destructive as every government is organized on the basis of an army? Even the most cruel band of brigands is not so much to be dreaded as such a government.

The power of every brigand chief is at least so far limited that the men of his band preserve at least some human liberty, and can refuse to commit acts opposed to their conscience. But, owing to the perfection to which the discipline of the army has been brought, there is no limit to check men who form part of a regularly organized government. There are no crimes so revolting that they would not readily be committed by men who form part of a government or army, at the will of anyone (such as Boulanger, Napoleon, or Pougachef) who may chance to be at their head.

Often when one sees conscription levies, military drills and maneuvers, police officers with loaded revolvers, and sentinels at their posts with bayonets on their rifles; when one hears for whole days at a time (as I hear it in Hamovniky where I live) the whistle of balls and the dull thud as they fall in the sand; when one sees in the midst of a town where any effort at violence in self-defense is forbidden, where the sale of powder and of chemicals, where furious driving and practicing as a doctor without a diploma, and so on, are not allowed; thousands of disciplined troops, trained to murder, and subject to one man’s will; one asks oneself how can people who prize their security quietly allow it, and put up with it? Apart from the immorality and evil effects of it, nothing can possibly be more unsafe. What are people thinking about? I don’t mean now Christians, ministers of religion, philanthropists, and moralists, but simply people who value their life, their security, and their comfort. This organization, we know, will work just as well in one man’s hands as another’s. To-day, let us assume, power is in the hands of a ruler who can be endured, but to-morrow it may be seized by a Biron, an Elizabeth, a Catherine, a Pougachef, a Napoleon I., or a Napoleon III.

And the man in authority, endurable to-day, may become a brute to-morrow, or may be succeeded by a mad or imbecile heir, like the King of Bavaria or our Paul I.

And not only the highest authorities, but all little satraps scattered over everywhere, like so many General Baranovs, governors, police officers even, and commanders of companies, can perpetrate the most awful crimes before there is time for them to be removed from office. And this is what is constantly happening.

One involuntarily asks how can men let it go on, not from higher considerations only, but from regard to their own safety?

The answer to this question is that it is not all people who do tolerate it (some — the greater proportion — deluded and submissive, have no choice and have to tolerate anything). It is tolerated by those who only under such an organization can occupy a position of profit. They tolerate it, because for them the risks of suffering from a foolish or cruel man being at the head of the government or the army are always less than the disadvantages to which they would be exposed by the destruction of the organization itself.

A judge, a commander of police, a governor, or an officer will keep his position just the same under Boulanger or the republic, under Pougachef or Catherine. He will lose his profitable position for certain, if the existing order of things which secured it to him is destroyed. And so all these people feel no uneasiness as to who is at the head of the organization, they will adapt themselves to anyone; they only dread the downfall of the organization itself, and that is the reason — though often an unconscious one — that they support it.

One often wonders why independent people, who are not forced to do so in any way, the so-called ÉLITE of society, should go into the army in Russia, England, Germany, Austria, and even France, and seek opportunities of becoming murderers. Why do even high-principled parents send their boys to military schools? Why do mothers buy their children toy helmets, guns, and swords as playthings? (The peasant’s children never play at soldiers, by the way). Why do good men and even women, who have certainly no interest in war, go into raptures over the various exploits of Skobeloff and others, and vie with one another in glorifying them? Why do men, who are not obliged to do so, and get no fee for it, devote, like the marshals of nobility in Russia, whole months of toil to a business physically disagreeable and morally painful — the enrolling of conscripts? Why do all kings and emperors wear the military uniform? Why do they all hold military reviews, why do they organize maneuvers, distribute rewards to the military, and raise monuments to generals and successful commanders? Why do rich men of independent position consider it an honor to perform a valet’s duties in attendance on crowned personages, flattering them and cringing to them and pretending to believe in their peculiar superiority? Why do men who have ceased to believe in the superstitions of the mediaeval Church, and who could not possibly believe in them seriously and consistently, pretend to believe in and give their support to the demoralizing and blasphemous institution of the church? Why is it that not only governments but private persons of the higher classes, try so jealously to maintain the ignorance of the people? Why do they fall with such fury on any effort at breaking down religious superstitions or really enlightening the people? Why do historians, novelists, and poets, who have no hope of gaining anything by their flatteries, make heroes of kings, emperors, and conquerors of past times? Why do men, who call themselves learned, dedicate whole lifetimes to making theories to prove that violence employed by authority against the people is not violence at all, but a special right? One often wonders why a fashionable lady or an artist, who, one would think, would take no interest in political or military questions, should always condemn strikes of working people, and defend war; and should always be found without hesitation opposed to the one, favorable to the other.

But one no longer wonders when one realizes that in the higher classes there is an unerring instinct of what tends to maintain and of what tends to destroy the organization by virtue of which they enjoy their privileges. The fashionable lady had certainly not reasoned out that if there were no capitalists and no army to defend them, her husband would have no fortune, and she could not have her entertainments and her ball-dresses. And the artist certainly does not argue that he needs the capitalists and the troops to defend them, so that they may buy his pictures. But instinct, replacing reason in this instance, guides them unerringly. And it is precisely this instinct which leads all men, with few exceptions, to support all the religious, political, and economic institutions which are to their advantage.

But is it possible that the higher classes support the existing order of things simply because it is to their advantage? Cannot they see that this order of things is essentially irrational, that it is no longer consistent with the stage of moral development attained by people, and with public opinion, and that it is fraught with perils? The governing classes, or at least the good, honest, and intelligent people of them, cannot but suffer from these fundamental inconsistencies, and see the dangers with which they are threatened. And is it possible that all the millions of the lower classes can feel easy in conscience when they commit such obviously evil deeds as torture and murder from fear of punishment? Indeed, it could not be so, neither the former nor the latter could fail to see the irrationality of their conduct, if the complexity of government organization did not obscure the unnatural senselessness of their actions.

So many instigate, assist, or sanction the commission of every one of these actions that no one who has a hand in them feels himself morally responsible for it.

It is the custom among assassins to oblige all the witnesses of a murder to strike the murdered victim, that the responsibility may be divided among as large a number of people as possible. The same principle in different forms is applied under the government organization in the perpetration of the crimes, without which no government organization could exist. Rulers always try to implicate as many citizens as possible in all the crimes committed in their support.

Of late this tendency has been expressed in a very obvious manner by the obligation of all citizens to take part in legal processes as jurors, in the army as soldiers, in the local government, or legislative assembly, as electors or members.

Just as in a wicker basket all the ends are so hidden away that it is hard to find them, in the state organization the responsibility for the crimes committed is so hidden away that men will commit the most atrocious acts without seeing their responsibility for them.

In ancient times tyrants got credit for the crimes they committed, but in our day the most atrocious infamies, inconceivable under the Neros, are perpetrated and no one gets blamed for them.

One set of people have suggested, another set have proposed, a third have reported, a fourth have decided, a fifth have confirmed, a sixth have given the order, and a seventh set of men have carried it out. They hang, they flog to death women, old men, and innocent people, as was done recently among us in Russia at the Yuzovsky factory, and is always being done everywhere in Europe and America in the struggle with the anarchists and all other rebels against the existing order; they shoot and hang men by hundreds and thousands, or massacre millions in war, or break men’s hearts in solitary confinement, and ruin their souls in the corruption of a soldier’s life, and no one is responsible.

At the bottom of the social scale soldiers, armed with guns, pistols, and sabers, injure and murder people, and compel men through these means to enter the army, and are absolutely convinced that the responsibility for the actions rests solely on the officers who command them.

At the top of the scale — the Tzars, presidents, ministers, and parliaments decree these tortures and murders and military conscription, and are fully convinced that since they are either placed in authority by the grace of God or by the society they govern, which demands such decrees from them, they cannot be held responsible. Between these two extremes are the intermediary personages who superintend the murders and other acts of violence, and are fully convinced that the responsibility is taken off their shoulders partly by their superiors who have given the order, partly by the fact that such orders are expected from them by all who are at the bottom of the scale.

The authority who gives the orders and the authority who executes them at the two extreme ends of the state organization, meet together like the two ends of a ring; they support and rest on one another and inclose all that lies within the ring.

Without the conviction that there is a person or persons who will take the whole responsibility of his acts, not one soldier would ever lift a hand to commit a murder or other deed of violence.

Without the conviction that it is expected by the whole people not a single king, emperor, president, or parliament would order murders or acts of violence.

Without the conviction that there are persons of a higher grade who will take the responsibility, and people of a lower grade who require such acts for their welfare, not one of the intermediate class would superintend such deeds.

The state is so organized that wherever a man is placed in the social scale, his irresponsibility is the same. The higher his grade the more he is under the influence of demands from below, and the less he is controlled by orders from above, and VICE VERSA.

All men, then, bound together by state organization, throw the responsibility of their acts on one another, the peasant soldier on the nobleman or merchant who is his officer, and the officer on the nobleman who has been appointed governor, the governor on the nobleman or son of an official who is minister, the minister on the member of the royal family who occupies the post of Tzar, and the Tzar again on all these officials, noblemen, merchants, and peasants. But that is not all. Besides the fact that men get rid of the sense of responsibility for their actions in this way, they lose their moral sense of responsibility also, by the fact that in forming themselves into a state organization they persuade themselves and each other so continually, and so indefatigably, that they are not all equal, but “as the stars apart,” that they come to believe it genuinely themselves. Thus some are persuaded that they are not simple people like everyone else, but special people who are to be specially honored. It is instilled into another set of men by every possible means that they are inferior to others, and therefore must submit without a murmur to every order given them by their superiors.

On this inequality, above all, on the elevation of some and the degradation of others, rests the capacity men have of being blind to the insanity of the existing order of life, and all the cruelty and criminality of the deception practiced by one set of men on another.

Those in whom the idea has been instilled that they are invested with a special supernatural grandeur and consequence, are so intoxicated with a sense of their own imaginary dignity that they cease to feel their responsibility for what they do.

While those, on the other hand, in whom the idea is fostered that they are inferior animals, bound to obey their superiors in everything, fall, through this perpetual humiliation, into a strange condition of stupefied servility, and in this stupefied state do not see the significance of their actions and lose all consciousness of responsibility for what they do.

The intermediate class, who obey the orders of their superiors on the one hand and regard themselves as superior beings on the other, are intoxicated by power and stupefied by servility at the same time and so lose the sense of their responsibility.

One need only glance during a review at the commander-in-chief, intoxicated with self-importance, followed by his retinue, all on magnificent and gayly appareled horses, in splendid uniforms and wearing decorations, and see how they ride to the harmonious and solemn strains of music before the ranks of soldiers, all presenting arms and petrified with servility. One need only glance at this spectacle to understand that at such moments, when they are in a state of the most complete intoxication, commander-in-chief, soldiers, and intermediate officers alike, would be capable of committing crimes of which they would never dream under other conditions.

The intoxication produced by such stimulants as parades, reviews, religious solemnities, and coronations, is, however, an acute and temporary condition; but there are other forms of chronic, permanent intoxication, to which those are liable who have any kind of authority, from that of the Tzar to that of the lowest police officer at the street corner, and also those who are in subjection to authority and in a state of stupefied servility. The latter, like all slaves, always find a justification for their own servility, in ascribing the greatest possible dignity and importance to those they serve.

It is principally through this false idea of inequality, and the intoxication of power and of servility resulting from it, that men associated in a state organization are enabled to commit acts opposed to their conscience without the least scruple or remorse. Under the influence of this intoxication, men imagine themselves no longer simply men as they are, but some special beings — noblemen, merchants, governors, judges, officers, tzars, ministers, or soldiers — no longer bound by ordinary human duties, but by other duties far more weighty — the peculiar duties of a nobleman, merchant, governor, judge, officer, tzar, minister, or soldier.

Thus the landowner, who claimed the forest, acted as he did only because he fancied himself not a simple man, having the same rights to life as the peasants living beside him and everyone else, but a great landowner, a member of the nobility, and under the influence of the intoxication of power he felt his dignity offended by the peasants’ claims. It was only through this feeling that, without considering the consequences that might follow, he sent in a claim to be reinstated in his pretended rights.

In the same way the judges, who wrongfully adjudged the forest to the proprietor, did so simply because they fancied themselves not simply men like everyone else, and so bound to be guided in everything only by what they consider right, but, under the intoxicating influence of power, imagined themselves the representatives of the justice which cannot err; while under the intoxicating influence of servility they imagined themselves bound to carry out to the letter the instructions inscribed in a certain book, the so-called law. In the same way all who take part in such an affair, from the highest representative of authority who signs his assent to the report, from the superintendent presiding at the recruiting sessions, and the priest who deludes the recruits, to the lowest soldier who is ready now to fire on his own brothers, imagine, in the intoxication of power or of servility, that they are some conventional characters. They do not face the question that is presented to them, whether or not they ought to take part in what their conscience judges an evil act, but fancy themselves various conventional personages — one as the Tzar, God’s anointed, an exceptional being, called to watch over the happiness of one hundred millions of men; another as the representative of nobility; another as a priest, who has received special grace by his ordination; another as a soldier, bound by his military oath to carry out all he is commanded without reflection.

Only under the intoxication of the power or the servility of their imagined positions could all these people act as they do.

Were not they all firmly convinced that their respective vocations of tzar, minister, governor, judge, nobleman, landowner, superintendent, officer, and soldier are something real and important, not one of them would even think without horror and aversion of taking part in what they do now.

The conventional positions, established hundreds of years, recognized for centuries and by everyone, distinguished by special names and dresses, and, moreover, confirmed by every kind of solemnity, have so penetrated into men’s minds through their senses, that, forgetting the ordinary conditions of life common to all, they look at themselves and everyone only from this conventional point of view, and are guided in their estimation of their own actions and those of others by this conventional standard.

Thus we see a man of perfect sanity and ripe age, simply because he is decked out with some fringe, or embroidered keys on his coat tails, or a colored ribbon only fit for some gayly dressed girl, and is told that he is a general, a chamberlain, a knight of the order of St. Andrew, or some similar nonsense, suddenly become self-important, proud, and even happy, or, on the contrary, grow melancholy and unhappy to the point of falling ill, because he has failed to obtain the expected decoration or title. Or what is still more striking, a young man, perfectly sane in every other matter, independent and beyond the fear of want, simply because he has been appointed judicial prosecutor or district commander, separates a poor widow from her little children, and shuts her up in prison, leaving her children uncared for, all because the unhappy woman carried on a secret trade in spirits, and so deprived the revenue of twenty-five rubles, and he does not feel the least pang of remorse. Or what is still more amazing; a man, otherwise sensible and good-hearted, simply because he is given a badge or a uniform to wear, and told that he is a guard or customs officer, is ready to fire on people, and neither he nor those around him regard him as to blame for it, but, on the contrary, would regard him as to blame if he did not fire. To say nothing of judges and juries who condemn men to death, and soldiers who kill men by thousands without the slightest scruple merely because it has been instilled into them that they are not simply men, but jurors, judges, generals, and soldiers.

This strange and abnormal condition of men under state organization is usually expressed in the following words: “As a man, I pity him; but as guard, judge, general, governor, tzar, or soldier, it is my duty to kill or torture him.” Just as though there were some positions conferred and recognized, which would exonerate us from the obligations laid on each of us by the fact of our common humanity.

So, for example, in the case before us, men are going to murder and torture the famishing, and they admit that in the dispute between the peasants and the landowner the peasants are right (all those in command said as much to me). They know that the peasants are wretched, poor, and hungry, and the landowner is rich and inspires no sympathy. Yet they are all going to kill the peasants to secure three thousand rubles for the landowner, only because at that moment they fancy themselves not men but governor, official, general of police, officer, and soldier, respectively, and consider themselves bound to obey, not the eternal demands of the conscience of man, but the casual, temporary demands of their positions as officers or soldiers.

Strange as it may seem, the sole explanation of this astonishing phenomenon is that they are in the condition of the hypnotized, who, they say, feel and act like the creatures they are commanded by the hypnotizer to represent. When, for instance, it is suggested to the hypnotized subject that he is lame, he begins to walk lame, that he is blind, and he cannot see, that he is a wild beast, and he begins to bite. This is the state, not only of those who were going on this expedition, but of all men who fulfill their state and social duties in preference to and in detriment of their human duties.

The essence of this state is that under the influence of one suggestion they lose the power of criticising their actions, and therefore do, without thinking, everything consistent with the suggestion to which they are led by example, precept, or insinuation.

The difference between those hypnotized by scientific men and those under the influence of the state hypnotism, is that an imaginary position is suggested to the former suddenly by one person in a very brief space of time, and so the hypnotized state appears to us in a striking and surprising form, while the imaginary position suggested by state influence is induced slowly, little by little, imperceptibly from childhood, sometimes during years, or even generations, and not in one person alone but in a whole society.

“But,” it will be said,” at all times, in all societies, the majority of persons — all the children, all the women absorbed in the bearing and rearing of the young, all the great mass of the laboring population, who are under the necessity of incessant and fatiguing physical labor, all those of weak character by nature, all those who are abnormally enfeebled intellectually by the effects of nicotine, alcohol, opium, or other intoxicants — are always in a condition of incapacity for independent thought, and are either in subjection to those who are on a higher intellectual level, or else under the influence of family or social traditions, of what is called public opinion, and there is nothing unnatural or incongruous in their subjection.”

And truly there is nothing unnatural in it, and the tendency of men of small intellectual power to follow the lead of those on a higher level of intelligence is a constant law, and it is owing to it that men can live in societies and on the same principles at all. The minority consciously adopt certain rational principles through their correspondence with reason, while the majority act on the same principles unconsciously because it is required by public opinion.

Such subjection to public opinion on the part of the unintellectual does not assume an unnatural character till the public opinion is split into two.

But there are times when a higher truth, revealed at first to a few persons, gradually gains ground till it has taken hold of such a number of persons that the old public opinion, founded on a lower order of truths, begins to totter and the new is ready to take its place, but has not yet been firmly established. It is like the spring, this time of transition, when the old order of ideas has not quite broken up and the new has not quite gained a footing. Men begin to criticise their actions in the light of the new truth, but in the meantime in practice, through inertia and tradition, they continue to follow the principles which once represented the highest point of rational consciousness, but are now in flagrant contradiction with it.

Then men are in an abnormal, wavering condition, feeling the necessity of following the new ideal, and yet not bold enough to break with the old-established traditions.

Such is the attitude in regard to the truth of Christianity not only of the men in the Toula train, but of the majority of men of our times, alike of the higher and the lower orders.

Those of the ruling classes, having no longer any reasonable justification for the profitable positions they occupy, are forced, in order to keep them, to stifle their higher rational faculty of loving, and to persuade themselves that their positions are indispensable. And those of the lower classes, exhausted by toil and brutalized of set purpose, are kept in a permanent deception, practiced deliberately and continuously by the higher classes upon them.

Only in this way can one explain the amazing contradictions with which our life is full, and of which a striking example was presented to me by the expedition I met on the 9th of September; good, peaceful men, known to me personally, going with untroubled tranquillity to perpetrate the most beastly, senseless, and vile of crimes. Had not they some means of stifling their conscience, not one of them would be capable of committing a hundredth part of such a villainy.

It is not that they have not a conscience which forbids them from acting thus, just as, even three or four hundred years ago, when people burnt men at the stake and put them to the rack they had a conscience which prohibited it; the conscience is there, but it has been put to sleep — in those in command by what the psychologists call auto-suggestion; in the soldiers, by the direct conscious hypnotizing exerted by the higher classes.

Though asleep, the conscience is there, and in spite of the hypnotism it is already speaking in them, and it may awake.

All these men are in a position like that of a man under hypnotism, commanded to do something opposed to everything he regards as good and rational, such as to kill his mother or his child. The hypnotized subject feels himself bound to carry out the suggestion — he thinks he cannot stop — but the nearer he gets to the time and the place of the action, the more the benumbed conscience begins to stir, to resist, and to try to awake. And no one can say beforehand whether he will carry out the suggestion or not; which will gain the upper hand, the rational conscience or the irrational suggestion. It all depends on their relative strength.

That is just the case with the men in the Toula train and in general with everyone carrying out acts of state violence in our day.

There was a time when men who set out with the object of murder and violence, to make an example, did not return till they had carried out their object, and then, untroubled by doubts or scruples, having calmly flogged men to death, they returned home and caressed their children, laughed, amused themselves, and enjoyed the peaceful pleasures of family life. In those days it never struck the landowners and wealthy men who profited by these crimes, that the privileges they enjoyed had any direct connection with these atrocities. But now it is no longer so. Men know now, or are not far from knowing, what they are doing and for what object they do it. They can shut their eyes and force their conscience to be still, but so long as their eyes are opened and their conscience undulled, they must all — those who carry out and those who profit by these crimes alike — see the import of them. Sometimes they realize it only after the crime has been perpetrated, sometimes they realize it just before its perpetration. Thus those who commanded the recent acts of violence in Nijni-Novgorod, Saratov, Orel, and the Yuzovsky factory realized their significance only after their perpetration, and now those who commanded and those who carried out these crimes are ashamed before public opinion and their conscience. I have talked to soldiers who had taken part in these crimes, and they always studiously turned the conversation off the subject, and when they spoke of it it was with horror and bewilderment. There are cases, too, when men come to themselves just before the perpetration of the crime. Thus I know the case of a sergeant-major who had been beaten by two peasants during the repression of disorder and had made a complaint. The next day, after seeing the atrocities perpetrated on the other peasants, he entreated the commander of his company to tear up his complaint and let off the two peasants. I know cases when soldiers, commanded to fire, have refused to obey, and I know many cases of officers who have refused to command expeditions for torture and murder. So that men sometimes come to their senses long before perpetrating the suggested crime, sometimes at the very moment before perpetrating it, sometimes only afterward.

The men traveling in the Toula train were going with the object of killing and injuring their fellow-creatures, but none could tell whether they would carry out their object or not. However obscure his responsibility for the affair is to each, and however strong the idea instilled into all of them that they are not men, but governors, officials, officers, and soldiers, and as such beings can violate every human duty, the nearer they approach the place of the execution, the stronger their doubts as to its being right, and this doubt will reach its highest point when the very moment for carrying it out has come.

The governor, in spite of all the stupefying effect of his surroundings, cannot help hesitating when the moment comes to give final decisive command. He knows that the action of the Governor of Orel has called down upon him the disapproval of the best people, and he himself, influenced by the public opinion of the circles in which he moves, has more than once expressed his disapprobation of him. He knows that the prosecutor, who ought to have come, flatly refused to have anything to do with it, because he regarded it as disgraceful. He knows, too, that there may be changes any day in the government, and that what was a ground for advancement yesterday may be the cause of disgrace to-morrow. And he knows that there is a press, if not in Russia, at least abroad, which may report the affair and cover him with ignominy forever. He is already conscious of a change in public opinion which condemns what was formerly a duty. Moreover, he cannot feel fully assured that his soldiers will at the last moment obey him. He is wavering, and none can say beforehand what he will do.

All the officers and functionaries who accompany him experience in greater or less degree the same emotions. In the depths of their hearts they all know that what they are doing is shameful, that to take part in it is a discredit and blemish in the eyes of some people whose opinion they value. They know that after murdering and torturing the defenseless, each of them will be ashamed to face his betrothed or the woman he is courting. And besides, they too, like the governor, are doubtful whether the soldiers’ obedience to orders can be reckoned on. What a contrast with the confident air they all put on as they sauntered about the station and platform! Inwardly they were not only in a state of suffering but even of suspense. Indeed they only assumed this bold and composed manner to conceal the wavering within. And this feeling increased as they drew near the scene of action.

And imperceptible as it was, and strange as it seems to say so, all that mass of lads, the soldiers, who seemed so submissive, were in precisely the same condition.

These are not the soldiers of former days, who gave up the natural life of industry and devoted their whole existence to debauchery, plunder, and murder, like the Roman legionaries or the warriors of the Thirty Years’ War, or even the soldiers of more recent times who served for twenty-five years in the army. They have mostly been only lately taken from their families, and are full of the recollections of the good, rational, natural life they have left behind them.

All these lads, peasants for the most part, know what is the business they have come about; they know that the landowners always oppress their brothers the peasants, and that therefore it is most likely the same thing here. Moreover, a majority of them can now read, and the books they read are not all such as exalt a military life; there are some which point out its immorality. Among them are often free-thinking comrades — who have enlisted voluntarily — or young officers of liberal ideas, and already the first germ of doubt has been sown in regard to the unconditional legitimacy and glory of their occupation.

It is true that they have all passed through that terrible, skillful education, elaborated through centuries, which kills all initiative in a man, and that they are so trained to mechanical obedience that at the word of command: “Fire! — All the line! — Fire!” and so on, their guns will rise of themselves and the habitual movements will be performed. But “Fire!” now does not mean shooting into the sand for amusement, it means firing on their broken-down, exploited fathers and brothers whom they see there in the crowd, with women and children shouting and waving their arms. Here they are — one with his scanty beard and patched coat and plaited shoes of reed, just like the father left at home in Kazan or Riazan province; one with gray beard and bent back, leaning on a staff like the old grandfather; one, a young fellow in boots and a red shirt, just as he was himself a year ago — he, the soldier who must fire upon him. There, too, a woman in reed shoes and PANYOVA, just like the mother left at home.

Is it possible they must fire on them? And no one knows what each soldier will do at the last minute. The least word, the slightest allusion would be enough to stop them.

At the last moment they will all find themselves in the position of a hypnotized man to whom it has been suggested to chop a log, who coming up to what has been indicated to him as a log, with the ax already lifted to strike, sees that it is not a log but his sleeping brother. He may perform the act that has been suggested to him, and he may come to his senses at the moment of performing it. In the same way all these men may come to themselves in time or they may go on to the end.

If they do not come to themselves, the most fearful crime will be committed, as in Orel, and then the hypnotic suggestion under which they act will be strengthened in all other men. If they do come to themselves, not only this terrible crime will not be perpetrated, but many also who hear of the turn the affair has taken will be emancipated from the hypnotic influence in which they were held, or at least will be nearer being emancipated from it.

Even if a few only come to themselves, and boldly explain to the others all the wickedness of such a crime, the influence of these few may rouse the others to shake off the controlling suggestion, and the atrocity will not be perpetrated.

More than that, if a few men, even of those who are not taking part in the affair but are only present at the preparations for it, or have heard of such things being done in the past, do not remain indifferent but boldly and plainly express their detestation of such crimes to those who have to execute them, and point out to them all the senselessness, cruelty, and wickedness of such acts, that alone will be productive of good.

That was what took place in the instance before us. It was enough for a few men, some personally concerned in the affair and others simply outsiders, to express their disapproval of floggings that had taken place elsewhere, and their contempt and loathing for those who had taken part in inflicting them, for a few persons in the Toula case to express their repugnance to having any share in it; for a lady traveling by the train, and a few other bystanders at the station, to express to those who formed the expedition their disgust at what they were doing; for one of the commanders of a company, who was asked for troops for the restoration of order, to reply that soldiers ought not to be butchers — and thanks to these and a few other seemingly insignificant influences brought to bear on these hypnotized men, the affair took a completely different turn, and the troops, when they reached the place, did not inflict any punishment, but contented themselves with cutting down the forest and giving it to the landowner.

Had not a few persons had a clear consciousness that what they were doing was wrong, and consequently influenced one another in that direction, what was done at Orel would have taken place at Toula. Had this consciousness been still stronger, and had the influence exerted been therefore greater than it was, it might well have been that the governor with his troops would not even have ventured to cut down the forest and give it to the landowner.

Had that consciousness been stronger still, it might well have been that the governor would not have ventured to go to the scene of action at all; even that the minister would not have ventured to form this decision or the Tzar to ratify it.

All depends, therefore, on the strength of the consciousness of

Christian truth on the part of each individual man.

And, therefore, one would have thought that the efforts of all men of the present day who profess to wish to work for the welfare of humanity would have been directed to strengthening this consciousness of Christian truth in themselves and others.

But, strange to say, it is precisely those people who profess most anxiety for the amelioration of human life, and are regarded as the leaders of public opinion, who assert that there is no need to do that, and that there are other more effective means for the amelioration of men’s condition. They affirm that the amelioration of human life is effected not by the efforts of individual men, to recognize and propagate the truth, but by the gradual modification of the general conditions of life, and that therefore the efforts of individuals should be directed to the gradual modification of external conditions for the better. For every advocacy of a truth inconsistent with the existing order by an individual is, they maintain, not only useless but injurious, since in provokes coercive measures on the part of the authorities, restricting these individuals from continuing any action useful to society. According to this doctrine all modifications in human life are brought about by precisely the same laws as in the life of the animals.

So that, according to this doctrine, all the founders of religions, such as Moses and the prophets, Confucius, Lao-Tse, Buddha, Christ, and others, preached their doctrines and their followers accepted them, not because they loved the truth, but because the political, social, and above all economic conditions of the peoples among whom these religions arose were favorable for their origination and development.

And therefore the chief efforts of the man who wishes to serve society and improve the condition of humanity ought, according to this doctrine, to be directed not to the elucidation and propagation of truth, but to the improvement of the external political, social, and above all economic conditions. And the modification of these conditions is partly effected by serving the government and introducing liberal and progressive principles into it, partly in promoting the development of industry and the propagation of socialistic ideas, and most of all by the diffusion of science. According to this theory it is of no consequence whether you profess the truth revealed to you, and therefore realize it in your life, or at least refrain from committing actions opposed to the truth, such as serving the government and strengthening its authority when you regard it as injurious, profiting by the capitalistic system when you regard it as wrong, showing veneration for various ceremonies which you believe to be degrading superstitions, giving support to the law when you believe it to be founded on error, serving as a soldier, taking oaths, and lying, and lowering yourself generally. It is useless to refrain from all that; what is of use is not altering the existing forms of life, but submitting to them against your own convictions, introducing liberalism into the existing institutions, promoting commerce, the propaganda of socialism, and the triumphs of what is called science, and the diffusion of education. According to this theory one can remain a landowner, merchant, manufacturer, judge, official in government pay, officer or soldier, and still be not only a humane man, but even a socialist and revolutionist.

Hypocrisy, which had formerly only a religious basis in the doctrine of original sin, the redemption, and the Church, has in our day gained a new scientific basis and has consequently caught in its nets all those who had reached too high a stage of development to be able to find support in religious hypocrisy. So that while in former days a man who professed the religion of the Church could take part in all the crimes of the state, and profit by them, and still regard himself as free from any taint of sin, so long as he fulfilled the external observances of his creed, nowadays all who do not believe in the Christianity of the Church, find similar well-founded irrefutable reasons in science for regarding themselves as blameless and even highly moral in spite of their participation in the misdeeds of government and the advantages they gain from them.

A rich landowner — not only in Russia, but in France, England, Germany, or America — lives on the rents exacted; from the people living on his land, and robs these generally poverty-stricken people of all he can get from them. This man’s right of property in the land rests on the fact that at every effort on the part of the oppressed people, without his consent, to make use of the land he considers his, troops are called out to subject them to punishment and murder. One would have thought that it was obvious that a man living in this way was an evil, egoistic creature and could not possibly consider himself a Christian or a liberal. One would have supposed it evident that the first thing such a man must do, if he wishes to approximate to Christianity or liberalism, would be to cease to plunder and ruin men by means of acts of state violence in support of his claim to the land. And so it would be if it were not for the logic of hypocrisy, which reasons that from a religious point of view possession or non-possession of land is of no consequence for salvation, and from the scientific point of view, giving up the ownership of land is a useless individual renunciation, and that the welfare of mankind is not promoted in that way, but by a gradual modification of external forms. And so we see this man, without the least trouble of mind or doubt that people will believe in his sincerity, organizing an agricultural exhibition, or a temperance society, or sending some soup and stockings by his wife or children to three old women, and boldly in his family, in drawing rooms, in committees, and in the press, advocating the Gospel or humanitarian doctrine of love for one’s neighbor in general and the agricultural laboring population in particular whom he is continually exploiting and oppressing. And other people who are in the same position as he believe him, commend him, and solemnly discuss with him measures for ameliorating the condition of the working-class, on whose exploitation their whole life rests, devising all kinds of possible methods for this, except the one without which all improvement of their condition is impossible, i. e., refraining from taking from them the land necessary for their subsistence. (A striking example of this hypocrisy was the solicitude displayed by the Russian landowners last year, their efforts to combat the famine which they had caused, and by which they profited, selling not only bread at the highest price, but even potato haulm at five rubles the dessiatine (about 2 and four-fifths acres) for fuel to the freezing peasants.)

Or take a merchant whose whole trade — like all trade indeed — is founded on a series of trickery, by means of which, profiting by the ignorance or need of others, he buys goods below their value and sells them again above their value. One would have fancied it obvious that a man whose whole occupation was based on what in his own language is called swindling, if it is done under other conditions, ought to be ashamed of his position, and could not any way, while he continues a merchant, profess himself a Christian or a liberal.

But the sophistry of hypocrisy reasons that the merchant can pass for a virtuous man without giving up his pernicious course of action; a religious man need only have faith and a liberal man need only promote the modification of external conditions — the progress of industry. And so we see the merchant (who often goes further and commits acts of direct dishonesty, selling adulterated goods, using false weights and measures, and trading in products injurious to health, such as alcohol and opium) boldly regarding himself and being regarded by others, so long as he does not directly deceive his colleagues in business, as a pattern of probity and virtue. And if he spends a thousandth part of his stolen wealth on some public institution, a hospital or museum or school, then he is even regarded as the benefactor of the people on the exploitation and corruption of whom his whole prosperity has been founded: if he sacrifices, too, a portion of his ill-gotten gains on a Church and the poor, then he is an exemplary Christian.

A manufacturer is a man whose whole income consists of value squeezed out of the workmen, and whose whole occupation is based on forced, unnatural labor, exhausting whole generations of men. It would seem obvious that if this man professes any Christian or liberal principles, he must first of all give up ruining human lives for his own profit. But by the existing theory he is promoting industry, and he ought not to abandon his pursuit. It would even be injuring society for him to do so. And so we see this man, the harsh slave-driver of thousands of men, building almshouses with little gardens two yards square for the workmen broken down in toiling for him, and a bank, and a poorhouse, and a hospital — fully persuaded that he has amply expiated in this way for all the human lives morally and physically ruined by him — and calmly going on with his business, taking pride in it.

Any civil, religious, or military official in government employ, who serves the state from vanity, or, as is most often the case, simply for the sake of the pay wrung from the harassed and toilworn working classes (all taxes, however raised, always fall on labor), if he, as is very seldom the case, does not directly rob the government in the usual way, considers himself, and is considered by his fellows, as a most useful and virtuous member of society.

A judge or a public prosecutor knows that through his sentence or his prosecution hundreds or thousands of poor wretches are at once torn from their families and thrown into prison, where they may go out of their minds, kill themselves with pieces of broken glass, or starve themselves; he knows that they have wives and mothers and children, disgraced and made miserable by separation from them, vainly begging for pardon for them or some alleviation of their sentence, and this judge or this prosecutor is so hardened in his hypocrisy that he and his fellows and his wife and his household are all fully convinced that he may be a most exemplary man. According to the metaphysics of hypocrisy it is held that he is doing a work of public utility. And this man who has ruined hundreds, thousands of men, who curse him and are driven to desperation by his action, goes to mass, a smile of shining benevolence on his smooth face, in perfect faith in good and in God, listens to the Gospel, caresses his children, preaches moral principles to them, and is moved by imaginary sufferings.

All these men and those who depend on them, their wives, tutors, children, cooks, actors, jockeys, and so on, are living on the blood which by one means or another, through one set of blood-suckers or another, is drawn out of the working class, and every day their pleasures cost hundreds or thousands of days of labor. They see the sufferings and privations of these laborers and their children, their aged, their wives, and their sick, they know the punishments inflicted on those who resist this organized plunder, and far from decreasing, far from concealing their luxury, they insolently display it before these oppressed laborers who hate them, as though intentionally provoking them with the pomp of their parks and palaces, their theaters, hunts, and races. At the same time they continue to persuade themselves and others that they are all much concerned about the welfare of these working classes, whom they have always trampled under their feet, and on Sundays, richly dressed, they drive in sumptuous carriages to the houses of God built in very mockery of Christianity, and there listen to men, trained to this work of deception, who in white neckties or in brocaded vestments, according to their denomination, preach the love for their neighbor which they all gainsay in their lives. And these people have so entered into their part that they seriously believe that they really are what they pretend to be.

The universal hypocrisy has so entered into the flesh and blood of all classes of our modern society, it has reached such a pitch that nothing in that way can rouse indignation. Hypocrisy in the Greek means “acting,” and acting — playing a part — is always possible. The representatives of Christ give their blessing to the ranks of murderers holding their guns loaded against their brothers; “for prayer” priests, ministers of various Christian sects are always present, as indispensably as the hangman, at executions, and sanction by their presence the compatibility of murder with Christianity (a clergyman assisted at the attempt at murder by electricity in America) — but such facts cause no one any surprise.

There was recently held at Petersburg an international exhibition of instruments of torture, handcuffs, models of solitary cells, that is to say instruments of torture worse than knouts or rods, and sensitive ladies and gentlemen went and amused themselves by looking at them.

No one is surprised that together with its recognition of liberty, equality, and fraternity, liberal science should prove the necessity of war, punishment, customs, the censure, the regulation of prostitution, the exclusion of cheap foreign laborers, the hindrance of emigration, the justifiableness of colonization, based on poisoning and destroying whole races of men called savages, and so on.

People talk of the time when all men shall profess what is called Christianity (that is, various professions of faith hostile to one another), when all shall be well-fed and clothed, when all shall be united from one end of the world to the other by telegraphs and telephones, and be able to communicate by balloons, when all the working classes are permeated by socialistic doctrines, when the Trades Unions possess so many millions of members and so many millions of rubles, when everyone is educated and all can read newspapers and learn all the sciences.

But what good or useful thing can come of all these improvements, if men do not speak and act in accordance with what they believe to be the truth?

The condition of men is the result of their disunion. Their disunion results from their not following the truth which is one, but falsehoods which are many. The sole means of uniting men is their union in the truth. And therefore the more sincerely men strive toward the truth, the nearer they get to unity.

But how can men be united in the truth or even approximate to it, if they do not even express the truth they know, but hold that there is no need to do so, and pretend to regard as truth what they believe to be false?

And therefore no improvement is possible so long as men are hypocritical and hide the truth from themselves, so long as they do not recognize that their union and therefore their welfare is only possible in the truth, and do not put the recognition and profession of the truth revealed to them higher than everything else.

All the material improvements that religious and scientific men can dream of may be accomplished; all men may accept Christianity, and all the reforms desired by the Bellamys may be brought about with every possible addition and improvement, but if the hypocrisy which rules nowadays still exists, if men do not profess the truth they know, but continue to feign belief in what they do not believe and veneration for what they do not respect, their condition will remain the same, or even grow worse and worse. The more men are freed from privation; the more telegraphs, telephones, books, papers, and journals there are; the more means there will be of diffusing inconsistent lies and hypocrisies, and the more disunited and consequently miserable will men become, which indeed is what we see actually taking place.

All these material reforms may be realized, but the position of humanity will not be improved. But only let each man, according to his powers, at once realize in his life the truth he knows, or at least cease to support the falsehoods he is supporting in the place of the truth, and at once, in this year 1893, we should see such reforms as we do not dare to hope for within a century — the emancipation of men and the reign of truth upon earth.

Not without good reason was Christ’s only harsh and threatening reproof directed against hypocrites and hypocrisy. It is not theft nor robbery nor murder nor fornication, but falsehood, the special falsehood of hypocrisy, which corrupts men, brutalizes them and makes them vindictive, destroys all distinction between right and wrong in their conscience, deprives them of what is the true meaning of all real human life, and debars them from all progress toward perfection.

Those who do evil through ignorance of the truth provoke sympathy with their victims and repugnance for their actions, they do harm only to those they attack; but those who know the truth and do evil masked by hypocrisy, injure themselves and their victims, and thousands of other men as well who are led astray by the falsehood with which the wrongdoing is disguised.

Thieves, robbers, murderers, and cheats, who commit crimes recognized by themselves and everyone else as evil, serve as an example of what ought not to be done, and deter others from similar crimes. But those who commit the same thefts, robberies, murders, and other crimes, disguising them under all kinds of religious or scientific or humanitarian justifications, as all landowners, merchants, manufacturers, and government officials do, provoke others to imitation, and so do harm not only to those who are directly the victims of their crimes, but to thousands and millions of men whom they corrupt by obliterating their sense of the distinction between right and wrong.

A single fortune gained by trading in goods necessary to the people or in goods pernicious in their effects, or by financial speculations, or by acquiring land at a low price the value of which is increased by the needs of the population, or by an industry ruinous to the health and life of those employed in it, or by military or civil service of the state, or by any employment which trades on men’s evil instincts — a single fortune acquired in any of these ways, not only with the sanction, but even with the approbation of the leading men in society, and masked with an ostentation of philanthropy, corrupts men incomparably more than millions of thefts and robberies committed against the recognized forms of law and punishable as crimes.

A single execution carried out by prosperous educated men uninfluenced by passion, with the approbation and assistance of Christian ministers, and represented as something necessary and even just, is infinitely more corrupting and brutalizing to men than thousands of murders committed by uneducated working people under the influence of passion. An execution such as was proposed by Joukovsky, which would produce even a sentiment of religious emotion in the spectators, would be one of the most perverting actions imaginable. (SEE vol. iv. of the works of Joukovsky.)

Every war, even the most humanely conducted, with all its ordinary consequences, the destruction of harvests, robberies, the license and debauchery, and the murder with the justifications of its necessity and justice, the exaltation and glorification of military exploits, the worship of the flag, the patriotic sentiments, the feigned solicitude for the wounded, and so on, does more in one year to pervert men’s minds than thousands of robberies, murders, and arsons perpetrated during hundreds of years by individual men under the influence of passion.

The luxurious expenditure of a single respectable and so-called honorable family, even within the conventional limits, consuming as it does the produce of as many days of labor as would suffice to provide for thousands living in privation near, does more to pervert men’s minds than thousands of the violent orgies of coarse tradespeople, officers, and workmen of drunken and debauched habits, who smash up glasses and crockery for amusement.

One solemn religious procession, one service, one sermon from the altar-steps or the pulpit, in which the preacher does not believe, produces incomparably more evil than thousands of swindling tricks, adulteration of food, and so on.

We talk of the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. But the hypocrisy of our society far surpasses the comparatively innocent hypocrisy of the Pharisees. They had at least an external religious law, the fulfillment of which hindered them from seeing their obligations to their neighbors. Moreover, these obligations were not nearly so clearly defined in their day. Nowadays we have no such religious law to exonerate us from our duties to our neighbors (I am not speaking now of the coarse and ignorant persons who still fancy their sins can be absolved by confession to a priest or by the absolution of the Pope). On the contrary, the law of the Gospel which we all profess in one form or another directly defines these duties. Besides, the duties which had then been only vaguely and mystically expressed by a few prophets have now been so clearly formulated, have become such truisms, that they are repeated even by schoolboys and journalists. And so it would seem that men of to-day cannot pretend that they do not know these duties.

A man of the modern world who profits by the order of things based on violence, and at the same time protests that he loves his neighbor and does not observe what he is doing in his daily life to his neighbor, is like a brigand who has spent his life in robbing men, and who, caught at last, knife in hand, in the very act of striking his shrieking victim, should declare that he had no idea that what he was doing was disagreeable to the man he had robbed and was prepared to murder. Just as this robber and murderer could not deny what was evident to everyone, so it would seem that a man living upon the privations of the oppressed classes cannot persuade himself and others that he desires the welfare of those he plunders, and that he does not know how the advantages he enjoys are obtained.

It is impossible to convince ourselves that we do not know that there are a hundred thousand men in prison in Russia alone to guarantee the security of our property and tranquillity, and that we do not know of the law tribunals in which we take part, and which, at our initiative, condemn those who have attacked our property or our security to prison, exile, or forced labor, whereby men no worse than those who condemn them are ruined and corrupted; or that we do not know that we only possess all that we do possess because it has been acquired and is defended for us by murder and violence.

We cannot pretend that we do not see the armed policeman who marches up and down beneath our windows to guarantee our security while we eat our luxurious dinner, or look at the new piece at the theater, or that we are unaware of the existence of the soldiers who will make their appearance with guns and cartridges directly our property is attacked.

We know very well that we are only allowed to go on eating our dinner, to finish seeing the new play, or to enjoy to the end the ball, the Christmas fete, the promenade, the races or, the hunt, thanks to the policeman’s revolver or the soldier’s rifle, which will shoot down the famished outcast who has been robbed of his share, and who looks round the corner with covetous eyes at our pleasures, ready to interrupt them instantly, were not the policeman and the soldier there prepared to run up at our first call for help.

And therefore just as a brigand caught in broad daylight in the act cannot persuade us that he did not lift his knife in order to rob his victim of his purse, and had no thought of killing him, we too, it would seem, cannot persuade ourselves or others that the soldiers and policemen around us are not to guard us, but only for defense against foreign foes, and to regulate traffic and fêtes and reviews; we cannot persuade ourselves and others that we do not know that men do not like dying of hunger, bereft of the right to gain their subsistence from the earth on which they live; that they do not like working underground, in the water, or in stifling heat, for ten to fourteen hours a day, at night in factories to manufacture objects for our pleasure. One would imagine it impossible to deny what is so obvious. Yet it is denied.

Still, there are, among the rich, especially among the young, and among women, persons whom I am glad to meet more and more frequently, who, when they are shown in what way and at what cost their pleasures are purchased, do not try to conceal the truth, but hiding their heads in their hands, cry: “Ah! don’t speak of that. If it is so, life is impossible.” But though there are such sincere people who even though they cannot renounce their fault, at least see it, the vast majority of the men of the modern world have so entered into the parts they play in their hypocrisy that they boldly deny what is staring everyone in the face.

“All that is unjust,” they say; “no one forces the people to work for the landowners and manufacturers. That is an affair of free contract. Great properties and fortunes are necessary, because they provide and organize work for the working classes. And labor in the factories and workshops is not at all the terrible thing you make it out to be. Even if there are some abuses in factories, the government and the public are taking steps to obviate them and to make the labor of the factory workers much easier, and even agreeable. The working classes are accustomed to physical labor, and are, so far, fit for nothing else. The poverty of the people is not the result of private property in land, nor of capitalistic oppression, but of other causes: it is the result of the ignorance, brutality, and intemperance of the people. And we men in authority who are striving against this impoverishment of the people by wise legislation, we capitalists who are combating it by the extension of useful inventions, we clergymen by religious instruction, and we liberals by the formation of trades unions, and the diffusion of education, are in this way increasing the prosperity of the people without changing our own positions. We do not want all to be as poor as the poor; we want all to be as rich as the rich. As for the assertion that men are ill treated and murdered to force them to work for the profit of the rich, that is a sophism. The army is only called out against the mob, when the people, in ignorance of their own interests, make disturbances and destroy the tranquillity necessary for the public welfare. In the same way, too, it is necessary to keep in restraint the malefactors for whom the prisons and gallows are established. We ourselves wish to suppress these forms of punishment and are working in that direction.”

Hypocrisy in our day is supported on two sides: by false religion and by false science. And it has reached such proportions that if we were not living in its midst, we could not believe that men could attain such a pitch of self-deception. Men of the present day have come into such an extraordinary condition, their hearts are so hardened, that seeing they see not, hearing they do not hear, and understand not.

Men have long been living in antagonism to their conscience. If it were not for hypocrisy they could not go on living such a life. This social organization in opposition to their conscience only continues to exist because it is disguised by hypocrisy.

And the greater the divergence between actual life and men’s conscience, the greater the extension of hypocrisy. But even hypocrisy has its limits. And it seems to me that we have reached those limits in the present day.

Every man of the present day with the Christian principles assimilated involuntarily in his conscience, finds himself in precisely the position of a man asleep who dreams that he is obliged to do something which even in his dream he knows he ought not to do. He knows this in the depths of his conscience, and all the same he seems unable to change his position; he cannot stop and cease doing what he ought not to do. And just as in a dream, his position becoming more and more painful, at last reaches such a pitch of intensity that he begins sometimes to doubt the reality of what is passing and makes a moral effort to shake off the nightmare which is oppressing him.

This is just the condition of the average man of our Christian society. He feels that all that he does himself and that is done around him is something absurd, hideous, impossible, and opposed to his conscience; he feels that his position is becoming more and more unendurable and reaching a crisis of intensity.

It is not possible that we modern men, with the Christian sense of human dignity and equality permeating us soul and body, with our need for peaceful association and unity between nations, should really go on living in such a way that every joy, every gratification we have is bought by the sufferings, by the lives of our brother men, and moreover, that we should be every instant within a hair’s-breadth of falling on one another, nation against nation, like wild beasts, mercilessly destroying men’s lives and labor, only because some benighted diplomatist or ruler says or writes some stupidity to another equally benighted diplomatist or ruler.

It is impossible. Yet every man of our day sees that this is so and awaits the calamity. And the situation becomes more and more insupportable.

And as the man who is dreaming does not believe that what appears to him can be truly the reality and tries to wake up to the actual real world again, so the average man of modern days cannot in the bottom of his heart believe that the awful position in which he is placed and which is growing worse and worse can be the reality, and tries to wake up to a true, real life, as it exists in his conscience.

And just as the dreamer need only make a moral effort and ask himself, “Isn’t it a dream?” and the situation which seemed to him so hopeless will instantly disappear, and he will wake up to peaceful and happy reality, so the man of the modern world need only make a moral effort to doubt the reality presented to him by his own hypocrisy and the general hypocrisy around him, and to ask himself, “Isn’t it all a delusion?” and he will at once, like the dreamer awakened, feel himself transported from an imaginary and dreadful world to the true, calm, and happy reality.

And to do this a man need accomplish no great feats or exploits.

He need only make a moral effort.

But can a man make this effort?

According to the existing theory so essential to support hypocrisy, man is not free and cannot change his life.

“Man cannot change his life, because he is not free. He is not free, because all his actions are conditioned by previously existing causes. And whatever the man may do there are always some causes or other through which he does these or those acts, and therefore man cannot be free and change his life,” say the champions of the metaphysics of hypocrisy. And they would be perfectly right if man were a creature without conscience and incapable of moving toward the truth; that is to say, if after recognizing a new truth, man always remained at the same stage of moral development. But man is a creature with a conscience and capable of attaining a higher and higher degree of truth. And therefore even if man is not free as regards performing these or those acts because there exists a previous cause for every act, the very causes of his acts, consisting as they do for the man of conscience of the recognition of this or that truth, are within his own control.

So that though man may not be free as regards the performance of his actions, he is free as regards the foundation on which they are performed. Just as the mechanician who is not free to modify the movement of his locomotive when it is in motion, is free to regulate the machine beforehand so as to determine what the movement is to be.

Whatever the conscious man does, he acts just as he does, and not otherwise, only because he recognizes that to act as he is acting is in accord with the truth, or because he has recognized it at some previous time, and is now only through inertia, through habit, acting in accordance with his previous recognition of truth.

In any case, the cause of his action is not to be found in any given previous fact, but in the consciousness of a given relation to truth, and the consequent recognition of this or that fact as a sufficient basis for action.

Whether a man eats or does not eat, works or rests, runs risks or avoids them, if he has a conscience he acts thus only because he considers it right and rational, because he considers that to act thus is in harmony with truth, or else because he has made this reflection in the past.

The recognition or non-recognition of a certain truth depends not on external causes, but on certain other causes within the man himself. So that at times under external conditions apparently very favorable for the recognition of truth, one man will not recognize it, and another, on the contrary, under the most unfavorable conditions will, without apparent cause, recognize it. As it is said in the Gospel, “No man can come unto me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him.” That is to say, the recognition of truth, which is the cause of all the manifestations of human life, does not depend on external phenomena, but on certain inner spiritual characteristics of the man which escape our observation.

And therefore man, though not free in his acts, always feels himself free in what is the motive of his acts — the recognition or non-recognition of truth. And he feels himself independent not only of facts external to his own personality, but even of his own actions.

Thus a man who under the influence of passion has committed an act contrary to the truth he recognizes, remains none the less free to recognize it or not to recognize it; that is, he can by refusing to recognize the truth regard his action as necessary and justifiable, or he may recognize the truth and regard his act as wrong and censure himself for it.

Thus a gambler or a drunkard who does not resist temptation and yields to his passion is still free to recognize gambling and drunkenness as wrong or to regard them as a harmless pastime. In the first case even if he does not at once get over his passion, he gets the more free from it the more sincerely he recognizes the truth about it; in the second case he will be strengthened in his vice and will deprive himself of every possibility of shaking it off.

In the same way a man who has made his escape alone from a house on fire, not having had the courage to save his friend, remains free, recognizing the truth that a man ought to save the life of another even at the risk of his own, to regard his action as bad and to censure himself for it, or, not recognizing this truth, to regard his action as natural and necessary and to justify it to himself. In the first case, if he recognizes the truth in spite of his departure from it, he prepares for himself in the future a whole series of acts of self-sacrifice necessarily flowing from this recognition of the truth; in the second case, a whole series of egoistic acts.

Not that a man is always free to recognize or to refuse to recognize every truth. There are truths which he has recognized long before or which have been handed down to him by education and tradition and accepted by him on faith, and to follow these truths has become a habit, a second nature with him; and there are truths, only vaguely, as it were distantly, apprehended by him. The man is not free to refuse to recognize the first, nor to recognize the second class of truths. But there are truths of a third kind, which have not yet become an unconscious motive of action, but yet have been revealed so clearly to him that he cannot pass them by, and is inevitably obliged to do one thing or the other, to recognize or not to recognize them. And it is in regard to these truths that the man’s freedom manifests itself.

Every man during his life finds himself in regard to truth in the position of a man walking in the darkness with light thrown before him by the lantern he carries. He does not see what is not yet lighted up by the lantern; he does not see what he has passed which is hidden in the darkness; but at every stage of his journey he sees what is lighted up by the lantern, and he can always choose one side or the other of the road.

There are always unseen truths not yet revealed to the man’s intellectual vision, and there are other truths outlived, forgotten, and assimilated by him, and there are also certain truths that rise up before the light of his reason and require his recognition. And it is in the recognition or non-recognition of these truths that what we call his freedom is manifested.

All the difficulty and seeming insolubility of the question of the freedom of man results from those who tried to solve the question imagining man as stationary in his relation to the truth.

Man is certainly not free if we imagine him stationary, and if we forget that the life of a man and of humanity is nothing but a continual movement from darkness into light, from a lower stage of truth to a higher, from a truth more alloyed with errors to a truth more purified from them.

Man would not be free if he knew no truth at all, and in the same way he would not be free and would not even have any idea of freedom if the whole truth which was to guide him in life had been revealed once for all to him in all its purity without any admixture of error.

But man is not stationary in regard to truth, but every individual man as he passes through life, and humanity as a whole in the same way, is continually learning to know a greater and greater degree of truth, and growing more and more free from error.

And therefore men are in a threefold relation to truth. Some truths have been so assimilated by them that they have become the unconscious basis of action, others are only just on the point of being revealed to him, and a third class, though not yet assimilated by him, have been revealed to him with sufficient clearness to force him to decide either to recognize them or to refuse to recognize them.

These, then, are the truths which man is free to recognize or to refuse to recognize.

The liberty of man does not consist in the power of acting independently of the progress of life and the influences arising from it, but in the capacity for recognizing and acknowledging the truth revealed to him, and becoming the free and joyful participator in the eternal and infinite work of God, the life of the world; or on the other hand for refusing to recognize the truth, and so being a miserable and reluctant slave dragged whither he has no desire to go.

Truth not only points out the way along which human life ought to move, but reveals also the only way along which it can move. And therefore all men must willingly or unwillingly move along the way of truth, some spontaneously accomplishing the task set them in life, others submitting involuntarily to the law of life. Man’s freedom lies in the power of this choice.

This freedom within these narrow limits seems so insignificant to men that they do not notice it. Some — the determinists — consider this amount of freedom so trifling that they do not recognize it at all. Others — the champions of complete free will — keep their eyes fixed on their hypothetical free will and neglect this which seemed to them such a trivial degree of freedom.

This freedom, confined between the limits of complete ignorance of the truth and a recognition of a part of the truth, seems hardly freedom at all, especially since, whether a man is willing or unwilling to recognize the truth revealed to him, he will be inevitably forced to carry it out in life.

A horse harnessed with others to a cart is not free to refrain from moving the cart. If he does not move forward the cart will knock him down and go on dragging him with it, whether he will or not. But the horse is free to drag the cart himself or to be dragged with it. And so it is with man.

Whether this is a great or small degree of freedom in comparison with the fantastic liberty we should like to have, it is the only freedom that really exists, and in it consists the only happiness attainable by man.

And more than that, this freedom is the sole means of accomplishing the divine work of the life of the world.

According to Christ’s doctrine, the man who sees the significance of life in the domain in which it is not free, in the domain of effects, that is, of acts, has not the true life. According to the Christian doctrine, that man is living in the truth who has transported his life to the domain in which it is free — the domain of causes, that is, the knowledge and recognition, the profession and realization in life of revealed truth.

Devoting his life to works of the flesh, a man busies himself with actions depending on temporary causes outside himself. He himself does nothing really, he merely seems to be doing something. In reality all the acts which seem to be his are the work of a higher power, and he is not the creator of his own life, but the slave of it. Devoting his life to the recognition and fulfillment of the truth revealed to him, he identifies himself with the source of universal life and accomplishes acts not personal, and dependent on conditions of space and time, but acts unconditioned by previous causes, acts which constitute the causes of everything else, and have an infinite, unlimited significance.

“The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.” (Matt. xi. 12.)

It is this violent effort to rise above external conditions to the recognition and realization of truth by which the kingdom of heaven is taken, and it is this effort of violence which must and can be made in our times.

Men need only understand this, they need only cease to trouble themselves about the general external conditions in which they are not free, and devote one-hundredth part of the energy they waste on those material things to that in which they are free, to the recognition and realization of the truth which is before them, and to the liberation of themselves and others from deception and hypocrisy, and, without effort or conflict, there would be an end at once of the false organization of life which makes men miserable, and threatens them with worse calamities in the future. And then the kingdom of God would be realized, or at least that first stage of it for which men are ready now by the degree of development of their conscience.

Just as a single shock may be sufficient, when a liquid is saturated with some salt, to precipitate it at once in crystals, a slight effort may be perhaps all that is needed now that the truth already revealed to men may gain a mastery over hundreds, thousands, millions of men, that a public opinion consistent with conscience may be established, and through this change of public opinion the whole order of life may be transformed. And it depends upon us to make this effort.

Let each of us only try to understand and accept the Christian truth which in the most varied forms surrounds us on all sides and forces itself upon us; let us only cease from lying and pretending that we do not see this truth or wish to realize it, at least in what it demands from us above all else; only let us accept and boldly profess the truth to which we are called, and we should find at once that hundreds, thousands, millions of men are in the same position as we, that they see the truth as we do, and dread as we do to stand alone in recognizing it, and like us are only waiting for others to recognize it also.

Only let men cease to be hypocrites, and they would at once see that this cruel social organization, which holds them in bondage, and is represented to them as something stable, necessary, and ordained of God, is already tottering and is only propped up by the falsehood of hypocrisy, with which we, and others like us, support it.

But if this is so, if it is true that it depends on us to break down the existing organization of life, have we the right to destroy it, without knowing clearly what we shall set up in its place? What will become of human society when the existing order of things is at an end?

“What shall we find the other side of the walls of the world we are abandoning?

“Fear will come upon us — a void, a vast emptiness, freedom — how are we to go forward not knowing whither, how face loss, not seeing hope of gain? . . . If Columbus had reasoned thus he would never have weighed anchor. It was madness to set off upon the ocean, not knowing the route, on the ocean on which no one had sailed, to sail toward a land whose existence was doubtful. By this madness he discovered a new world. Doubtless if the peoples of the world could simply transfer themselves from one furnished mansion to another and better one — it would make it much easier; but unluckily there is no one to get humanity’s new dwelling ready for it. The future is even worse than the ocean — there is nothing there — it will be what men and circumstances make it.

“If you are content with the old world, try to preserve it, it is very sick and cannot hold out much longer. But if you cannot bear to live in everlasting dissonance between your beliefs and your life, thinking one thing and doing another, get out of the mediaeval whited sepulchers, and face your fears. I know very well it is not easy.

“It is not a little thing to cut one’s self off from all to which a man has been accustomed from his birth, with which he has grown up to maturity. Men are ready for tremendous sacrifices, but not for those which life demands of them. Are they ready to sacrifice modern civilization, their manner of life, their religion, the received conventional morality?

“Are we ready to give up all the results we have attained with such effort, results of which we have been boasting for three centuries; to give up every convenience and charm of our existence, to prefer savage youth to the senile decay of civilization, to pull down the palace raised for us by our ancestors only for the pleasure of having a hand in the founding of a new house, which will doubtless be built long after we are gone?” (Herzen, vol. v. p. 55.)

Thus wrote almost half a century ago the Russian writer, who with prophetic insight saw clearly then, what even the most unreflecting man sees to-day, the impossibility, that is, of life continuing on its old basis, and the necessity of establishing new forms of life.

It is clear now from the very simplest, most commonplace point of view, that it is madness to remain under the roof of a building which cannot support its weight, and that we must leave it. And indeed it is difficult to imagine a position more wretched than that of the Christian world to-day, with its nations armed against one another, with its constantly increasing taxation to maintain its armies, with the hatred of the working class for the rich ever growing more intense, with the Damocles sword of war forever hanging over the heads of all, ready every instant to fall, certain to fall sooner or later.

Hardly could any revolution be more disastrous for the great mass of the population than the present order or rather disorder of our life, with its daily sacrifices to exhausting and unnatural toil, to poverty, drunkenness, and profligacy, with all the horrors of the war that is at hand, which will swallow up in one year more victims than all the revolutions of the century.

What will become of humanity if each of us performs the duty God demands of us through the conscience implanted within us? Will not harm come if, being wholly in the power of a master, I carry out, in the workshop erected and directed by him, the orders he gives me, strange though they may seem to me who do not know the Master’s final aims?

But it is not even this question “What will happen?” that agitates men when they hesitate to fulfill the Master’s will. They are troubled by the question how to live without those habitual conditions of life which we call civilization, culture, art, and science. We feel ourselves all the burdensomeness of life as it is; we see also that this organization of life must inevitably be our ruin, if it continues. At the same time we want the conditions of our life which arise out of this organization — our civilization, culture, art, and science — to remain intact. It is as though a man, living in an old house and suffering from cold and all sorts of inconvenience in it, knowing, too, that it is on the point of falling to pieces, should consent to its being rebuilt, but only on the condition that he should not be required to leave it: a condition which is equivalent to refusing to have it rebuilt at all.

“But what if I leave the house and give up every convenience for a time, and the new house is not built, or is built on a different plan so that I do not find in it the comforts to which I am accustomed?” But seeing that the materials and the builders are here, there is every likelihood that the new house will on the contrary be better built than the old one. And at the same time, there is not only the likelihood but the certainty that the old house will fall down and crush those who remain within it. Whether the old habitual conditions of life are supported, or whether they are abolished and altogether new and better conditions arise; in any case, there is no doubt we shall be forced to leave the old forms of life which have become impossible and fatal, and must go forward to meet the future.

“Civilization, art, science, culture, will disappear!”

Yes, but all these we know are only various manifestations of truth, and the change that is before us is only to be made for the sake of a closer attainment and realization of truth. How then can the manifestations of truth disappear through our realizing it? These manifestations will be different, higher, better, but they will not cease to be. Only what is false in them will be destroyed; all the truth there was in them will only be stronger and more flourishing.

Take thought, oh, men, and have faith in the Gospel, in whose teaching is your happiness. If you do not take thought, you will perish just as the men perished, slain by Pilate, or crushed by the tower of Siloam; as millions of men have perished, slayers and slain, executing and executed, torturers and tortured alike, and as the man foolishly perished, who filled his granaries full and made ready for a long life and died the very night that he planned to begin his life. Take thought and have faith in the Gospel, Christ said eighteen hundred years ago, and he says it with even greater force now that the calamities foretold by him have come to pass, and the senselessness of our life has reached the furthest point of suffering and madness.

Nowadays, after so many centuries of fruitless efforts to make our life secure by the pagan organization of life, it must be evident to everyone that all efforts in that direction only introduce fresh dangers into personal and social life, and do not render it more secure in any way.

Whatever names we dignify ourselves with, whatever uniforms we wear, whatever priests we anoint ourselves before, however many millions we possess, however many guards are stationed along our road, however many policemen guard our wealth, however many so-called criminals, revolutionists, and anarchists we punish, whatever exploits we have performed, whatever states we may have founded, fortresses and towers we may have erected — from Babel to the Eiffel Tower — there are two inevitable conditions of life, confronting all of us, which destroy its whole meaning; (1) death, which may at any moment pounce upon each of us; and (2) the transitoriness of all our works, which so soon pass away and leave no trace. Whatever we may do — found companies, build palaces and monuments, write songs and poems — it is all not for long time. Soon it passes away, leaving no trace. And therefore, however we may conceal it from ourselves, we cannot help seeing that the significance of our life cannot lie in our personal fleshly existence, the prey of incurable suffering and inevitable death, nor in any social institution or organization. Whoever you may be who are reading these lines, think of your position and of your duties — not of your position as landowner, merchant, judge, emperor, president, minister, priest, soldier, which has been temporarily allotted you by men, and not of the imaginary duties laid on you by those positions, but of your real positions in eternity as a creature who at the will of Someone has been called out of unconsciousness after an eternity of non-existence to which you may return at any moment at his will. Think of your duties — not your supposed duties as a landowner to your estate, as a merchant to your business, as emperor, minister, or official to the state, but of your real duties, the duties that follow from your real position as a being called into life and endowed with reason and love.

Are you doing what he demands of you who has sent you into the world, and to whom you will soon return? Are you doing what he wills? Are you doing his will, when as landowner or manufacturer you rob the poor of the fruits of their toil, basing your life on this plunder of the workers, or when, as judge or governor, you ill treat men, sentence them to execution, or when as soldiers you prepare for war, kill and plunder?

You will say that the world is so made that this is inevitable, and that you do not do this of your own free will, but because you are forced to do so. But can it be that you have such a strong aversion to men’s sufferings, ill treatment, and murder, that you have such an intense need of love and co-operation with your fellows that you see clearly that only by the recognition of the equality of all, and by mutual services, can the greatest possible happiness be realized; that your head and your heart, the faith you profess, and even science itself tell you the same thing, and yet that in spite of it all you can be forced by some confused and complicated reasoning to act in direct opposition to all this; that as landowner or capitalist you are bound to base your whole life on the oppression of the people; that as emperor or president you are to command armies, that is, to be the head and commander of murderers; or that as government official you are forced to take from the poor their last pence for rich men to profit and share them among themselves; or that as judge or juryman you could be forced to sentence erring men to ill treatment and death because the truth was not revealed to them, or above all, for that is the basis of all the evil, that you could be forced to become a soldier, and renouncing your free will and your human sentiments, could undertake to kill anyone at the command of other men?

It cannot be.

Even if you are told that all this is necessary for the maintenance of the existing order of things, and that this social order with its pauperism, famines, prisons, gallows, armies, and wars is necessary to society; that still greater disasters would ensue if this organization were destroyed; all that is said only by those who profit by this organization, while those who suffer from it — and they are ten times as numerous — think and say quite the contrary. And at the bottom of your heart you know yourself that it is not true, that the existing organization has outlived its time, and must inevitably be reconstructed on new principles, and that consequently there is no obligation upon you to sacrifice your sentiments of humanity to support it.

Above all, even if you allow that this organization is necessary, why do you believe it to be your duty to maintain it at the cost of your best feelings? Who has made you the nurse in charge of this sick and moribund organization? Not society nor the state nor anyone; no one has asked you to undertake this; you who fill your position of landowner, merchant, tzar, priest, or soldier know very well that you occupy that position by no means with the unselfish aim of maintaining the organization of life necessary to men’s happiness, but simply in your own interests, to satisfy your own covetousness or vanity or ambition or indolence or cowardice. If you did not desire that position, you would not be doing your utmost to retain it. Try the experiment of ceasing to commit the cruel, treacherous, and base actions that you are constantly committing in order to retain your position, and you will lose it at once. Try the simple experiment, as a government official, of giving up lying, and refusing to take a part in executions and acts of violence; as a priest, of giving up deception; as a soldier, of giving up murder; as landowner or manufacturer, of giving up defending your property by fraud and force; and you will at once lose the position which you pretend is forced upon you, and which seems burdensome to you.

A man cannot be placed against his will in a situation opposed to his conscience.

If you find yourself in such a position it is not because it is necessary to anyone whatever, but simply because you wish it. And therefore knowing that your position is repugnant to your heart and your head, and to your faith, and even to the science in which you believe, you cannot help reflecting upon the question whether in retaining it, and above all trying to justify it, you are doing what you ought to do.

You might risk making a mistake if you had time to see and retrieve your fault, and if you ran the risk for something of some value. But when you know beyond all doubt that you may disappear any minute, without the least possibility either for yourself or those you draw after you into your error, of retrieving the mistake, when you know that whatever you may do in the external organization of life it will all disappear as quickly and surely as you will yourself, and will leave no trace behind, it is clear that you have no reasonable ground for running the risk of such a fearful mistake.

It would be perfectly simple and clear if you did not by your hypocrisy disguise the truth which has so unmistakably been revealed to us.

Share all that you have with others, do not heap up riches, do not steal, do not cause suffering, do not kill, do not unto others what you would not they should do unto you, all that has been said not eighteen hundred, but five thousand years ago, and there could be no doubt of the truth of this law if it were not for hypocrisy. Except for hypocrisy men could not have failed, if not to put the law in practice, at least to recognize it, and admit that it is wrong not to put it in practice.

But you will say that there is the public good to be considered, and that on that account one must not and ought not to conform to these principles; for the public good one may commit acts of violence and murder. It is better for one man to die than that the whole people perish, you will say like Caiaphas, and you sign the sentence of death of one man, of a second, and a third; you load your gun against this man who is to perish for the public good, you imprison him, you take his possessions. You say that you commit these acts of cruelty because you are a part of the society and of the state; that it is your duty to serve them, and as landowner, judge, emperor, or soldier to conform to their laws. But besides belonging to the state and having duties created by that position, you belong also to eternity and to God, who also lays duties upon you. And just as your duties to your family and to society are subordinate to your superior duties to the state, in the same way the latter must necessarily be subordinated to the duties dictated to you by the eternal life and by God. And just as it would be senseless to pull up the telegraph posts for fuel for a family or society and thus to increase its welfare at the expense of public interests, in the same way it is senseless to do violence, to execute, and to murder to increase the welfare of the nation, because that is at the expense of the interests of humanity.

Your duties as a citizen cannot but be subordinated to the superior obligations of the eternal life of God, and cannot be in opposition to them. As Christ’s disciples said eighteen centuries ago: “Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye” (Acts iv. 19); and, “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts v. 29).

It is asserted that, in order that the unstable order of things, established in one corner of the world for a few men, may not be destroyed, you ought to commit acts of violence which destroy the eternal and immutable order established by God and by reason. Can that possibly be?

And therefore you cannot but reflect on your position as landowner, manufacturer, judge, emperor, president, minister, priest, and soldier, which is bound up with violence, deception, and murder, and recognize its unlawfulness.

I do not say that if you are a landowner you are bound to give up your lands immediately to the poor; if a capitalist or manufacturer, your money to your workpeople; or that if you are Tzar, minister, official, judge, or general, you are bound to renounce immediately the advantages of your position; or if a soldier, on whom all the system of violence is based, to refuse immediately to obey in spite of all the dangers of insubordination.

If you do so, you will be doing the best thing possible. But it may happen, and it is most likely, that you will not have the strength to do so. You have relations, a family, subordinates and superiors; you are under an influence so powerful that you cannot shake it off; but you can always recognize the truth and refuse to tell a lie about it. You need not declare that you are remaining a landowner, manufacturer, merchant, artist, or writer because it is useful to mankind; that you are governor, prosecutor, or tzar, not because it is agreeable to you, because you are used to it, but for the public good; that you continue to be a soldier, not from fear of punishment, but because you consider the army necessary to society. You can always avoid lying in this way to yourself and to others, and you ought to do so; because the one aim of your life ought to be to purify yourself from falsehood and to confess the truth. And you need only do that and your situation will change directly of itself.

There is one thing, and only one thing, in which it is granted to you to be free in life, all else being beyond your power: that is to recognize and profess the truth.

And yet simply from the fact that other men as misguided and as pitiful creatures as yourself have made you soldier, tzar, landowner, capitalist, priest, or general, you undertake to commit acts of violence obviously opposed to your reason and your heart, to base your existence on the misfortunes of others, and above all, instead of filling the one duty of your life, recognizing and professing the truth, you feign not to recognize it and disguise it from yourself and others.

And what are the conditions in which you are doing this? You who may die any instant, you sign sentences of death, you declare war, you take part in it, you judge, you punish, you plunder the working people, you live luxuriously in the midst of the poor, and teach weak men who have confidence in you that this must be so, that the duty of men is to do this, and yet it may happen at the moment when you are acting thus that a bacterium or a bull may attack you and you will fall and die, losing forever the chance of repairing the harm you have done to others, and above all to yourself, in uselessly wasting a life which has been given you only once in eternity, without having accomplished the only thing you ought to have done.

However commonplace and out of date it may seem to us, however confused we may be by hypocrisy and by the hypnotic suggestion which results from it, nothing can destroy the certainty of this simple and clearly defined truth. No external conditions can guarantee our life, which is attended with inevitable sufferings and infallibly terminated by death, and which consequently can have no significance except in the constant accomplishment of what is demanded by the Power which has placed us in life with a sole certain guide — the rational conscience.

That is why that Power cannot require of us what is irrational and impossible: the organization of our temporary external life, the life of society or of the state. That Power demands of us only what is reasonable, certain, and possible: to serve the kingdom of God, that is, to contribute to the establishment of the greatest possible union between all living beings — a union possible only in the truth; and to recognize and to profess the revealed truth, which is always in our power.

“But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.” (Matt. vi. 33.)

The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity by contributing to the establishment of the kingdom of God, which can only be done by the recognition and profession of the truth by every man.

“The kingdom of God cometh not with outward show; neither shall they say, Lo here! or, Lo there! for behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” (Luke xvii. 20, 21.)

END.

WHAT THEN MUST WE DO?

Translated by Aylmer Maude 1886

Chapter 1

I HAD spent my life in the country, and when in 1881 I came to live in Moscow the sight of town poverty surprised me. I knew country poverty, but town poverty was new and incomprehensible to me. In Moscow one cannot pass a street without meeting beggars, and beggars who are not like those in the country. They do not ‘carry a bag and beg in Christ’s name’, as country beggars say of themselves; they go without a bag and do not beg. When you meet or pass them they generally only try to catch your eye; and according to your look they either ask or do not ask. I know one such beggar from among the gentry. The old man walks slowly, stooping at each step. When he meets you he stoops on one leg and seems to be making you a bow. If you stop he takes off his cockaded cap, bows again, and begs; but if you do not stop he makes as though this were merely his way of walking, and goes on, bowing in the same way on the other leg. He is a typical educated Moscow beggar. At first I did not know why they do not ask plainly. Afterwards I learnt this but still did not understand their position.

Once, passing through the Afanasev side-street, I saw a policeman putting a ragged peasant who was swollen with dropsy, into an open cab. I asked: ‘What is this for?’ The policeman replied: ‘For begging.’ ‘Is that forbidden?’ ‘It seems it’s forbidden!’ replied the policeman.

The man with dropsy was taken away in the cab. I got into another cab and followed them. I wanted to find out whether it was really forbidden to ask alms and in what way it was repressed. I could not at all understand that it should be possible to forbid a man s asking another man for anything; and also I could not believe that asking alms was forbidden, for Moscow was full of beggars. I entered the police station to which the beggar was taken. There a man who had a sword and a pistol was sitting at a table. I asked: ‘What has that peasant been arrested for?’ The man with the sword and pistol looked at me sternly and said: ‘What business is it of yours?’ Feeling however that he ought to explain something to me, he added: ‘The authorities order such people to be arrested, so it has to be done.’ I went out. The policeman who had brought the beggar in was sitting o~ a windowsill in the entrance-hall looking dejectedly at a note-book. I asked him: ‘Is it true that beggars are forbidden to ask in Christ’s name for alms?’ The policeman roused himself, looked up at me, and then did not exactly frown but seemed to drowse off again, and sitting on the window-.sill said: ‘The authorities order it, so that means it’s necessary’; and he occupied himself again with his note-book. I went out into the porch to the cabman.

‘Well, what’s happened? Have they arrested him?’ asked the cabman. He, too, was evidently interested in this affair. .

‘They have,’ I replied. The cabman shook his head disapprovingly.

‘How is it that it is forbidden, in this Moscow of yours, to ask alms in Christ’s name?’ I inquired.

‘Who knows?’ said the cabman.

‘How is it?’ I said. ‘The destitute are Christ’s folk, yet they take this man to a police-station.’ ‘Nowadays that is the law. Begging is not allowed.’

After that I several times saw how the police took beggars to a police-station and afterwards to the Usupov workhouse. Once, on the Myasnitski street, I met a crowd of these beggars, some thirty of them. In front and behind went policemen. I asked: ‘What is it for?’ ‘For asking alms.’

It turned out that in Moscow, by law, all the beggars (of whom one meets several in every street, and rows of whom stand outside every church when service is on, and who regularly attend every funeral) are forbidden to beg.

But why some are caught and shut up and others not, I was never able to understand. Either there are among them some legal and some illegal beggars, or there are so many that they cannot all be caught, or else as quickly as some are captured others appear.

There are in Moscow beggars of all sorts.

There are some who live by it, and there are genuine beggars who have come to Moscow for some reason or other and are really destitute.

Among these latter there are many simple peasants, both men and women, wearing peasant clothes. I often meet them. Some of them have fallen ill here and have come out of hospital and can neither support themselves nor get away from Moscow. Some of them have also taken to drink (as no doubt had the man who was ill with dropsy); some are not ill but have lost their all in a fire, or are old, or-are women with children; while some are quite healthy and capable of working. These quite healthy peasants, asking alms, interested me particularly; for since I came to Moscow I had for the sake of exercise formed the habit of going to work at the Sparrow Hills with two peasants who sawed wood there. These two men were just like those I met in the streets. One was Peter, a soldier from Kaluga; the other was Semen, a peasant from Vladimir. They owned nothing but the clothes on their backs and their own hands. With those hands by working very hard they earned 40 to 45 kopeks (10d. to 11d.) a day, of which they both put something by: Peter, to buy a sheepskin coat, and Semen, for the journey back to his village. For this reason I was particularly interested in such people when I met them in the streets.

Why do these work and those beg?

On meeting such a peasant I generally asked how he came to be in such a state. I once met a healthy peasant whose beard was beginning to go grey. He begged. I asked who he was and where he was from. He said he had come from Kaluga to find work. At first he had found some work cutting up old timber for firewood. He and his mate cut up all the wood at one place. Then he looked for another job but found none. His mate left him, and now he had been knocking about for a fortnight having eaten all he possessed, and he had nothing with which to buy either a saw or an axe. I gave him money for a saw and told him where he could come and work. (I had arranged beforehand with Peter and Semen to take on another man and to find him a mate.)

‘Well then, be sure and come. There is plenty of work there,’ said I.

‘I’ll come of course I’ll come. Does one like to go begging?’ said he. ‘I can work.’

He swore he would come, and it seemed to me he was in earnest and meant to.

Next day I joined my acquaintances the peasants and asked if the man had turned up. He had not. And several others deceived me in the same way. I was also cheated by men who

said they only needed money to buy a railway ticket home, but whom I met on the street again a week later. Many such I recognized and they recognized me; but sometimes, having forgotten me, they told me the same story again. Some of them turned away on seeing me. So I learned that among this class too there are many cheats; but I was very sorry for these cheats; they were a half-clad, poor, thin, sickly folk: the kind of people who really freeze to death or hang themselves, as we learn from the papers.

Chapter 2

WHEN I spoke to Moscovites of this destitution in the city I was always told, ‘Oh, what you have seen is nothing! Go to Khitrov market and see the dosshouses there. That’s where you’ll see the real “Golden Company”!’

One jester told me it was no longer a ‘Company’, but had become a ‘Golden Regiment’-there are now so many of them. The jester was right; but he would have been still more so had he said that in Moscow these people are now neither a company nor a regiment but a whole army numbering, I suppose, about 50,000. Old inhabitants when telling me of town poverty always spoke of it with a kind of pleasure-as if proud of knowing about it. I remember also that when I was in London, people there spoke boastfully of London pauperism: ‘Just look what it is like here!’ .

I wanted to see this destitution about which I had been told, and several times I set out towards Khitrov market, but each time I felt uncomfortable and ashamed. ‘Why go to look at the sufferings of people I cannot help?’ said one voice within me: ‘If you live here and see all the allurements of town-life, go and see that also,’ said another voice; and so one frosty windy day in December 1881, I went to the heart of the town destitution-Khitrov market. It was a week-day, towards four o’clock. In Solyanka Street I already noticed more and more people wearing strange clothes not made for them, and yet stranger footgear; people with a peculiar, unhealthy complexion, and especially with an air, common to them all, of indifference to everything around them. A man went along. quite at his ease dressed in most strange, impossible clothes and evidently quite regardless of what he looked like to others. All these people were going in one direction. Without asking the way (which I did not know) I went with them, and came to Khitrov market. There were women of a similar type, in all sorts of capes, cloaks, jackets, boots and goloshes, equally at ease in spite of the hideousness of their garb; old and young they sat trading in goods of some sort, walking about, scolding and swearing. There were few people in the market. It was evidently over, and most of the people were ascending the hill, going through and past the market all in one direction. I followed them. The farther I went the more people of that sort there seemed to be, all going one way. Passing the market and going up the street I overtook two women: one old, the other young. Both wore tattered, drab clothes. They went along talking about some affair.

After each necessary word one or two unnecessary and most indecent words were uttered. Neither of them was drunk, they were preoccupied with something, and the men who met them and those who were behind and in front of them paid no attention to their way of speaking which seemed to me so strange. It was evident that here people always talked like that. To the left were private dosshouses, and some turned into them while others went farther. Ascending the hill we came to a large corner house. Most of those among

whom I had been walking stopped there. All along the pavement and on the snow in the street people of the same type stood and sat. To the right of the entrance door were the women, to the left the men. I passed both the women and the men (there were some hundreds of them), and stopped where the line ended. The house outside which they were waiting was the Lyapin Free Night-Lodging-House. The crowd were lodgers awaiting admission. At 5 p.m. the doors open and people are let in. Nearly all those I had overtaken were on their way here.

I stopped where the line of men ended. Those nearest began to look at me and drew me to them by their glances. The tatters covering their bodies were very various, but the expression in all the eyes directed towards me was just the same. They all seemed to ask: ‘Why have you, a man from a different world, stopped near us? Who are you? A self-satisfied rich man who wishes to enjoy our misery to relieve his dullness and to torture us or are you what does not and cannot exist-a man who pities us?’ This question was on every face. They joked, caught my eye, and turned away. I wanted to speak to some one of them, but could not make up my mind to do so for a long time. But while we were yet silent our glances already drew us together. Widely as life had divided us, after our glances had met twice or thrice, we felt that we were akin and we ceased to tear one another. Nearest to me stood a peasant with a swollen face and a red beard, in a torn coat and with worn-out galoshes on his bare feet. There were eight degrees Reaumur1 of frost. I met his glance three or four times, and felt so near to him that instead of being ashamed to speak to him I should have been ashamed not to say something. I asked where he came from. He answered readily and began talking, while others drew near. He was from Smolensk, and had come to seek work, hoping to be able to buy grain and pay his taxes. ‘There is no work to be got,’ said he. ‘The soldiers2 have taken all the work. So I am knocking about, and God knows I have not eaten for two days!’ He spoke timidly, with an attempt at a smile. A seller of hot drinks,3 an old soldier, was standing near and I called him. He poured out a glass. The peasant took it in his hands and, trying not to lose any of the heat, warmed them with it before drinking. While doing so he told me his adventures (the adventures, or the stories of them told by these men, were almost all alike). He had had a little work but it came to an end; and then his purse with his passport and what money he had had been stolen here in the Night-Lodging-House. Now he could not get away from Moscow. He said that during the day he warmed himself in the drink-shops and ate scraps of bread which were sometimes given to him; but sometimes they drove him out. He got his night’s lodging free in Lyapin House. He was now only waiting for a police-search, when he would be put in prison for having no passport, and sent by etapeA to his native place. ‘They say there will be a police search on Thursday,’ added he. (Prison and the etape were to him like the Promised Land.)

While he was telling me this two or three others among the crowd confirmed his words and said they were in the same plight. A lean youth, pale, long-nosed, with nothing over his shirt (which was torn at the shoulder) and with a peakless cap, pushed his way

1 Fourteen degrees above zero Fahrenheit.-A. M.

2 Soldiers were often hired out to work at cheap rates.-A. M.

3 sbiten, made with honey and spices.-A. M.

4 On foot, with others, under escort.-A. M.

sidelong to me through the crowd. He was shivering violently all the time, but tried to smile contemptuously at the peasant’s speech, thinking thereby to adapt himself to my tone, and he looked me in the face. I offered him, too, some sbiten. On taking the glass he also warmed his hands on it, but he had only begun to speak when he was shoved aside by a big, black, aquiline-nosed fellow in a print shirt and a waistcoat but no cap. The aquiline-nosed man asked for some sbiten. Then followed a tall, drunken old man with a pointed beard, in an overcoat tied round the waist with a cord, and wearing bast-shoes. Then came a little fellow with a swollen face and watery eyes, in a brown nankeen pea-jacket, with bare knees showing through the holes in his summer trousers and knocking together from cold. He shivered so that he could not hold the glass but spilled it over himself. The others began to abuse him, but he only smiled pitifully and shivered. Then came a crooked, deformed man in tatters, and with strips of linen tied round his bare feet; then something that looked like an officer, then something that looked like a cleric, then something strange and noseless: all, hungry, cold, importunate and submissive, crowded round me and pressed near the sbiten till it was all finished. One man asked for money and I gave him some. Another asked, and a third, and then the crowd besieged me. Disorder and a crush ensued. A porter from the next house shouted to them to get off the pavement in front of his house and they submissively obeyed his command. Organizers appeared among the crowd, who took me under their protection. They wished to extricate me from the crush; but the crowd that had at first stretched along the pavement had now become disorganized and gathered round me. They all looked at me and begged; and each face was more pitiful, more jaded, and more degraded than, the last. I gave away all I had with me, which was not much, only some twenty rubles (£2), and following the crowd I entered the Night-Lodging-House. It was an immense building consisting of four departments. On the top stories were the men’s lodgings and on the lower stories the women’s. First I entered the latter: a large room all filled with bunks like the berths in third-class Russian railway cars. They were arranged in two tiers, above and below. Women old and young strange, tattered, with no outdoor garments entered and took possession of their bunks: some below and some above. Some of the older ones crossed themselves and prayed for the founder of this refuge. Others laughed and swore. I went upstairs. There the men were taking their places. Among them I saw one of those to whom I had given money. On seeing him I suddenly felt dreadfully ashamed and hurried away. Arid feeling as if I had committed a crime, I left the house and went home. There, ascending the carpeted steps to the cloth-carpeted hall and taking off my fur coat, I sat down to a five-course dinner, served by two lackeys in dress clothes with white ties and white gloves.

Thirty years ago in Paris I once saw how, in the presence of thousands of spectators, they cut a man’s head off with a guillotine. I knew that the man was a dreadful criminal; I knew all the arguments that have been written in defence of that kind of action, and I knew it was done deliberately and intentionally, but at the moment the head and body separated and fell into the box I gasped, and realized not with my mind nor with my heart but with my whole being, that all the arguments in defence of capital punishment are wicked nonsense, and that however many people may combine to commit murder-the worst of all crimes-and whatever they may call themselves, murder remains murder, and that this crime had been committed before my eyes, and I by my presence and nonintervention had approved and shared in it. In the same way now, at the sight of the

hunger, cold, and degradation of thousands of people, I understood not with my mind or my heart but with my whole being; that the existence of tens of thousands of such people in Moscow-while I and thousands of others over-eat ourselves with beef-steaks and sturgeon and cover our horses and floors with cloth or carpets-no matter what all the learned men in the world may say about its necessity-is a crime, not committed once but constantly; and that I with my luxury not merely tolerate it but share in it. For me the difference between these two impressions was only-that there all I could have done would have been to cry out to the murderers, who stood around the guillotine arranging the murder, that they were doing wrong, and to have tried by all means to hinder it. Even: then I should have known in advance that my action would not prevent the murder. But here I could have given not sbiten alone and the trifling sum of money I had with me, but the overcoat I wore and all I had at home. But I had not done it, and I therefore felt and feel and shall not cease to feel that as long as I have any superfluous food and someone else has none, and I have two coats and someone else has none, I share in a constantly repeated crime.

Chapter 3

THAT same evening after returning from Lyapin House I told my impressions to a friend. He, a town dweller, began to explain with some satisfaction that it was the most natural thing in a city, and that it was merely my provincialism that caused me to see anything particular in it. Things had always been so and would and must always be so; it is an inevitable condition of civilization. In London it is still worse . . . so there is nothing bad in it and one ought not to be dissatisfied with it. I began to answer my friend; but I did it so warmly and irritably that my wife ran in from an adjoining room to ask what had happened. It seems that, without noticing it, I had cried out with tears in my voice and had waved my arms at my friend, exclaiming: ‘One cannot live so; one cannot; one cannot!’ They put me to shame for my unnecessary ardour, and told me that I cannot talk quietly about anything but become unpleasantly excited, and in particular they proved to me that the existence of such unfortunate people cannot justify my spoiling the lives of those about me.

I felt that this was quite just, and I was silenced; but in the depth of my heart I felt that I too was right, and I could not feel at ease.

Town life, which had seemed strange and foreign to me before, now became so repulsive that all the pleasures of the luxurious life I formerly enjoyed became a torment to me. And try as I would to find in my soul some justification for our way of living, I could not without irritation behold either my own or any other drawing room, or any clean, elegantly laid table, or a carriage with well-fed coachmen and horses, or the shops, theatres, and assemblies. I could not help seeing beside them the hungry, cold, downtrodden inhabitants of Lyapin House. I could not escape the thought that these two things were connected and the one resulted from the other. I remember that the consciousness of guilt which I experienced from the first moment remained with me, but another feeling was soon added to it, obscuring it.

When I spoke of my impressions of Lyapin House to intimate friends and acquaintances, they all replied as the first one (at whom I shouted) had done, but they also expressed

approval of my kind-heartedness and susceptibility and gave me to understand that the sight had acted so strongly on me merely because I Leo Tolstoy-am a very kind and good man. I willingly believed them. And before I had time to look round there came to me, instead of the feeling of shame and repentance I had first experienced, a feeling of satisfaction at my own beneficence, and a desire to exhibit it.

‘Really,’ said I to myself, ‘the fault probably lies not in my luxury but in the inevitable conditions of life. An alteration in my life cannot cure the evils I have seen. By altering my life I shall only make myself and those near me unhappy, while the destitute will remain as badly off as ever.

‘Therefore the task for me is not to change my own life, as I thought at first, but as far as I can to aid in improving the position of those unfortunates who have evoked my sympathy. The fact of the matter is that I am a very good, kind man, and wish to benefit my neighbours.’ So I began to devise a plan of philanthropic activity in which I could exhibit my goodness. I should mention, however, that when devising this philanthropic activity I felt all the time in the depth of my soul that it was not the right thing, but, as often happens, reasoning and imagination stifled the voice of conscience. It happened that preparations were being made at that time for the Census. This seemed a good opportunity for starting the charity in which I wished to exhibit my goodness. I knew of many philanthropic organizations and societies in Moscow, but all their activities seemed to me falsely directed and insignificant in comparison with what I aimed at. So I planned the following: to arouse sympathy for town poverty among the rich; to collect money, enrol people willing to help in the affair, and with the Census-takers to visit all the dens of destitution and, besides compiling the Census, get into touch with the unfortunates and investigate their needs, helping them with money and work or by getting them back to their villages, as well as by putting their children to school and the old folk into refuges and almshouses. More than that, I thought that from among those engaged in this work a permanent society could be formed which, dividing the districts of Moscow among its members, would see that poverty and destitution should not be allowed to breed, but would constantly nip them in the bud and perform the duty not so much of curing town poverty as of preventing it. I already imagined that, not to speak of the totally destitute, there would be none left in want in the town, and that I should have accomplished all this; and that we, the rich, could afterwards sit at ease in our drawing-rooms, eat five-course dinners and drive in carriages to theatres and assemblies, untroubled by such sights as I had witnessed at Lyapin House.

Having formed this plan I wrote an article about it, and before sending it for publication I went about among my acquaintances from whom I hoped to receive help. To all whom I saw that day (I specially addressed myself to the rich) I said the same thing-almost exactly what I said in the article. I proposed to take advantage of the Census to become acquainted with the Moscow destitute and to come to their aid with work and money, and to take. such action as would abolish destitution in Moscow; and then we, the rich, could with quiet consciences enjoy the good things to which we are accustomed. They all listened to me attentively and seriously, but with all of them without exception the same thing occurred. As soon as they understood what it was about, they became ill at ease and rather shamefaced. It was as though they were ashamed chiefly on my account-that I should talk nonsense, but a kind of nonsense which it was impossible plainly to call

nonsense. It was as though some external cause obliged them to be indulgent to this nonsense of mine.

‘Ah! yes, of course! It would be a very good idea,’ said they. ‘Of course one can’t help sympathizing with it. Yes, your idea is excellent. I had a similar idea myself, but... our people are so indifferent that one mustn’t expect much success... For my part, however, I shall of course be ready to help.’

They all said something like that. They all agreed, but as it seemed to me not because they were convinced nor from any wish of their own, but from some external cause which prevented their not agreeing. I noticed this also from the fact that not one of those who promised to help with money fixed the sum he or she intended to give; so that I had to fix it by asking, ‘Then I may count on you for three hundred, or two hundred, or one hundred, or twenty-five rubles?’ and not one of them handed me the money. I mention this because when people give money for what they want, they generally give it promptly. For a box at the theatre to see Sarah Bernhardt they hand, over the money at once, to clinch the matter. But here of those who had agreed to give money and had expressed their sympathy not one offered the money at once, but they only tacitly consented to the sums I named. At the last house I went to that day in the evening, I happened to find a large gathering. The hostess of that house has for some years been engaged in philanthropy. Several carriages stood at the entrance and several footmen in expensive liveries were sitting in the hall. In the large drawing-room, round two tables on which stood lamps, sat married and unmarried ladies in expensive clothes with expensive ornaments, dressing little dolls. Several young men were there also, near the ladies. The dolls these ladies were making were to be disposed of at a lottery for the poor.

The sight of this drawing-room and of the people collected in it impressed me very unpleasantly. Not to mention that the fortunes of the people there assembled amounted to some millions of rubles, or that the interest on the cost of their dresses, lace, bronzes, jewellery, carriages, horses, liveries, and footmen, would a hundred times exceed the value of their work, the cost of this one gathering alone: the gloves, clean linen, and conveyances, with the candles, tea, sugar and biscuits provided, must have exceeded a hundred times the value of the things produced. I saw all this and could therefore understand that here at any rate I should find no sympathy for my plan, but I had come to make the proposal, and, difficult as I felt it, I said my say (almost the same as was said in my article).

Of those present, one lady said she was too sensitive to go among the poor herself but she would give money. How much, and when she would send it, she did not say. Another lady and a young man offered their services to go among the poor, but I did not avail myself of their offer. The chief person to whom I addressed myself told me it would not be possible to do much, for lack of means. Means would be lacking because the rich in Moscow were all well known and what could be got out of them had already been got. All the philanthropists had already received rank, medals and other honours, and for a monetary success’ it would be essential to secure a fresh grant of honours from the Government, and this-the only thing that is really effective-is very difficult to obtain.

After returning home that day I lay down to sleep not merely with a foreboding that my plan would come to nothing, but with a sense of shame and a consciousness that I had

been doing something very nasty and shameful all day. But I did not abandon the attempt. In the first place, it had been started and false shame kept me to it; secondly, the mere fact of being occupied with it enabled me to continue to live in the conditions habitual to me, while its failure would oblige me to abandon these and seek new ways of life-a thing I unconsciously dreaded. So I did not trust my inward voice, and continued what I had begun.

Having given my article1 to be printed, I read it in proof at the Town Duma. While reading it, I felt so uncomfortable that I hesitated and blushed to tears. I noticed that everybody present was also uncomfortable. On my asking, at the end of the reading, whether the Census organizers accepted my proposal that they should remain at their posts to act as intermediaries between society and the necessitous poor, an awkward silence ensued. Then two members made speeches. These, as it were, corrected the awkwardness of my proposal. Sympathy was expressed with my idea, but the impracticability of my thought (of which every one approved) was pointed out. After that all felt more at ease. But when subsequently, still wishing to carry my point, I asked the organizers separately whether they agreed to investigate the needs of the poor during the Census and to remain at their posts to serve as intermediaries between the poor and the rich, they all again appeared uncomfortable. Their looks seemed to say, ‘There now, we smoothed over your folly out of respect for you, but you are again obtruding it!’ That was what their looks said. But verbally they consented and two of them separately, as though by arrangement, remarked in the self-same words ‘We consider ourselves morally bound to do it.’

When I said to the students engaged to take the Census, that besides the usual aims of the. Census the aim of philanthropy needed also to be kept in view, my communication produced a similar effect on them. I noticed that when we talked about it they were ashamed to look me in the face, as one is ashamed to look a kindly man in the face when he talks nonsense. My article had the same effect on the newspaper editor to whom I gave it, and also on my son, and on my wife, and on the most diverse people. All, for some reason, felt uncomfortable, but all considered it necessary to approve of my idea, and all after expressing approval at once began to express doubts of its success; and all without exception began also to condemn the indifference and coldness of society and of everybody, except (evidently) themselves.

In the depth of my soul I continued to feel that all this was not the right thing, and that nothing would come of it; but the article was printed and I undertook to take part in the Census. First I had started the affair and now it dragged me along.

Chapter 4

AT my request they allotted me for the Census the district in the Khamovniki ward near the Smolensk market, along Protochny side-street between Riverside Passage and Nikolski side-street, in which are situated the houses generally called Rzhanov house or Rzhanov fortress. These houses formerly belonged to a merchant named Rzhanov, but

1 About the Census in Moscow, 1882.-A. M.

now belong to the Zimins. I had long heard of it as a den of most terrible poverty and vice and had therefore asked the organizers to let me take that district.

After receiving instructions from the Town Duma, I went-a few days before the Census to inspect my district, and easily found Rzhanov house by the plan they gave me...

I entered the adjoining Nikolski side-street. This ends on the left with a gloomy house which has no exit on that side, and by its appearance I guessed that this was the Rzhanov fortress.

Descending the slope of the Nikolski street I overtook some boys of ten to fourteen years old, in jackets or thin coats, sliding down the slope or going on one skate along the frozen pavement by that house. The boys were ragged and like town boys in general they were alert and impudent. I stopped to look at them. From round the corner appeared a ragged old woman with sallow flabby cheeks. She was going towards the Smolensk marketplace and wheezing like a broken-winded horse at each step she took. On coming up to me she paused, breathing hoarsely. Anywhere else this old woman would have asked me for money, but here she only began talking. ‘See,’ she said, pointing to the skating boys, ‘all they do is to get into mischief. They will be just such Rzhanovites as their fathers.’ One of the boys, in an overcoat and a cap that had lost its peak, heard what she said and stopped. ‘What are you rowing at us for?’ he shouted at the old woman. ‘You are a Rzhanov bitch yourself!’ ‘And do you live here?’ I asked the boy. ‘Yes, and she lives here. She stole the leg of a boot!’ shouted the boy and, putting a foot out in front of him, skated away. The old woman broke out into a stream of abuse interrupted by coughs. Just then an old man all in rags, with quite white hair, came along the middle of the road descending the slope and swinging his hands, in one of which was a string of bread-stuff and cracknell rings. The old man had the appearance of one who had just fortified himself with a glass of vodka. He had evidently heard the old woman’s scoldings, and he took her part. ‘I’ll give it you, little devils, uh!’ shouted he at the boys, pretending to make for them; and having reached me, he came onto the pavement. On the Arbat1 this old man would strike one by his age, his weakness, and his destitution. Here he was a merry workman returning from his day’s work.

I followed the old man. He turned the corner to the left into the Protochny side-street, and having gone the whole length of the house and its gates he disappeared into a tavern.

Two gates and several doors open onto the Protochny side-street; there are taverns, gin shops, some provision shops and others. This is the Rzhanov fortress itself. Everything here is grey, dirty, and stinking-the building, the lodgings, the yard, and the people. Most of those I met here were ragged and half-dressed. Some walked and some ran from one door to another. Two were bargaining about some rag or other. I went round the whole building from the Protochny side-street and the Riverside passage, and on returning I stopped at one of the gates. I wanted to enter to see what was going on inside, but felt timid about it; what was I to say if asked what I wanted? After some hesitation, however, I entered the gate. As soon as I did so I noticed an abominable stench. The yard was horribly filthy. I turned a corner and at that moment, upstairs to the left, heard the clatter of feet running on the wooden gallery, first along the boards of the balcony and then

1 One of the main streets of Moscow.-A. M.

down the steps of the staircase.1 A lean woman in a faded pink dress, with turned-up sleeves and with boots on her stockingless feet, ran out first. Following her came a shock-headed man in a red shirt and very wide trousers that looked like a petticoat, and with goloshes on his feet. At the bottom of the stairs the man seized the woman: ‘You won’t get away!’ said he, laughing. ‘Listen to the squint-eyed devil!’ began the woman, evidently flattered by his pursuit, but she caught sight of me and shouted angrily: ‘What do you want?’ As I did not want anybody I grew confused and went away. There was nothing remarkable about all this; but this incident, after what I had seen outside in the street: the scolding old woman, the merry old man, and. the sliding boys, suddenly showed me quite a new side of the affair I was engaged on. I had set out to benefit these people by the help of the rich, and here for the first time I realized that all these unfortunates whom I wished to benefit, besides the hours they spend suffering from hunger and cold and waiting for a night’s lodging, have also time to devote to something else. There is the rest of the twenty four hours every day, and there is a whole life about which I had never thought. Here for the first time I understood that all these people, besides needing food and shelter, must also pass twenty-four hours each day which they, like the rest of us, have to live. I understood that they must be angry, and dull, and must pluck up courage, and mourn, and make merry. Strange to say, I now for the first time understood clearly that the business I had undertaken could not consist merely in feeding and clothing a thousand people as one feeds and drives under shelter a thousand sheep; but that it must consist in doing them good. And when I understood that each of these thousand people was a human being with a past; and with passions, temptations, and errors, and thoughts and questions, like my own, and was such a man as myself-then the thing I had undertaken suddenly appeared so difficult that I realized my impotence. But it had been started, and I went on with, it.

Chapter 5

ON the first appointed day the student Census takers began work in the morning, but I, the philanthropist, did not join them till towards noon. I could not get there sooner because I only got up at ten, and then drank coffee and had to smoke to help my digestion. I reached the gates of the Rzhanov house at twelve o’clock. A policeman showed me the tavern on the Riverside passage, to which the Census-takers had said anyone should be shown who asked for them. I went into the tavern. It was very dark, smelly, and dirty. Straight before me was a bar, on the left a small room with tables covered with dirty table-cloths, on the right a large room with columns and similar tables at the window and by the walls. At some of the tables men, tattered or decently dressed, probably workmen or small shopkeepers, and some women, sat having tea. The tavern was very dirty but one saw at once that business was good. The look of the man at the bar was business-like and the waiters were prompt and attentive: I had hardly entered before an attendant was ready to help me off with my overcoat and to take any order I might give. It was evident that habits of prompt and attentive work had been established. I inquired about the Census-takers. ‘Vanya!’ cried a small man, dressed German-fashion, who was arranging something in a cupboard behind the bar; this was the owner of the

1 The courtyard was enclosed by the house, which had a balcony all round it looking onto the yard.-A. M.

tavern, Ivan Fedotych ?’ Kaluga peasant who leased half the lodgings in Zimin’s houses, sub-letting them to lodgers. An attendant ran up, a lad of eighteen, thin, hook-nosed, and with a yellow complexion. Take the gentleman to the Census-takers’ they are in the big building above the well-get along.’

The lad laid down his napkin and put on an overcoat over his white shirt and white trousers,1 as well as a cap with a large peak, and rapidly moving his white legs he led me through a back door that closed by a counter-weight. In the lobby of a greasy smelly kitchen we met an old woman who was carefully carrying some very malodorous tripe in a rag. From the lobby we descended into the sloping yard all covered by a wooden building, with the lower story of brick. The stench in this, yard was very strong. The centre of this stench was the privy, around which always, every time I passed, people were crowding. The privy itself was not the place where people relieved themselves, but it served to indicate the place around which it had become customary to relieve oneself. Passing through the yard it was impossible not to notice that place; it always felt stifling when one entered the acrid atmosphere of the smell that came from it.

The lad, careful of his white trousers, cautiously led me past that place over the frozen filth, and made his way to one of the buildings. The people passing through the yard and along the galleries all stopped to look at me. Evidently a cleanly dressed man was a prodigy in these parts.

The lad asked a woman whether she had not seen where the Census-takers were, and three or more men immediately answered his question; some said they were above the well, but others said that they had been there but had left and had gone to Nikita Ivanovich. An old man with nothing over his shirt, who was adjusting his clothes near the privy, said they were in No. 30. The boy decided that this information was the most probable, and led me to No. 30 under the penthouse of the basement story, into darkness and stench different from that of the yard. We descended into the lower story and went along the earth floor of a dark corridor. While we were passing along the corridor one of the doors opened abruptly and from it emerged a drunken old man with nothing over his shirt, who was apparently not a peasant. A washerwoman with bared and soapy arms was driving and pushing this man out with shrill screams. Vanya, my conductor, pushed the drunken man aside and reproved him. ‘It won’t do to make such scenes,’ said he, ‘and you an officer too!’

We came to the door of No. 30. Vanya pulled at it. The door came unstuck with a smacking sound, opened, and we became aware of an odour of soapy steam and an acrid smell of bad food and tobacco. We entered into complete darkness. The windows were on the other side; but here were boarded corridors to right and left, with small doors at various angles leading into rooms roughly constructed of thin whitewashed boards. In a dark room to our left a woman was seen washing clothes at a trough. From a small door on the right an old woman looked out. Through another open door a hairy red-faced, peasant in bast-shoes was seen sitting on a board fixed to the wall, which did duty for a bed: he had his hands on his knees, swung his feet in his bast-shoes, and looked at them gloomily.

1 In the class of tavern referred to (a traktir) the waiters always wore white cotton blouses and trousers, Russian style.

At the end of the corridor was a little door leading into the room where the Census-takers were. This was the room of the landlady of the whole of No. 30; she rented the whole of it from Ivan Fedotych and let it out to the tenants and night-lodgers. In that tiny room of hers, under a tinfoil icon, sat a student Census-taker with his cards, and like an investigating magistrate questioned a peasant in a shirt and waistcoat. This, was a friend of the landlady, who was answering the questions on her behalf. There also was the landlady-an old woman-and two inquisitive lodgers. When I had entered, the room was quite crowded. I squeezed up to the table. The student and I exchanged greetings, and he continued his questions. But I began to observe and to interrogate the lodgers who were living there, for my own purpose.

It turned out that in this first lodging I did not find a single person on whom to expend my benevolence. The landlady, in spite of the poverty, smallness, and dirt of her lodging, which struck me after the mansions in which I live, had a sufficiency even in comparison with the poor of the town; and in comparison with village poverty, which I knew well, she was living in luxury. She had a feather bed, a quilted coverlet, a samovar, a warm coat, and a cupboard with crockery. Her friend had a similarly comfortable appearance. He even had a watch and chain. The lodgers were poor, but not one of them was in immediate need of assistance. Help was asked by the woman’ washing clothes at the wash trough, who had been left by her husband with children on her hands; by an old widow-woman who said she had nothing to live on; and by the peasant in bast-shoes who told me he had not eaten that day. But on inquiry it appeared that none of these people was particularly in need and that in order to aid them one would have to get to know them well.

When I offered to place her children in a children’s home, the woman abandoned by her husband grew confused, considered a bit, thanked me very much, but evidently did not want that: she would have preferred a gift of money. The eldest girl helped her with the washing and the middle one took care of the little boy. The old woman begged hard to be put in an alms-house, but when I looked at the corner she lived in I saw that she was not destitute. She had a small trunk with goods in it, a teapot with a tin spout, two cups, and boxes that had held sweets and now had tea and sugar in them. She knitted socks and gloves and had a monthly allowance from a benefactress. What the peasant for his part evidently wanted was not something to eat but something to drink, and all that might be given him would go to the gin-shop. So that in that lodging there were none of those with whom, as I fancied, the house overflowed-people whom I could make happy by a gift of money. They were, It seemed to me, poor people of a dubious kind. I noted down the old woman, the woman with children, and the peasant, and decided that they would have to be attended to, but only after I had attended to those specially unfortunate ones whom I expected to find in that house. I decided that in the help we were going to distribute there must be a sequence: first would come the most unfortunate, and afterwards these people. But in the next and the next lodging it was the same thing. All the people were of the same kind, cases one would have to look into more carefully before helping them. I did not find any unfortunates who could be made fortunate by a mere gift of money. Ashamed as lam to admit it, I began to feel disappointed at not seeing in these houses anything like what I had expected. I thought I should find people of an exceptional kind, but when I had been to all the lodgings I became convinced that the inhabitants of these houses are not at all exceptional, but are just such people as those among whom I live.

Among them, as among us, there were some more or less good and more or less bad, more or less happy and more or less miserable; and the unhappy were just such as exist among ourselves; people whose unhappiness depends not on external conditions but on themselves-a kind of unhappiness bank-notes cannot cure.

Chapter 6

dwellers in these houses form the lowest layer of the town population, of whom there are in Moscow probably more than a hundred thousand. Here in this house were representatives of all sections of this population: small employers and artisans, boot makers, brush makers, carpenters, joiners, cobblers, tailors, and smiths, and here too were cabmen and men trading on their own account, also women who kept stalls, washerwomen, dealers in old clothes, petty money-lenders, day-labourers, and people with no fixed occupation, as well as beggars and dissolute women.

Many of the very people I had seen at the entrance to Lyapin House were here, but here they were distributed among many workers. And moreover, whereas I had then seen them at their most wretched time when they had eaten and drunk all they possessed: and when, cold, naked, and driven from the taverns, they were waiting, as for heavenly manna, for admission into the free Night-Lodging-House to be taken thence to the promised land of prison and sent under police escort back to their villages-here I saw them scattered among a large number of workers and at a time when one way or other they had obtained three or five kopeks1 to pay for a night’s lodging, or perhaps even had some rubles to spend on food and drink.

Strange as it may seem to say so, I did not here experience anything like the feeling I. had at Lyapin House. On the contrary, during the first round both I and the students had an almost pleasant feeling. Why do I say, ‘almost pleasant’? That is untrue-the feeling produced by intercourse with these people, strange as it seems to say so, was simply a very pleasant one.

The first impression was that the majority of those who lived here were working people, and very good-natured ones.

We found most of them at work: washerwomen at their troughs, carpenters at their benches, boot makers on their stools. The narrow lodgings were full of people, and brisk, cheery work was going on. The place smelt of workmen’s perspiration, and at the boot maker’s of leather, and at the carpenter’s of shavings. One often heard singing, or saw sinewy bare arms quickly and skillfully performing accustomed movements. Everywhere we were greeted cheerily and kindly: almost everywhere our intrusion into the daily life of these people was far from evoking the pretension or desire to show off and reply curtly which was evoked by the Census-takers’ call at the houses of most of the wealthy families, but on the contrary these people replied to all our questions properly, without attaching any special importance to them. Our questions merely gave them occasion to make merry and joke about how the return should be filled in, who ought to count as two, and which two as one, and so forth.

1 A kopek was about a farthing.

We found many of them at dinner or tea, and every time in reply to our greeting: ‘Bread and salt’ or ‘Tea and sugar’,1 they replied ‘Please to join us’, and even moved up to make room for us. Instead of the haunt of constantly changing inhabitants we thought we should find here, it turned out that in this house there were many lodgings in which people had lived a long time. One carpenter with his workmen, and a boot maker with his assistants, had been there for ten years. At the boot maker’s it was very dirty and crowded, but all the people at work were very cheerful I tried to talk with one of the workmen, wishing to hear from him of the misery of his position and of his being in debt to his master, but the workman did not understand me and spoke very well of his master and of his own life.

In one lodging an old man lived with his old wife. They sold apples. Their room was warm, clean, and full of goods. The floor was spread with straw sacking which they got at the wholesale apple-dealers. There were trunks, cupboards, a samovar, and crockery. In the comer were many icons, with two little lamps burning before them; on the walls hung warm overcoats covered up with sheets. The old woman, who had star-shaped wrinkles, was affable, talkative, and apparently pleased at her own quiet well ordered life.

Ivan Fedotych, the landlord of the tavern and the lodgings, came from the tavern and went along with us. He jested good-humouredly with many of the lodgers, calling them all by their Christian names and patronymics,2 and gave us brief sketches of them. They were all people of ordinary types, Martin Semenoviches, Peter Petroviches, Mary Ivanovnas-people who did not consider themselves unfortunate, but considered themselves, and really were, like anyone else.

We came prepared to see nothing but horrors; and instead of horrors we were shown something good that involuntarily evoked our respect. There were so many of these good people that the tattered, fallen, idle ones, scattered here and there among them, did not destroy the general impression.

The students were not so much struck by this as I was. They had come simply to do something they considered to be of scientific value, and were incidentally making casual observations; but I was a philanthropist and came to help the unfortunate, perishing, depraved people I expected to find here. And instead of unfortunate, perishing, depraved people, I saw a majority of tranquil, contented, cheerful, kindly and very good working people.

I felt this most vividly when in these lodgings I really came on some cases of crying need such as I was prepared to help.

When I discovered such need I always found that it had already been met, and that the help I wished to render had already been given: given before I came, and by whom? By those same un-fortunate depraved creatures I was prepared to save; and given in a better way than I could have done.

In one cellar lay a lonely old man, ill of typhus. He had no connexions. A widow with a little daughter-a stranger to him but his neighbour (occupying another corner of the

1 Customary Russian folk-greetings to people having a meal.

2 This is a usual Russian practice, but indicates some amount of familiarity with the lodgers on the part of the landlord.-A. M.

room he lived in) was looking after him. She gave him tea, and bought medicine for him out of her own money. In another room lay a woman suffering from puerperal fever. A woman of the town was rocking the baby, had made it some pap wrapped in a rag to suck, and for two days had not gone out to ply her trade. A little girl who had been left an orphan had been taken into the family of a tailor who had three children of his own. So there remained only those unfortunate idle people: officials, copyists, footmen out of places, beggars, drunkards, prostitutes, and children, whom it was impossible to help at once with money, but whom it would be necessary to get to know well, to think about, and to find places for. I looked for people unfortunate merely from poverty and whom we could help by sharing our superfluity with them; and by some peculiar mischance (as it seemed to me) I did not find any such, but found only unfortunates of a kind to whom it would be necessary to devote much time and care.

Chapter 7

unfortunates I had noted down seemed to me to fall naturally into three classes: first, those who had lost advantageous positions and were awaiting a return to them (there were such both from the lower and higher ranks); then dissolute women, of whom there were very many in these houses; and thirdly, children. Most of all I found and noted people of the first class, who had lost their former advantageous position and wished to return to it. People of that kind, especially from among the gentry and officials, were very numerous. In almost all the tenements to which we went with the landlord, Ivan Fedotych, he told us: ‘Here there will be no need for you to fill in the list of lodgers yourselves. There is a man here who can do all that, if only he is not drunk to-day.’

And Ivan Fedotych would call the man out by name, and he was always one of those who had fallen from a better position. At Fedotych’s call there would creep out from some dark corner a once rich gentleman or official, usually drunk and always half-undressed. If not drunk he always readily undertook the task offered him: nodding with an air of importance, knitting his brows, and introducing learned terminology into his remarks, and holding with careful tenderness the clean, printed, red card in his trembling, dirty hands, he would look round on his fellow lodgers with pride and contempt as if triumphing now, by his superior education, over those who had so often humiliated him. He was evidently glad to come into touch with the world in which red cards are printed-the world to which he once belonged. Almost always in reply to my inquiries about his life the man would begin, not only readily but with enthusiasm; to tell the story, fixed in his mind like a prayer, of the misfortunes he had endured and especially of that former position which by his education he felt ought to be his.

There are very many such people scattered in various corners of Rzhanov House. One tenement was entirely taken up by them-men and women. When we approached it Ivan Fedotych told us: ‘Now here are the gentry.’ The lodging was quite full: they were almost all (some forty persons) at home. In the whole house there were none more degraded and unhappy than these: the old shrivelled, and the young pale and haggard. I talked with some of them. The story was almost always the same, differing only in degree of development. Each of them had been rich, or had a father, brother, or uncle who had been or still was rich, or his father or he himself had had an excellent place. Then a misfortune

occurred, caused either by some envious people or by his own imprudent good-nature, or by some accident, and now he had lost everything and had to perish in these unsuitable, hateful surroundings-lousy and tattered, amid drunken and debauched people, feeding on bullock’s liver and bread, and holding out his hand for alms. All the thoughts, wishes, and memories of these people were turned solely to the past. The present appeared to them unnatural, abhorrent, and unworthy of attention. None of them had a present. They had only recollections of the past and expectations of a future, which might at any moment be realized and for the realization of which very little was needed, but that little was always just beyond their reach, so their life was wasting in vain. One had been in this plight for a year, another for five, and a third for thirty years. One of them need only be decently dressed to go to see a well-known person favourably disposed towards him; another need only be dressed, pay some debts, and get to the town of Orel; a third need only redeem his things from pawn and find a little money to continue a lawsuit he is bound to win, and then all would again be well. They all say they only need some external thing in order to resume the position they consider natural and happy for themselves.

Had I not been befogged by my pride as benefactor, I need only have looked a little into their faces-young and old-generally weak and sensual but good-natured, to understand that their misfortune could not be repaired by external means and that unless their views of life were changed they could not be happy in any position; and that they were not peculiar people in specially unfortunate circumstances, but were just such people as surround us and as we are ourselves. I remember that I found intercourse with this kind of unfortunates particularly trying, and I now understand why. In them I saw myself as in a looking-glass. Had I thought of my own life and that of the people of our circle, I should have seen that between us and these people there was no essential difference.

If those now about me do not live in Rzhanov House, but in large apartments or houses of their own in the best streets, and if they eat and drink dainty food instead of only bread with bullock’s liver or herrings, this does not prevent their being similarly unfortunate. They too are dissatisfied with their position, regret the past and want something better; and the better positions they desire are just like those the dwellers in Rzhanov House want: namely, positions in which they can do less work and make others do more for them. The difference is merely in degree. Had I then reflected, I should have understood this; however, I did not reflect, but only questioned these people and noted them down, intending, after learning the details of their various circumstances and needs, to help them later on. I did not then understand that such men can only be helped by changing their outlook on life; and to change another man’s outlook one must oneself have a better one and live in accord with it; and I was myself living according to the view of life that had to be altered before these people could cease to be unhappy.

I did not see that, metaphorically speaking, they were unhappy not because they lacked nourishing food but because their digestions were spoilt, and that they were demanding not what was nourishing but what excited their appetites. I did not see that the help they needed was not food, but a cure for their spoilt digestions. Though I anticipate, I will here remark that of all the people I noted down I really helped none, though what they asked-and what seemed as though it would set them on their feet-was done for some of them.

Of these I know three particularly well. All three, after being repeatedly set on their feet, are now again just in the same position as they were three years ago.

Chapter 8

second category of unfortunates whom I also hoped to help later on were the loose women, of whom there were very many of all sorts in Rzhanov House-from young ones who looked like women, to terrible and horrible old ones who had lost human semblance. The hope of being able to help these women, whom at first I had not had in view, came to me from the following incident.

It was in the midst of our round. We had already formed a systematic plan for doing our business.

On entering each new tenement we at once inquired for its master. One of us then sat down and cleared a place to write at, while another went round from corner to corner and questioned each person in the lodgings separately, bringing the information to the one who wrote.

On entering one basement-lodging a student went to find the master, while I began to question those in the lodging. The lodging was arranged thus: in the middle of a square fourteen-foot room was a brick stove. From it ran four partitions star-wise, forming four separate lodgings or cubicles. In the first of these, a passage partition which contained four bunks, were two people-an old man and a woman. Straight through this was a long cubicle occupied by the landlord of the tenement, a very pale young man dressed respectably in a drab cloth coat. To the left of the first cubicle was another in which was a sleeping man (probably drunk) and a woman in a pink blouse loose in front and tight behind. The fourth cubicle was beyond a partition; the entrance to it was through the landlord’s cubicle.

The student went into the landlord’s cubicle while I remained in the first one questioning the old man and the woman. The man was a working printer, now without means of livelihood. The woman was a cook’s wife. I went into the third cubicle and asked the woman in the blouse about the sleeping man. She said he was a visitor. I asked her who she was. She said she was a Moscow peasant-woman. ‘What is your occupation?’ She laughed and did not reply. ‘How do you get your living?’ I repeated, thinking she had not. understood my question. ‘I sit in the tavern,’ said she. I did not understand her and again asked, ‘What do you live on?’ She did not reply, but laughed. From the fourth cubicle which we had not yet entered, there also came the sound of women’s laughter. The landlord came out of his cubicle and joined us. He had evidently heard my questions and the woman’s replies. He looked severely at her and addressing me said: ‘She’s a prostitute,’ evidently pleased that he knew this word used by the officials, and could pronounce it correctly.1 Having said this to me with a scarcely perceptible smile of respectful satisfaction, he turned to the woman. As soon as he spoke to her his whole face changed; and with a peculiar, contemptuously rapid utterance such as people use to a dog, he said without looking at her:

1 ‘Prostitute’ is a hard, foreign word, little used by common people in Russia.-A. M.

‘Why talk nonsense? “I sit in a tavern,” indeed! If you sit there, then speak plainly and say you’re a prostitute.’ Again he used that word and added, ‘She doesn’t know what to call herself.’

His tone exasperated me. ‘It is not for us to shame her,’ said I; ‘if we all lived godly lives there would not be any such as she.’

‘Yes, that’s the way of it,’ said the landlord with an unnatural smile.

‘Then it is not for us to reproach them but to pity them. Is it their fault?’

I don’t remember exactly what I said; but I know that the contemptuous tone of this young landlord of a lodging full of women he called prostitutes, revolted me; and I felt sorry for the woman, and expressed both feelings. And hardly had I spoken, before in the room from which the laughter had come, the boards of the bunks creaked and above the partition (which did not reach to the ceiling) appeared the dishevelled curly hair and small swollen eyes of a woman with a shiny red face, and then a second, and a third. They had evidently got up on their bunks and were all three stretching their necks with bated breath and strained attention, silently looking at us.

An awkward silence ensued. The student who had been smiling became serious; the landlord lowered his eyes abashed; and the women, not drawing a breath, looked at me and waited. I was more abashed than any of them. I had not at all expected that a word casually dropped would produce such an effect. It was as when Ezekiel’s field of death strewn with bones quivered at the touch of the spirit and the dead bones moved. I had spoken a chance word of love and pity, and it had acted on all as though they had only been waiting for that word to cease to be corpses and to become alive. They all looked at me and waited for what would follow. They waited for me to speak the words and do the deeds that would cause the bones to come together and be covered with flesh and come to life again. But I felt I had no words or deeds with which to continue what I had begun. In the depth of my soul I felt that I had lied: that I was myself like them and that I had nothing more to say; and I began to write on the card the names and occupations of all the people in the lodging. This incident led me into a fresh error: that of supposing that it would be possible to help these unfortunates also. It seemed to me then, in my self-deception, that this would be quite easy. I said to myself: Let us note down these women also, and afterwards, when we have noted everybody down, we (who these ‘we’ were, I did not stop to consider) will attend to them. I imagined that we (those very people who have for several generations led, and are still leading, these women into that condition) could one fine day take it into our heads suddenly to rectify it all. Yet had I but remembered my talk with the loose woman who was rocking the child whose mother was ill, I might have understood how insensate such an undertaking was.

When we saw that woman with the child we thought it was her own. In reply to the question, Who are you? she said simply that she was a wench. She did not say, ‘A prostitute’. Only the landlord of the lodging used that terrible word. The supposition that she had a child of her own suggested to me the thought of extricating her from her position. So I asked:

‘Is that your child?’

‘No, it’s this woman’s.’

‘How is it you are rocking it?’ ‘She asked me to. She is dying.’

Though my supposition had proved erroneous, I continued to speak to her in the same sense. I began to ask her who she was and how she came to be in such a position. She told me her story willingly and very simply. She was of Moscow birth, the daughter of a factory workman. She had been left an orphan, and an aunt (now dead) had taken charge of her. From her aunt’s she began to frequent the taverns. When I asked whether she would not like to change her way of life, my question evidently did not even interest her. How can the suggestion of anything quite impossible interest anybody? She giggled and said: ‘Who would take me with a yellow ticket?’1

‘Well, but suppose we found you a place as cook somewhere?’ said I.

That idea suggested itself to me because she was a strong, flaxen-haired woman with a kindly, round face. There are cooks like that. My words obviously did not please her. She said:

‘A cook! But I can’t bake bread!’ and she laughed. She said she could not, but I saw by the expression of her face that she did not wish to be a cook and despised that position and calling.

This woman, who like the widow in the Gospels had quite simply sacrificed her all for a sick neighbour, considered, as her companions did, that the position of a worker was degrading, and she despised it. She had been brought up to live without working and in the way that was considered natural by those around her. Therein lay her misfortune: this misfortune had led her into her present position and kept her there. That was what led her to sit in taverns. And which of us-man or woman-can cure her of that false view of life? Where among us are people who are convinced that an industrious life is always more to be respected than an idle one-people convinced of this and who live accordingly: valuing and respecting others on the basis of that conviction? Had I thought of this, I might have understood that neither I nor any one of those I knew could cure this disease.

I should have understood that those surprised and attentive faces that peered over the partition showed merely surprise at hearing sympathy expressed for them, but certainly not any hope of being cured of their immorality. They do not see the immorality of their lives. They know they are despised and abused, but cannot understand why. They have lived from childhood among other such women, who they know very well have always existed and do exist, and are necessary for society: so necessary that Government officials are appointed to see that they exist properly.2 They know moreover that they have power over men and can often influence them more than other women can. They see that their position in society, though they are always abused, is recognized both by women and men and by the Government, and so they cannot even understand what there is for them to repent of and wherein they ought to amend. During one of our rounds a student told me of a woman in one of the lodgings who traded in her thirteen year-old daughter. Wishing to save the girl, I purposely went to that lodging. The mother and

1 The passport issued to a prostitute by the police.-A. M.

2 This is a reference to the licensing, inspection, and medical examination of brothels that was regularly carried on in Russia.-A. M.

daughter were living in great poverty. The mother, a small, dark, forty-year-old prostitute, was not merely ugly but unpleasantly ugly. The daughter was equally unpleasant. To all my indirect questions about their way of life the mother replied curtly and with hostile distrust, evidently regarding me as an enemy. The daughter never answered me without first glancing at her mother, and evidently trusted her completely. They did not evoke in me cordial pity rather repulsion; but yet I decided that it was necessary to save the daughter, and that I would speak to some ladies who take an interest in the wretched position of such women, and would send them here. Had I but thought of the long past life of that mother: of how she bore, nursed, and reared that daughter-in her position assuredly without the least help from others, and with heavy sacrifices-had I thought of the view that had been formed in her mind, I should have understood that in her action there was absolutely nothing bad or immoral: she had done and was doing all she could for her daughter-that is to say, just what she herself considered best. One might take the daughter from the mother by force, but one could not convince the mother that it was wrong of her to sell her daughter. To save her one ought long ago to have saved her mother-saved her from the view of life approved by everybody, which allows a woman to live without marriage, that is without bearing children and without working, serving only as a satisfaction for sensuality. Had I thought of that I should have understood that the majority of the ladies I wished to send here to save that girl themselves live without bearing children and without work, serving merely to satisfy sensuality and deliberately educate their daughters for such a life. One mother leads her daughter to the taverns, another takes hers to Court or to balls, but both share the same view of life: namely, that a woman should satisfy a man’s lusts and that for that service she should be fed, clothed, and cared for. How then can our ladies save that woman or her daughter?

Chapter 9

STILL stranger was my relation towards the children. In my role of benefactor I noticed them too. I wished to save innocent beings from perishing in that den of depravity, and I wrote them down intending to occupy myself with them ‘afterwards’ .

Among them I was particularly struck by a twelve-year-old boy, Serezha. He was a sharp, clever lad who had been living at a boot maker’s and was left homeless when his master was sent to prison. I was very sorry for the lad and wished to be of use to him.

I will tell how the help I gave him ended, for the story shows most clearly how false my position as a benefactor was. I took the boy home and put him in our kitchen. Was it possible to put a lousy boy taken from a den of depravity, among our own children? I considered myself very kind and good to let him inconvenience not me but our servants, and because we (not I but the cook) fed him, and because I gave him some cast-off clothes to wear. The boy stayed about a week. During that time I twice spoke a few words to him in passing, and while out for a walk called on a boot maker I know and mentioned the boy to him as a possible apprentice. A peasant1 who was staying with me invited the boy to live with him in the village as a labourer. The boy declined, and a week

1 Sutaev, of whom there is an account in my Life of Tolstoy. — A. M.

later disappeared. I went to Rzhimov House to inquire for him. He had been there, but was not at home when I called. That day and the day before he had gone to the Zoological Gardens, where he was hired for thirty kopeks a day to take part in a procession of costumed savages, who led an elephant about in some show they had on. I returned another day, but he was so ungrateful that he evidently avoided me. Had I then reflected on that boy’s life and my own, I should have understood that he had been spoilt by learning the possibility of living an easy life without work and by having become unaccustomed to work; and I, to benefit him and improve him, had taken him into my house where he saw-what? My own children older than himself, and younger, and of his own age-never doing any work for themselves but giving all sorts of work to others: dirtying things, spoiling everything about them, overeating themselves with rich, tasty, and sweet food, breaking crockery, spilling things and throwing to the dogs food that to him appeared a delicacy. If I took him from a ‘den’ and brought him to a good place, he was right to assimilate the views of life existing in that good place; and from those views he understood that in a good place one must live merrily, eating and drinking tasty things without working. It is true he did not know that my children do the hard work of learning the declensions in Latin and Greek grammar, nor could he have understood the object of such work. But one cannot help seeing that had he understood that fact, the effect of my children’s example on him would have been still stronger. He would then have understood that my children are being educated in such a way that without working now, they may be able in future, by the aid of their diplomas, to work as little as possible and command as much as possible of life’s good things. And he understood this, and did not go with the peasant to tend cattle and live on potatoes and kvas, but went to the Zoological Gardens to dress as a savage and lead an elephant about for eight pence a day.

I might have understood how absurd it was of me, while educating my own children in complete idleness and luxury, to hope to correct other people and their children who were perishing from idleness in what I call the Rzhanov den, where at any rate three-fourths of the people-work for themselves and for others. But I understood nothing of all that.

There were very many children in most wretched conditions in Rzhanov House: the children of prostitutes, orphans, and children who were taken about the streets by beggars. They were all very pitiful. But my experiment with Serezha showed me that, living as I do, I could not help them. When Serezha was living with us, I detected in myself a desire to hide our life, and especially our children’s life, from him. I felt that all my efforts to guide him to a good industrious life were destroyed by the example we and our children set. To take a child from a prostitute or a beggar is very easy. It is very easy, when one has money, to have him washed, cleaned, and dressed in good clothes, well fed, and even taught various sciences; but for us who do not earn our own bread, to teach him to earn his bread is not merely difficult but impossible; for by our example, and even by that material bettering of his life which costs us nothing, we teach him the opposite. One may take a puppy, tend it, feed it, teach it to fetch and carry, and be pleased with it; but it is not enough to tend and feed a man and teach him Greek; one has to teach him to live: to take less from others and give more, but we, whether we take him into our house or put him into a Home founded for the purpose, cannot help teaching him the reverse.

Chapter 10

THAT feeling of compassion for people and aversion from myself that I had experienced at Lyapin House I no longer felt; I was quite filled with the wish to accomplish the business I had started-that of doing good to the people I met here. And strange to say, whereas it seemed that to do good-to give money to those in need was a very good thing and should promote one’s love of people, it turned out on the contrary that this business evoked in me ill-will towards people and condemnation of them. During the first round, in the evening, a scene occurred just like the one at Lyapin House; but it did not produce on me the same impression as at Lyapin House but evoked quite a different feeling.

It began when in one of the lodgings I really found an unfortunate who was in need of immediate aid. It was a hungry woman who had not had anything to eat for two days.

It was like this: in one very large, almost empty, night-lodging I asked an old woman whether there were any very poor people there, people who had nothing to eat. The old woman thought awhile, and then named two, but afterwards she seemed to remember something. ‘Oh, yes, I fancy she is lying here,’ said she, looking into one of the occupied bunks. ‘Yes, this one, I fancy, has not had anything to eat.’ ‘Really? And who is she?’ ‘She was a strumpet, but nobody wants her now, so she gets nothing. The landlady has had pity on her, but now wants to turn her out... Agafya, eh, Agafya!’ cried the old woman.

We drew nearer and something on the bunk rose. It was a rather grey, dishevelled woman, lean as a skeleton, in a dirty, torn chemise, with particularly shining and fixed eyes. She looked past us with those fixed eyes; caught with her thin hand at a jacket lying behind her, in order to cover the bony breast exposed by her torn and dirty chemise, and ejaculated: ‘What? What?’ I asked her how she was getting on. It was long before she understood and replied: ‘I don’t myself know; they are turning me out.’ I asked her. I am ashamed to write it down-whether it was true that she had not had anything to eat. With the same feverish rapidity she replied, still not looking at me: ‘I did not eat yesterday and I have not eaten to-day.’

This woman’s appearance touched me, but not at all as I had been touched at Lyapin House: there pity for those people made me at once feel ashamed of myself, while here I was glad to have found at last what I was looking for-someone who was hungry.

I gave her a ruble, and remember being very glad that others saw it. The old woman, seeing this, also asked me for money. It was so pleasant to give, that without considering whether it was or was not necessary, I gave to the old woman also. She then accompanied me on my way out, and some people standing in the corridor heard her thank me. Probably the questions I had asked about poverty had raised expectations, and some people were following us about. In the corridor again they began to ask me for money. There were among these people some evident drunkards who aroused an unpleasant feeling in me, but having given something to the old woman I had no right to refuse these and I began distributing money. While I gave, more and more people came up. Excitement arose in all the lodgings. On the staircases and in the galleries people appeared, watching me. As I came out into the yard a boy ran quickly down from one of

the staircases, pushing through among the people. He did not see me and rapidly shouted, ‘He gave Agafya a ruble.’ Having run down the stairs the boy joined the crowd that was following me. I went out into the street; various people walked with me and asked for money. I gave away what small change I had and went to a trading-stall there, asking the man who kept it to change ten rubles for me. And here there occurred what had happened at Lyapin House. A terrible confusion arose. Old women, broken down gentry, peasants, and children, crowded to the stall holding out their hands; I gave them money and questioned some of them about their lives, entering them in my note-book. The owner of the stall, having turned in the fur corners of his winter overcoat, sat like a statue, occasionally glancing at the crowd and again directing his eyes past us. He evidently, like the rest, felt that it was stupid, but could not say so.

In Lyapin House I had been horrified by the wretchedness and degradation of the people and felt myself guilty, and felt a wish and a possibility of being better. But now a similar scene produced on me quite a different effect: I experienced, in the first place, a feeling of ill-will towards many of those who besieged me, and, secondly, I was uneasy as to what the shopkeepers and yard-porters thought of me.

On returning home that day I was ill at ease. I felt that what I was doing was stupid and immoral, and as always happens in consequence of an inner perplexity, I talked much about the business I had started, as though I did not at all doubt its success.

The next day I went alone to see those of the people I had noted down who seemed most to be pitied and whom I thought it would be easiest to help. As I have said, I did not really help any of them. To help them proved harder than I had expected. And whether because of my incompetence or because it really was impossible, I only disturbed them and did not help them. I visited Rzhanov House several times before the final Census-round was made, and the same thing happened each time. I was besieged by a crowd of suppliants among whom I was quite lost. I felt the impossibility of achieving anything because there were too many of them, and I therefore felt angry with them for being so numerous; but besides that, taking them separately, they did not attract me. I felt that each of them was telling me lies or not telling the whole truth, and saw in me merely a purse from which money might be extracted. And it very often seemed to me that the money a man wheedled out of me would do him more harm than good. The oftener I went to the place and the more I got to know the people there the plainer the impossibility of doing anything became, but I did not abandon my enterprise till the last night of the Census.

I am particularly ashamed to remember that last visit. Previously I had gone alone, but now we went some twenty of us together. At seven o’clock those who wished to take part in this last night’s round collected at my house. They were nearly all strangers to me: students, an officer, and two of my society acquaintances, who saying in the usual way C’est tres interessant! asked me to include them among the Census-takers.

My society acquaintances had dressed specially in shooting jackets and high travelling boots, a costume in which they went on hunting expeditions, and which in their opinion was adapted for a visit to the night-lodging-houses. They took with them peculiar notebooks and extraordinary pencils. They were in that special state of excitement people are in when preparing for a hunt, a duel, or to start for the war. In their case the stupidity and falseness of our position was particularly noticeable, but the rest of us were in the same

false situation. Before we started we held a consultation, like a council of war, as to how and with what to begin, how to divide our party, and so forth. The consultation was just like those which take place in councils, assemblies, and committees that is to say, everybody spoke not because he had something that needed saying or because he wanted to learn something, but each devised something to say so as not to seem to lag behind the others. But in the course of these conversations no one referred to charity, of which I had spoken to them all so often. Abashed as I was I felt that I must again refer to charity, that is to the need of entering up during our round all whom we found to be in a state of poverty. I had always felt ashamed to speak of this, but now, amid our excited preparations for the campaign, I could scarcely utter it. All listened to me as it seemed with regret, and at the same time all agreed verbally; but it was evident that they all knew it was folly and that nothing would come of it, and all immediately began to talk about something else. This continued till it was time to start and we drove off.

We arrived at the dark tavern, roused the attendants, and began to sort our papers. When we were told that the people had heard of our visit and were leaving the quarters, we asked the landlord to have the gates closed, and ourselves went out into the yard to reassure those who were leaving, telling them that no one would ask to see their passports.1 I remember the strange and unpleasant impression those excited night-lodgers produced on me: tattered, half-dressed, by the light of the lamp In the dark yard all appearing to me to be tall; frightened and terrible in their fright they stood in a group near the stinking privy and heard our assurances but did not believe them. Evidently, like hunted animals, they were ready for anything merely to escape from us. Gentlemen in various guises-as police-officers in town or country, as examining magistrates, and as Judges-had harassed them all their lives in the towns and in the villages and on the highroads and in the streets and in taverns and dosshouses, and now suddenly these gentlemen had come and shut the gates on them merely to count them; it was as hard for them to believe this as it would be for hares to believe that dogs had come not to catch them but to count them. But the gates were closed, and the alarmed night lodgers went back to their quarters, and having separated Into groups we set to work. With me went the two society men and two students. Before us in the darkness went Vanya in overcoat and white trousers, carrying a lantern, and we followed him.

We visited lodgings I already knew and in which I also knew some of the lodgers, but most of the people were new and the spectacle was new and terrible-more terrible than I had seen at Lyapin House. All the lodgings were full, all the bunks were occupied, and often by two people. The sight was horrible from the way they were crowded together, and from the mingling of women and men. All the women who were not dead drunk were sleeping with men. Many women with children were sleeping with strange men on the narrow bunks. Terrible was the sight of these people’s destitution, dirt, raggedness, and terror. And terrible, above all, was the immense number in this condition. One tenement, another, a third, a tenth, a twentieth, and no end to them! Everywhere the same stench, the same stifling atmosphere, the same overcrowding, the same mingling of the sexes, the same spectacle of men and women drunk to stupefaction, and the same fear, submissiveness, and culpability on all faces; and again I felt pained and ashamed of

1 To be without a passport, or to have a false one, was a serious offence in Russian law and police practice.-A.M.

myself as I had done in Lyapin House, and I understood that what I had undertaken was horrid, stupid, and therefore impossible. And I no longer questioned anyone or took notes about anything, knowing that nothing would come of it.

I suffered profoundly, at Lyapin House I had been like one who happens to see a horrible sore on a man’s body, he is sorry for the man and conscience-stricken at not having pitied him before, but he may still hope to help him. But now I was like a doctor who has come to the sufferer with his medicines, has uncovered his wound and chafed it, but has himself to admit that he has done it all in vain and that his medicine is of no use.

Chapter 11

THAT visit dealt the last blow to my self-deception, it became obvious to me that what I had undertaken was not merely stupid but horrid. Yet, though I knew this, it seemed to me that it would not do to throw up the whole affair at once. It seemed as. if I was bound to go on, first, because by the article I had written and by my visits and promises I had raised hopes among the poor; and secondly, because I had also by my article and by conversations evoked the sympathy of charitable people, many of whom had promised to co-operate both with work and money. And I awaited applications from both classes and meant to deal with them as best I could.

As to the needy, this is what occurred. I received more than a hundred letters and applications; these were all from the rich-poor, if I may use the expression. I went to see some of them and to some I did not reply. Nowhere did I succeed in doing anything. All the applications were from people who had once occupied a privileged position (I mean a position in which a man receives from others more than he gives), had lost it, and wished to regain it. One wanted two hundred rubles to maintain his declining business and complete the education of his children another wanted a photographic establishment; third wanted his debts paid and to get his respectable clothes out of pawn; a fourth wanted a piano in order to perfect himself and to support his family by giving lessons. Most of them simply asked for help without defining how much money they wanted, but when one looked into what they wanted, it turned out that their needs grew In proportion to the amount of help available, and there was not and could not be any satisfying them. I repeat that this may have occurred because I did not know how to deal with them, but the fact remains that I helped nobody though in some cases I tried to.

As to the co-operation of the charitable, what happened seemed to me very strange and unexpected. Of all who promised me money for the poor and even fixed the amount, not one gave me a single ruble. From the promises given me I might have counted on receiving some three thousand rubles but of all those people not one remembered the conversation or gave me a single farthing. Only the students gave me what they received for their work on the census, which was, I think twelve rubles.1 So that my whole undertaking, which was to have dealt with tens of thousands of rubles given by the rich and to have saved hundreds and thousands of people from poverty and vice, came merely to this: that I distributed haphazard some dozens of rubles to those who begged of me, and was left with twelve rubles in hand given by the students, and twenty five rubles allowed

1 About a penny.

me by the Town Duma for my work as organizer: which amounts I positively did not know what to do with.

The whole affair was at an end. On the Sunday of Carnival week, before leaving Moscow and going to the country. I went in the morning to Rzhanov House to get rid of those thirty-seven rubles by distributing them to the poor. I went to see those I knew in the tenements, and found only one sick man, to whom I gave something, five rubles I think. There was no one else there to give to. Of course many began begging. But I did not know them now any better than I had known them at first, and I decided to consult Ivan Fedotych, the owner of the tavern as to the disposal of the remaining thirty-two rubles. It was the first day of Carnival. Everyone was dressed in his best, all had eaten enough and many were tipsy. In the yard, by a corner of the house, in a torn peasant coat and bast-shoes, stood an old but still active rag-and-bone man sorting the booty in his basket, throwing the leather, iron, and other things, into different heaps, and trolling a merry song in a strong and excellent voice. I had a chat with him. He was seventy, lived by himself by his trade as rag-and bone dealer, and not only did not complain, but said he had enough to eat and get drunk on. I asked him if there were any who were specially in need. He seemed vexed, and said plainly that none were in need except drunkards and lazybones, but on hearing of my aim, he asked me for five kopeks1 to get a drink with, and ran off to the tavern. I also went into the tavern to Ivan Fedotych, to entrust him with the distribution of the remaining money. The tavern was full; gaudy and tipsy girls were going from door to door, all the tables were occupied many were already drunk, and in a small room someone was playing a concertina and two people were dancing. Ivan Fedotych out of respect for me ordered the dancing to cease, and sat down with me at a vacant table. I said that as he knew his lodgers and I was commissioned to distribute a little money, would he not point out to me those most in need? Good-natured Ivan Fedotych (he died a year later), though busy with his trade, left it for a while to help me. He considered, and evidently felt puzzled. An elderly waiter heard what we were talking about and joined in our conference.

They began to go over the lodgers, some of whom I knew; but they could not agree. ‘Paramonovna,’ suggested the waiter. ‘Yes, she goes hungry sometimes. But then she goes on the spree.’ ‘Well, what of that? All the same ... ‘ ‘And Spiridon Ivanovich, he has children?’ But Ivan Fedotych had his doubts about Spiridon Ivanovich. ‘Akuhna? But she receives an allowance. How about the blind man?’ To him I objected. I had just seen him. He was a blind man of eighty, without kith or kin. One would suppose no condition could be worse; but I had just seen him-he was lying drunk on a high featherbed and, not seeing me, he was abusing, in the filthiest language and in a terrible bass voice, the comparatively young woman with whom he cohabited. They then suggested a one-armed boy who lived with his mother. I noticed that Ivan Fedotych was embarrassed owing to his conscientiousness, for he knew that at Carnival time whatever was given would all come back to him at the tavern. But I had to get rid of my thirty-two rubles, and I insisted, and somehow, well or ill, the money was at last disposed of. Those who received it were for the most part well dressed, and we had not to go far for them for they were there in the tavern. The one-armed boy appeared in high boots, a red shirt, and a waistcoat.

1 About 25 shillings.

So ended my charitable activity, and I departed for the country, vexed with others-as is always the case-because I had myself done something stupid and bad. My charity came to nothing and quite ceased, but the flow of thoughts and feelings in me did not cease but went on with redoubled force.

Chapter 12

WHAT did it all mean?

I had lived in the country and had there been in touch with village poverty. Not out of humility which is more like pride, but to tell the truth which is necessary to make the whole trend of my thoughts and feelings comprehensible, I will mention that in the country I did very little for the poor, but the demands made on me there were so modest that even the little I did was of use to the people and created an atmosphere of love and satisfaction around me, amid which it was possible to soothe the gnawing consciousness of the wrongfulness of my way of life. When we moved to town I hoped to live in just the same way. But there I met poverty of quite a different kind. Town poverty was less truthful and more exacting and more cruel than village poverty. Above all, there was so much of it in one place that it produced a terrible impression on me. What I saw at Lyapin House made me at once realize the odiousness of my life. That feeling was sincere and very strong. But despite its sincerity and strength I was at first weak enough to fear the revolution it demanded in my life, and I compromised. I believed what everyone told me and what all have been saying since the world began, that there is nothing wrong in riches and luxury, which are God’s gifts, and that one can help the needy without ceasing to be luxurious. I believed this and wished to do so. And I wrote the article in which I called on the rich for help. The rich all acknowledged themselves morally bound to agree with me, but evidently either did not wish or were unable to do anything, or give anything, for the poor. I began to visit the poor and saw what I had not at all expected. On the one hand in those dens-as I called them-I found people whom it was out of the question for me to help, for they were workers accustomed to work and to endure, and therefore possessed a far firmer hold on life than my own. On the other hand I saw unfortunates whom I could not help because they were just like myself. The majority of the unfortunates I saw were unfortunate only because they had lost the capacity, the wish, and the habit, of working for their bread. That is to say their misfortune consisted in being like me.

I could not find any unfortunates-sick, cold, or hungry-whom one could help at once, except the one starving woman Agafya. And I became convinced that cut off as I was from the life of the people I wished to help, it would be almost impossible for me to find such unfortunates, for every case of real want was met by the very people among whom these unfortunates live, and above all, I became convinced that money would not enable me to alter the wretched life these people lead. I became convinced of all this, but from false shame at abandoning what I had begun, from self-deception as to my own beneficence, I continued for some time to go on with it till of itself it came to nothing, so that with much difficulty I managed somehow, with Ivan Fedotych’s aid, in the tavern in Rzhanov House, to get rid of those thirty-seven rubles which I did not consider belonged to me.

Of course I could have continued the affair and made of it a semblance of philanthropy. I could by persistency with those who had promised me money have obliged them to hand it over to me and could have collected still more and could have distributed that money and consoled myself with my benevolent activity; but I saw on the one hand, that we rich people neither wish, nor are able, to set aside for the poor a part of our abundance (we have so many needs of our own), and that there is no one to give money to, If we wish only to do good and not merely to give away haphazard as I had done in the Rzhanov tavern. And I threw up the whole thing and with a feeling of despair left for the country.

There I wished to write an article about my experience and to explain why my undertaking had not succeeded. I wished to justify myself against the reproaches addressed to me concerning my article on the Census, and to indict society for its indifference and to state the causes which produce this urban poverty, and the need to counteract it, and also the means I saw for doing so.

I then began the article and thought it would contain much of value.

But try as I would, in spite of an abundance and superabundance of material since I wrote under the influence of irritation, and had then not yet got rid of all that hindered my seeing the matter in a right light, and above all because I was not yet simply and clearly conscious of the cause of the whole matter (a very simple cause rooted in myself), I could not manage the article, and I did not finish it till the present year.1

In the moral sphere something occurs which is surprising and too little noticed.

If I tell a man who does not know it, anything I know of geology, astronomy, history, physics, or mathematics, he receives it as new information and never says to me: ‘But what is there new about it? Everyone knows that and I have long known it’; but impart to a man the loftiest moral truth, expressed in the clearest and briefest form, as it has never before been expressed, and every ordinary man, especially one not interested in moral questions, and especially one whom this moral truth strokes the wrong way, will certainly say: ‘But who does not know that? That was known and uttered long ago.’ It really seems to him that it was said long ago and in that very way. Only those to whom moral truths are serious and precious know how important and valuable they are, and by what prolonged efforts the simplification and elucidation of moral truth is reached-its transformation from dim, indefinitely conceived suppositions and wishes into firm and definite expressions inevitably demanding corresponding action.

We are all accustomed to think that moral teaching is a very empty and dull affair in which there can be nothing new or interesting, yet the whole life of man with all its complex and diverse activities-political, scientific, artistic, and commercial which seem to be independent of morality, have no other purpose than the ever greater elucidation, confirmation simplification and diffusion, of moral truth.

I remember walking along a street once in Moscow and seeing a man come out of a shop look attentively at the paving stones, select one of them, squat down over it and begin (as it seemed tome) to scrape or rub it with the greatest energy and ardour. ‘What is he doing to the pavement?’ thought I. Coming up to him I saw what he was doing. He was a lad out of a butcher’s shop, and was whetting his knife on a paving stone. He was not thinking at

1 The winter of 1885-1886-A. M

all about the stones when he examined them and was thinking still less about them while he was doing his job-he was simply whetting his knife. He has to sharpen his knife to cut meat with it, while it had seemed to me that he was doing something to the stones of the pavement. In just the same way, though It seems that mankind is occupied with commerce, treaties, wars, sciences, and arts, only one thing is important to humanity, and it is doing only that one thing: it is elucidating to itself the moral laws by which it lives. Moral laws exist; humanity merely elucidates them to itself, and this elucidation seems unimportant and insignificant to him who does not want moral law and does not wish to live by it. But this elucidation of the moral law is not only the chief, it is the sole business of humanity.

This elucidation is unobserved, just as the difference between a dull knife and a sharp one may be unobserved. A knife is a knife, and for him who does not want to cut anything with that knife the difference between a dull and a sharp one passes unobserved. But for a man who has understood that his whole life depends on the dullness or sharpness of his knife, every whetting of it is important and he knows that there is no end to this sharpening, and that a knife is a knife only when it is sharp and can cut what needs cutting.

This happened to me when I began to write the present article. I thought I knew all and understood all about the questions evoked in me by the impressions received at Lyapin House and during the Census, but when I tried to realize and express them it turned out that the knife would not cut and had to be sharpened. And only now after three years do I feel that my knife has been sufficiently sharpened to enable me to cut what I want to. I have learnt very little that is new. My thoughts are the same, but they were duller, they dispersed easily and did not converge: they had no sting in them, and they did not unite into the one simplest and clearest conclusion, as they now do.

Chapter 13

I REMEMBER that during the whole period of my fruitless attempt to aid the unfortunates in the town population I appeared to myself like one who wishes to draw another out of a bog but is himself standing in just such a bog. Each effort I made obliged me to realize the instability of the ground I stood on. I felt that I was myself in a bog, but this consciousness did not then cause me to examine more carefully beneath my feet to discover what I was standing on; I was all the time seeking external means of curing the evil around me.

I then felt that my life was bad and that it would not do to live so. But from the fact that my life was bad and that one must not live so, I did not draw the clear and simple conclusion that I must improve my way of life and live better, but drew the strange conclusion that to enable me to live better it was necessary to correct other people’s lives; and so I began to correct them. I was living in town and wished to correct the life of other people living in the town, but I soon became convinced that I could not possibly do this, and I began to reflect on the nature of town-life and town-poverty.

‘What is this town-life and town-poverty? Why, living in town, can I not help the town poor?’ I asked myself. And I replied that I could do nothing for them, first, because there

were too many there in one place, and secondly, because they were quite different from the poor in the villages. Why are there so many of them here, and in what do they differ from the poor of the villages? The reply to both questions was one and the same. There are many of them here because all who are unable to feed themselves in the villages collect here, around the rich, and their peculiarity is that they are people who have come from their village to feed themselves in the town.1 (If there are any town poor who were born here and whose fathers and grandfathers were born here, those fathers and grandfathers came here to feed themselves.)

What is meant by ‘feed oneself in town’? In the words ‘to feed oneself in town’ there is something strange, something resembling joke, when one comes to consider it. How can people come from the country, that is, from where there are woods and meadows, and grain, and cattle-all the wealth of the earth-to feed themselves in a place where trees, and grass, and even soil, are wanting, and where there are only stones and dust? What is meant by those words: ‘feed oneself in the town’, which are constantly used as though they were quite clear and comprehensible, both by those who are fed and by those who feed them.

I recall all the hundreds and thousands of town dwellers-some well off and some in poverty with whom I talked about why they came there, and they all without exception said that

‘Moscow neither sows nor reaps,

But always has its wealth in heaps’;

that there is plenty of everything in Moscow, and that therefore only in Moscow could they earn the money they needed in the country for grain, a cottage, a horse, and for articles of prime necessity. But yet the village is the source of all wealth and it is only there that real wealth is to be found: grain, and timber, and horses, and everything. Why come to town to obtain what is in the country? And why, above all, carry from the village to town what is needed by the villagers: flour, oats, horses, and cattle?

Hundreds of times have I talked of this with peasants who were living in town, and from my talks with them and from my observation I have understood that the crowding of country folk into the towns is partly compulsory, because they cannot feed themselves otherwise, and partly voluntary, since the temptations of the town attract them. It is true that the condition of the peasant is such that to satisfy the demands made on him in the village he cannot avoid selling the grain and the cattle which he knows he will himself need, and so he is obliged, whether he likes it or not, to go to town to get his grain back again. But it is also true that the comparative ease with which money can be earned and the luxury of town-life attracts him thither, and that on the pretext of feeding himself in town he goes there to get easier work and to be better fed, to drink tea three times a day, to dress up, and even to get drunk and live dissolutely. The cause of both is the same: the passing of wealth from the producers into the hands of non-producers and its accumulation in towns. And really when autumn comes all the wealth is collected in the village. And immediately come demands for taxes, conscription, rents, and also the

1 In English one would naturally say ‘to get a living in the town’, but it is here more convenient to use the Russian expression ‘to feed themselves’ because of what follows.-A. M.

temptations of vodka, weddings, fetes, itinerant pedlars, and other things; and in one way or another that wealth in its diverse forms-sheep, calves, cows, horses, pigs, fowls, eggs, butter, hemp, flax, rye, oats, buckwheat, peas, and hemp-seed and linseed-passes into the hands of other people and is carried to the towns and from the towns to the cities. The villager, obliged to part with all this to satisfy the demands and temptations presented to him, having given up his wealth remains in want and has to go to the place to which his wealth has been carried, and there he tries partly to secure the money he needs to get what is of prime necessity in the country, and partly, carried away by the temptations of the town, he himself with others indulges in what the town has to offer.

Everywhere in Russia, and I think not in Russia only but throughout the world, this goes on. The wealth of the country producers passes into the hands of dealers, landowners, officials, and manufacturers, and those who receive this wealth wish to enjoy it. And they can only enjoy it fully in town. In the village, on account of the distance at which people live, it is difficult, in the first place, to satisfy all the requirements of the rich; there are not all the workshops, stores, banks, restaurants, theatres, and all kinds of social amusements. Secondly, one of the chief pleasures furnished by riches-vanity, the desire to surprise and outshine others-is also difficult to secure in the country, again on account of the sparseness of the population. In the village connoisseurs of luxury are lacking-and there is no one to astonish. No matter what adornments of the house, what pictures or bronzes a dweller in the village may procure, or what carriages or toilets-there is no one to admire them or envy them-for the peasants do not understand anything about it. Thirdly, luxury in the country is even disagreeable and dangerous to a man who has a conscience and fear. It is uncomfortable and uncanny in the country to have a milk bath or to feed puppies on milk, when near by there are children who need it; it is uncomfortable and uncanny to build pavilions and layout gardens among people who live in huts surrounded by manure, and who lack fuel. In the village there is no one to keep the stupid peasants in order, who in their ignorance may destroy all this.

And so the rich people gather together in the towns and settle near other rich people who have similar tastes: where the gratification of every luxurious taste is carefully guarded by numerous police. The core of such town-dwellers are the government officials; around them all sorts of workmen and traders have settled down, and they are joined by the. rich. There a rich man only wishes for anything and it will be supplied. There too it is pleasanter for a wealthy man to live because there he can satisfy his vanity there is someone to vie with in luxury, someone to astonish and to outshine. Above all, it is better for a rich man in town because formerly, in the village, he was uncomfortable and felt ill at ease on account of his wealth, but now on the contrary. It would be uncomfortable not to live luxuriously as all the people around him do. What seemed frightening and awkward in the country, here seems to him quite proper. The rich assemble in town and there, under the protection of the authorities, calmly demand all that has been brought thither from the country. The villager is partly obliged to go where this continual holiday of the rich is going on and where what has been taken from him is being used up, in order to feed on the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table, and partly-seeing the easy and luxurious life of the rich which is approved and defended by everybody-he wants to arrange his own life so as to work less and enjoy the labour of others more.

So he makes his way to town and looks round where the rich people are, and tries by all means to get back from them what he needs, submitting to all the conditions they impose on him. He assists in the satisfaction of all their whims; and he or she attends on the rich in the baths, in the restaurants, as cabman, or as prostitute, and makes carriages, and toys, and fashionable dresses, and gradually learns from the rich man to live like him not by work but by obtaining from others by various expedients the riches they have accumulated-and so he becomes perverted and perishes. And it was this population perverted by city-wealth which forms the town-poverty I wished to aid but was unable to deal with.

And indeed one need but consider the position of those country folk who come to town to earn money for bread or for taxes, when they see everywhere around them the insanely squandered thousands and the easily acquired hundreds, while they themselves have to earn kopeks by heavy toil, to be surprised that any of them remain working people, and that they do not all turn to the easier, ways of obtaining money, by trading, cattle-dealing, mendicancy, vice, fraud, or even robbery.

You know it is only we who share in the unceasing orgy that goes on in the towns, who can be so accustomed to it that it seems to us natural for one person to live in five enormous rooms heated by fuel enough to cook the food and warm the lodgings of twenty families; to employ two horses and two attendants to carry us half a mile; to cover our parquet-floors with rugs, and to spend, I will not say five or ten thousand rubles on a ball, but say twenty-five rubles on a Christmas Tree, and so on. But a man who needs ten rubles for bread for his family, or whose last sheep is being taken to pay a seven-ruble tax and who cannot obtain the money even by heavy toil, cannot get accustomed to it. We think it all seems natural to the poor. There are even people naive enough to say that the poor are very grateful to us for feeding them by our luxury. But being poor does not deprive men of reason, and they reason as we do. When we hear of a man losing or squandering ten or twenty thousand rubles, we immediately think, ‘What a foolish and good-for-nothing fellow he is to squander so much money uselessly, and how well I could have used that money for a building I have long wanted, or to improve my farm,’ and so forth; and the poor reason just in the same way when they see wealth senselessly wasted, and they do it the more insistently since they need the money not to satisfy some caprice but to supply things they urgently need. We are much mistaken when we think that the poor c fail to see this, and can calmly look at the luxury surrounding them.

They never have admitted and never will admit that it is right for some to have a continual holiday while others must always fast and work. At first it astonishes and angers them to see it. Then they grow accustomed to it; and seeing that such arrangements are considered legitimate, they themselves try to avoid work and to share in the perpetual holiday. Some succeed and become such ever-feasting folk, others gradually insinuate themselves into an approach to that position, others again break down without having attained their aim, and having lost the habit of working, fill the brothels and doss-houses.

Two years ago we took a peasant lad from the village as a manservant. He did not get on with the footman and was dismissed. He found a place with a merchant, satisfied his master, and now goes about in showy boots and wearing a chain across his waistcoat. In his place we engaged a married peasant. He took to drink and lost some money. We

engaged a third man. He was intemperate, and having drunk all his clothes, loafed for a long time about the doss-houses. An old man-cook took to drink in town and fell ill. A footman who used to drink desperately, but who in the country had avoided vodka for five years, took to drink again last year while living in Moscow without his wife who used to restrain him, and he ruined his whole life. A lad from our village is living with my brother as manservant. His grandfather, a blind old man, came to me while I was staying in the country and asked me to shame his grandson into sending ten rubles towards the payment of the taxes, as otherwise he would have to sell his cow. ‘He always says: one has to dress properly,’ said the old man; ‘well he has got himself boots and that is enough, or else what is it he wants? Does he want to have a watch?’ said the grandfather, expressing by those words the insanest proposition he could think of. The proposition was indeed senseless if one knew that the old man had gone through the whole of Lent without being able to afford any oil with his food, and that he was losing the wood he had cut because he was unable to pay a ruble and twenty kopeks he owed; but it turned out that the old man’s insane jest was an actual fact. The lad came to me in a black overcoat of good cloth and wearing boots for which he had paid eight rubles. A few days earlier he had taken ten rubles in advance from my brother and had bought the boots. And my children, who have known the lad since childhood, tell me that he really considers it necessary to provide himself with a watch. He. is a very good-natured lad, but he thinks he will be laughed at till he has a watch. So a watch is necessary. This year in our house a housemaid, a girl of eighteen, had an affair with the coachman. She was dismissed. Our old nurse, with whom I spoke about it, reminded me of another poor girl whom I had forgotten. She too during our short stay in Moscow ten years ago had an affair with a footman. She also was dismissed, and ended in a brothel, dying of syphilis in the hospital before she was twenty. We only need look around us to be horrified at the infection which-not to speak of the factories and workshops that serve our luxury-we by our luxury directly and immediately diffuse among the very people we afterwards wish to help.

And so looking into the nature of the town poverty I was unable to help, I saw that its first cause was that I collect what the country folk need and take it to town. The second cause was that here in town, by means of what I have collected in the country, I by my insensate luxury tempt and corrupt those country folk who follow me to town in order to get back somehow or other what was taken from them in the village.

Chapter 14

FROM quite an opposite side I came to the same conclusion. Remembering all my relations with the city poor during that period, I saw that one reason I was unable to help them was that they were insincere and untruthful with me. They all regarded me not as a man but as a means. I could not get into touch with them: perhaps, thought I, I do not know how to; but without sincerity it was impossible to help them. How can one help a man who does not tell one his whole position? At first I blamed them for this (it is so natural to blame others), but a single word from a remarkable man-namely, Sutaev,1 who was staying with me at the time, explained the case to me and showed me where the

1 Sutaev (previously alluded to) was a peasant sectarian whom Tolstoy held in high esteem.-A. M.

cause of my failure lay. I remember that Sutaev’s remark struck me forcibly even then, but I only understood its full significance later. It was at the time when my self-delusion was at its height. I was sitting at my sister’s; Sutaev also was there and my sister was asking me about my enterprise. I began telling her and, as always happens when one is not sure of what one is doing, I told her with great enthusiasm, warmth, and verbosity, both what I was doing and what might come of it. I told her how we were going to look after the orphans and old folk, to send back to their villages peasants who could not get on in town; how we should make the path of reform easy for the vicious, and how, if only this affair succeeded, not a single man in Moscow would be left without help. My sister sympathized with me and we talked about it. During this conversation I glanced at Sutaev. Knowing his Christian life and the importance he attaches to charity, I expected his approval and spoke so that he should understand me. I addressed my sister, but what I said was meant rather for him. He sat immovable in his black tanned sheepskin coat which, peasant-fashion, he wore indoors as well as out of doors, but he seemed not to hear us and to be absorbed in his own thoughts. His small eyes were dim as though directed inwards. Having said my say, I turned to him and asked what he thought of it.

‘It’s all useless,’ said he.

‘Why?’

‘The whole Society you’re starting will be no use, and no good will come of it,’ repeated he with conviction.

‘Why not? Why will it be no use to help thousands, or even hundreds, of unfortunates? Is it wrong to clothe the naked and feed the hungry as the Gospel tells us to?’

‘I know, I know! But you’re not doing the right thing. Is that the way to help? You go out walking and a man asks you for twenty kopeks. You give it. Is that charity? Give him spiritual charity, teach him! But what have you done? Merely got rid of him!’

‘No, that’s not what we are talking about. We want to find out the need that exists, and to help with money and work and find employment for those who require it.’

‘You won’t do anything with those people that way.’

‘What do you mean? Are they to be left to die of cold and hunger?’

‘Why should they die? Are there so many of them?’

‘Many of them !’ said I, thinking he treated the matter so lightly because he did not know what an immense number there were. ‘Do you know that in Moscow alone there are, I suppose, some twenty thousand cold and hungry people? And in Petersburg, and in other towns...!’

He smiled.

‘Twenty thousand! And how many homes are there in Russia alone? A million?’ ‘Well, what of it?’

‘What of it!’ His eyes gleamed, and he became animated. ‘Why, let us divide them among us. I am not rich, but I will at once take two. There is that lad you had in your kitchen. I have asked him, but he won’t come. If there were ten times as many we could place them

all. You take one, I’ll take another. We could go to work together. He would see how I work, and would learn how to live. We would sit at one table and he would hear a word now from me and now from you. That is charity, but your scheme is quite useless.’

This simple remark struck me. I could not but acknowledge its justice; but it then seemed to me that, though it was true, what I had begun might perhaps also be useful. But the farther I went with the affair and the more I came in contact with the poor, the oftener I remembered those words and the more significance for me did they acquire. Indeed, I drive up in an expensive fur coat, or in my own carriage; or a man who has no boots sees my two thousand ruble lodgings, or even merely sees that I give away five rubles without regret because it comes into my head to do so; and he knows that if I give away rubles like that, it is because I have collected many and have a lot of superfluous ones I have not given away but on the contrary have extracted with ease from other people. What can he see in me but a man who has taken what ought to be his? And what feeling can he have towards me but a desire to get back as many as possible of the rubles I have taken from him and from others? I want to get into touch with him, and complain that he is not frank; but I fear to sit on his bed lest I should get lice or be infected, and I dare not let him into my room. When he comes, hungry, to see me, he has to wait in the hall (if he is lucky) or in the porch. Yet I say he is to blame that I cannot get into touch with him and that he is not frank!

Let the most cruel of men try to gorge himself on five-course dinners among people who have eaten little and eat only black bread. No one will find it possible to eat and see the hungry folk licking their lips. So, to be able to eat tasty food where there are hungry people, it is first of all necessary to hide oneself from them and eat where they cannot see one. And that is just what we do first of all.

And I looked more simply at our life and saw that to come in close touch with the poor is not difficult for us just by accident, but that we purposely arrange our life so as to make such contact difficult.

More than this, standing on one side to look at our life-the life of the rich-I saw that all that is considered as welfare in our life consists in, or at any rate is inseparably bound up with, what separates us as far as possible from the poor. Indeed all the efforts of our wealthy life, beginning with food, clothes, dwellings, our cleanliness, and even our very education-have as their chief aim to segregate us from the poor. And on thus dividing ourselves-separating ourselves with impassable walls-from the poor, at least nine-tenths of our wealth is spent. The first thing a man who gets rich does is to cease to eat out of the common bowl;1 he gets crockery, and separates himself from the kitchen and the servants.

He feeds his servant well that her saliva may not flow at sight of his tasty food, and he eats by himself: but as it is dull eating alone, he devises ways of improving the food and decorating the table, and the very manner of taking our food (dinners) becomes a subject of vanity and pride; and the way of partaking of food becomes a way of separating himself from others. It is unthinkable for a rich man to invite a poor man to his table. One must know how to take a lady to table, how to bow, to sit, to eat, to use a fingerbowl, and

1 In a Russian peasant family it is usual for all to eat out of one common family bowl, each with his own wooden spoon.-AM.

only the rich know how to do all that. The same occurs with clothes. If a rich man wore simple clothes merely to protect his body from the cold: an overcoat, a sheepskin, felt and leather boots, a peasant coat, trousers, and shirt-he would need very little, and he could not, if he had two sheepskins, refuse to give one to a man who had none; but a rich man begins by having apparel made for him which consists of several articles and is only suitable for special occasions and therefore will not do for a poor man. He has dress-coats, vests, pea-jackets, patent leather shoes, capes, shoes with French heels, fashionable clothes composed of small pieces, hunting dress, travelling jackets, and so forth, which are suitable only in conditions remote from poverty. Thus clothes also become a means of separation from the poor. Fashion makes its appearance, which is just what separates the rich from the poor. It is the same, even more clearly, with our dwelling places. In order to live alone in ten rooms it is necessary that this should not be seen by those who are living ten in a room. The richer a man is the more difficult it is to make one’s way to him-the more porters there are between him and the poor, and the less possible is it to take a poor man over his carpets and seat him in a satin chair. It is the same with means of conveyance. A peasant driving in a cart or on a carrier’s sledge must be very harsh not to give a lift to a traveller on foot-there is room and opportunity for him to do so. But the finer the carriage the more remote the possibility of giving a lift to anyone. Some of the smartest vehicles are even named ‘sulkys’.

The same is true of the whole manner of life expressed by the word cleanliness.

Cleanliness! Who does not know people, especially women, who make a great virtue of this cleanliness? And who does not know the devices of this cleanliness, which are endless when obtained by the labour of others? Who among those who have become rich does not know by experience with what difficulty and trouble he accustomed himself to this cleanliness, which only confirms the proverb, ‘White hands love other people’s work’?

To-day cleanliness consists in changing one’s shirt every day; to-morrow in changing twice a day. To-day in washing one’s neck and hands every day; to-morrow one’s feet also, after tomorrow one’s whole body each day and with some special friction besides. To-day one has a table-cloth for two days; to-morrow a fresh one every day; and then two a day. To-day the footman’s hands must be clean; to-morrow he must wear clean gloves and in clean gloves must bring in a letter on a clean tray. And there are no limits to this cleanliness when it is obtained by other people’s labour-and which is of no use to anyone except as a means of separating oneself from others and making intercourse with them impossible.

More than that, when I looked into the matter I became convinced that the same thing is true of what is generally called education.

Language does not deceive; it calls by its true name what people understand by that name. What the common folk call ‘education’ is, fashionable dress, refined conversation, clean hands, and a particular kind of cleanliness. Of such a man in contradistinction to others, they say that he is an ‘educated man’. In a rather higher circle they mean by ‘education’ the same that is meant among the people, but to the conditions of ‘education’ are added piano-playing, a knowledge of French, ability to write a Russian letter without mistakes in spelling, and yet more external cleanliness. In a still higher circle by

‘education’ is meant all this, with the addition of a knowledge of English, and a diploma from one of the higher educational institutions, and a yet higher degree of cleanliness. But the first, the second, and the third kind of education are essentially one and the same. ‘Education.’ consists of those forms and that knowledge which will separate a man from others. It’s object is the same as that of cleanliness-to separate us from the mass of the poor, in order that those cold and hungry people may not see how we make holiday. But to hide oneself is impossible, and they do see.

And thus I became convinced that the reason it was impossible for us, the rich, to help the town poor, lay also in the impossibility of coming into close touch with them, and that this impossibility we ourselves create by our whole life and by the whole use we make of our wealth. I became convinced that between us-the rich-and the poor there stands a wall of cleanliness and education that we have erected and reared by our wealth, and to be able to aid the poor we have first of all to destroy that wall, so that we might apply Sutaev’s method of distributing the poor among us. And from this side, too, I reached the same conclusion to which the course of my reflections on town poverty had brought me: that the cause of that poverty is our wealth.

Chapter 15

I BEGAN to examine the matter from yet another side-the purely personal one. Among the things which particularly struck me during the time of my philanthropic activity there was a very strange one for which I was long unable to find an explanation. It was this: every time it chanced, in the street or at home, that I gave some small coin to a pauper without talking to him, I saw, or it seemed to me that I saw, pleasure and gratitude on his face and I myself experienced a pleasant sensation at such times. I saw that I had done what the man wanted and expected of me. But if I stopped to speak to the man, and questioned him sympathetically about his former and his present life, entering more or less into detail, I felt that I could not give him three or twenty kopeks, and I began rummaging in my purse, doubting how much to give, and always gave him more, and always saw that the man went away dissatisfied. If I entered into still closer communication with him my doubts as to how much to give increased still more, and no matter what I gave the man became yet more gloomy and more dissatisfied. As a general rule it turned out that if after closer contact with a poor man I gave him three rubles or more, I nearly always saw gloom, dissatisfaction, and even resentment on his face, and it even happened that when I had given ten rubles he went away without even saying thank you, as though I had offended him. And on such occasions I always felt ill at ease, ashamed of myself, and guilty. If I kept in touch with a poor man for weeks, months, and years, and helped him, told him my views, and came into close touch with him, my relations with him became a torment and I saw that the poor man despised me. And I felt that he was right to do so.

If I go along the street and he, standing there, begs three kopeks of me among others walking or driving past, and I give it him, I am for him a passer-by and a good, kindly passer-by-one who gives a thread towards making a shirt for the naked. He expects nothing more than a thread, and if I give it he blesses me sincerely. But if I stop with him, talk to him as to a fellow man, and show that I wish to be more than a passer-by to him; if as often happens he weeps while telling me his woe, he no longer regards me merely as a

passer-by, but sees what I want him to see in me-a kindly man. But if I am a kindly man my kindness cannot stop at twenty kopeks, or at ten rubles, or at ten thousand. It is impossible to be good-natured only a little. Suppose I have given him much-set him up, clothed him, put him on his feet so that he may live without depending on others, but for some reason-misfortune or his own weakness and viciousness-he again lacks the overcoat, linen, and money which I gave him-is again hungry and cold and has again come to me-why should I refuse him? If the reason of my activity is to attain a certain material result: to give him so many rubles or such and such an overcoat, I might, once I had given them, be at rest; but the reason of my activity is not that, its reason is that I wish to be a kindly man, that is to say I wish to see myself in every other man. Everyone understands kindliness in this way and not otherwise. And therefore if he drinks all you give him twenty times over, and if he is again cold and hungry, you-if you are a kindly man-cannot help giving to him again, and can never cease giving if you have more than he has. And if you draw back, you thereby show that all you did you did not because you were a kindly man, but because you wished to seem kindly in his eyes and in the eyes of others.

And with such people, from whom I had to draw back and cease giving and thereby renounce kindliness, I experienced a tormenting sense of shame.

What was that shame? I felt it at Lyapin House, and before and after that in the village whenever I happened to give money or other things to the poor, and during my visits to the town poor.

One recent instance of this shame vividly reminded me of it and supplied me with an explanation of the shame I experienced when giving money to the poor.

It occurred in the country. I wanted twenty kopeks to give to a pilgrim, and sent my son to borrow them from someone; he brought the pilgrim the money and told me he had got it from our man-cook. A few days later some more pilgrims came and I again wanted twenty kopeks. I had a ruble, and remembering that lowed money to the cook, I went to the kitchen hoping to get change. I said: ‘I borrowed twenty kopeks of yours, here’s a ruble...’ Before I had finished speaking he called his wife from the next room and said: ‘Take it, Parasha.’ Thinking she understood what I wanted, I handed her the ruble. I must mention that the cook had been with us only a week and though I had seen his wife I had never spoken to her. Just as I was going to ask her for the change, she quickly bent over my hand and wished to kiss it,1 evidently supposing that I was giving her the ruble. I muttered something, and left the kitchen. I felt ashamed more painfully ashamed than I had done for years. I even writhed and was conscious of making grimaces, and I groaned with shame as I ran out of the kitchen. This shame, which seemed to me quite undeserved and unexpected, startled me, especially as it was long since I had experienced such a feeling, and because it seemed to me that I, as an old man, was living in a way that did not deserve such shame. It struck me very much. I mentioned the occurrence to my family and to some acquaintances, and they all agreed that they would have felt as I did. And I began to ask myself why it had made me feel ashamed. An incident that had happened to me previously in Moscow supplied me with the answer.

1 A common way of expressing gratitude in Russia.-A. M.

I pondered on that incident, and the shame I had felt with the cook’s wife became intelligible, and all the feelings of shame experienced during my period of Moscow charity, and which I now constantly experience when I happen to give people anything more than such petty contributions to mendicants and pilgrims as I am accustomed to give and consider not as charity but as decency and politeness. If a man asks you for a light, you must light a match for him if you have one. If a man asks for three or twenty kopeks, or even for a few rubles, you must give it if you have it. It is a matter of politeness and not of charity.

The incident was this: I have already mentioned two peasants with whom, two years ago, I used to saw wood. One Saturday evening, in the dusk, I was walking with them to town. They were going to their master to get their wages. Near the Dragomilov Bridge we met an old man. He asked for alms and I gave him twenty kopeks. As I gave it I thought that my charity would have a good effect on Semen, with whom we had been talking of divine things. Semen was that Vladimir peasant who had a wife and two children in Moscow. He also stopped, turned up the skirt of his long coat, drew out his purse, and rummaging in it, took out a three-kopek piece which he gave to the old man, asking for two kopeks change. The old man showed that he had two three-kopek pieces and a one-kopek. Semen looked at these, and was on the point of taking the one kopek, but changed his mind, took off his cap, made the sign of the cross, and went on, leaving the old man the three kopeks. I knew Semen’s position. He had no house and no property. His earnings up to the day when he gave those three kopeks amounted to six rubles and fifty kopeks. So that six rubles and fifty kopeks represented his total savings. My savings equalled about six hundred thousand rubles. I had a wife and children and so had Semen. He was younger than I and had fewer children; but his children were young while I had two already old enough to work, so that apart from our savings our positions were alike; perhaps mine was even somewhat the better. He gave three kopeks, I gave twenty. What had he and what had I given? What ought I to have given to match his gift? He had six hundred kopeks: he gave one of them, and then two more. I had six hundred thousand rubles. To do what he did, I should have given three thousand rubles and asked for two thousand rubles change, and if there was no change I should have left those two thousand rubles also, made the sign of the cross, and gone on my way; quietly talking of how factory hands live and of the price of liver on the Smolensk market. I thought of this at the time, but only much later was I able to draw from that instance the conclusion inevitably flowing from it. That conclusion seems so unusual and strange that despite its mathematical certainty one needs time to grow accustomed to it. It always seems as if there must be some mistake about it, but there is none. There is only the terrible tog of delusion in which we live.

That deduction, when I reached it and recognized its certainty, explained to me my feeling of shame with the cook’s wife and with all the poor people to whom I gave, or give, money.

What indeed is this money I give to the poor, and which the cook’s wife thought I was giving to her? In most cases it is such a small fraction of my property that it cannot be expressed in figures intelligible to Semen or to the cook’s wife; it is generally about a one-millionth part. I give so little that for me it is not and cannot be a deprivation; it is only a diversion indulged in when and as I please. And that was how the cook’s wife

understood me. H I give a ruble or a twenty kopek piece to a man from the street, why should I not give her a ruble? To give away money like that is in her eyes the same as for gentlefolk to throw gingerbreads among a crowd to be scrambled for; it is an amusement for those who possess much ‘mad money’. I was ashamed because the mistake she made showed me plainly how she, and all poor people, must regard me: ‘He throws mad (that is, unearned) money about.’

What indeed is my money, and where has it come from? Part of it I have got from the land I inherited from my father. A peasant sells his last sheep or cow to pay it to me. The other part of my money I have got for my writings, for books. If my books are harmful I only place temptation in the path of those who buy them and the money I receive is ill-gotten; but if my books are of use the case is still worse. I do not give them to people, but say, ‘Give me seventeen rubles,1 and then I will let you have them.’ And as in the former case the peasant sold his last sheep, so here a poor student, a teacher, or any poor man, deprives himself of things he needs, to give me that money. And I have thus got together much money, and what do I do with it? I bring it to town and give some of it to the poor if they also come to town and obey my whims and clean the pavement and my lamps and boots, and work for me in factories. For this money I get all I can out of them: that is, I try to give them as little, and to take as much, as possible. And quite unexpectedly, without any particular reason, I suddenly begin giving away this same money to those same poor people; not to all of them, but to some whom I select. How can each of them help thinking that perhaps he may have the luck to be one of those with whom I shall amuse myself when I distribute my mad money?

That is how they all regard me, and how the cook’s wife also regarded me. And I was so greatly deluded that I called ‘doing good’, this chucking away farthings with one hand to those whom it pleased me to select, while gathering thousands from the poor with the other! It is not surprising that I felt ashamed.

Yes, before doing good I must myself stand aside from evil, in conditions where one may cease to do evil. For my whole life is evil. I might give away a hundred thousand rubles and still not be in a position to do good, for I should still have five hundred thousand left. Only when I have nothing left shall I be in a position to do even a little good, if but as much as the prostitute who for three days looked after the sick woman and her baby. And that had seemed to me so little! And I dared to think of doing good! What I felt from the first at the sight of the hungry and cold people at Lyapin House: namely, that I was to blame for it, and that one could not, could not, could not go on living as I was doing, was the one thing that was really true!

What then must we do? To this question, if anyone still needs an answer, I will, God willing, furnish a detailed reply.

1 34s., the price of Tolstoy’s collected works at that time.-A, M.

Chapter 16

IT was hard for me to realize this, but when I came to it I was horrified at the delusion in which I had been living. I was up to my ears in the mire, yet thought I could drag others out of it.

What indeed do I want? I want to do good, to arrange that people should not be cold or hungry but should live in a way fit for human beings.

I want this, and I see that by violence, extortion, and various devices in which I participate, the workers’ bare necessities are taken from them, while the non-workers (of whom I am one) consume in superfluity the fruits of the labour of those who toil.

I see that this exploitation is so arranged that the more cunning and complex the devices a man employs (or which those from whom he inherits have employed) the more he commands of the work of others and the less he works himself.

First comes a Stieglitz, a Derviz,1 a Morozov,2 a Demidov,3 a Yusupov,4 and then the great bankers, merchants, landowners, and officials. Then the middle-sized bankers, merchants, officials, and landowners-of whom I am one. Then the lower order of petty traders, inn-keepers, usurers, police officers and constables, school teachers, chanters, and business clerks; then the house porters, footmen, coachmen, water-carriers, cabmen, and pedlars; and then at last come the working people, the factory-hands and peasants, who in number are to the others as ten to one. I see that the life of nine-tenths of the people-the workers-demands by its nature strain and labour as all natural life does, but that in consequence of the various devices which deprive these people of necessities and make their life hard, it becomes worse and more full of privations year by year, while our life-the life of the non-workers-by the help of science and art directed to that aim, becomes each year more superabundant, attractive, and secure.

I see that in our time working folk, especially the old men, women, and children, simply perish from intense labour and insufficient nourishment and that they are not sure of obtaining even the most elementary necessities; while side by side with this the non-working class, of which I am a member, is year by year more and more provided ,with superfluities and luxuries, becomes yet more and more secure, and has finally, among its lucky members (of whom I am one), reached such a degree of security as in olden times people only dreamt of in fairy tales. We have reached the condition of the owner of the magic inexhaustible purse; that is to say, a condition in which a man is not only completely freed from the law of labour for the support of life, but is able without labour to avail himself of all life’s bounties and to hand on that magic inexhaustible purse to his children or to whom he pleases. I see that the produce of man’s toil passes more and more from the labouring people to those who do no labour, and that the pyramid of the social structure is, as it were, reconstructed so that the foundation stones pass to the top, and the rapidity of this movement increases almost in geometrical progression. I see that what is happening is as though in an ant-hill the society of ants were to lose its sense of a

1 Prominent financiers and railway concessionaires in Russia when Tolstoy was writing this book.

2 The Morozovs were very wealthy cotton-mill owners, of peasant origin.

3 The Demidovs were the enormously wealthy founders of the mining industry in Russia.

4 The Princes Yusupov were very large landowners, having held important official positions from the time of Peter the Great. They are descendants of a Khan of the Nogay tribe.

common law, and some ants began to carry the produce of toil from the bottom of the heap to the top, ever narrowing the base and enlarging the top and so compelling the other ants to shift from the base to the top. I see that the ideal of an industrious life has been replaced by the ideal of a magic purse. The rich, and I among them, have by various devices obtained that magic purse for themselves, and to enjoy it we move to town-that is, to the place where nothing is grown but everything is consumed. The poor labouring man who is plucked that the rich man may have this magic purse, tries to follow him to town, and there also takes to tricks, and either secures a position in which while working little he obtains much, thus laying yet more burdens on the working folk; or, not reaching such a position, he perishes and becomes one of those cold and hungry inmates of the night lodging-houses-who are increasing in number with extraordinary rapidity.

I belong to the class who by various devices deprive the working people of necessities, and who by these devices have provided a magic purse for themselves which is a temptation to those same unfortunates. I want to aid people, and therefore it is clear, above all, that I should not pluck them as I am doing, and on the other hand I should not tempt them. Otherwise, by most complex cunning and cruel devices, which have been elaborated through the ages, I have arranged for myself the condition of any owner of a magic purse, that is, a condition which enables me without ever doing any work, to compel hundreds and thousands of people to work for me-as I am doing; and I imagine that I pity people and wish to help them. I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means-except by getting off his back.

It is really so simple. If I want to aid the poor, that is, to help the poor not to be poor, I ought not to make them poor. But as it is at my own choice I give away to the poor who have strayed from the path of life, rubles, or tens or hundreds of rubles; but of exactly such rubles I take thousands from people who have not yet strayed from the path, and thus make them poor and also pervert them.

It is very plain; yet it was terribly difficult for me to understand it fully without any compromises or excuses which would justify my position; but as soon as I acknowledged my guilt all that had before seemed strange, complicated, obscure, and insoluble, became quite intelligible and simple. Above all, my own path of life resulting, from this explanation became simple, clear and agreeable, instead of being tangled insoluble and tormenting, as it had been before.

Who am I who wish to help people? I wish to help people and-having got up at noon after playing bridge with four candles on the table-enfeebled, pampered, needing the aid and service of hundreds of people, I came to help whom? People who rise at five o’clock, sleep on boards, feed on bread and cabbage, are able to plough, to mow, to fix an axe-handle, to plane, to harness a horse, and to sew-people who in strength, endurance, skill, and abstemiousness are a hundred times superior to me who come to help them! What else but shame could I experience on coming into contact with these people? The weakest among them-a drunkard living in Rzhanov House, whom they call a loafer-is a hundred times more industrious than I; his balance (so to say), that is, the proportion between what he takes from people and what he gives to them, is a thousand times superior to my balance if I reckon what I take from people as against what I give to them.

And those are the people I go to help. I go to help the poor. But who is poor? Not one of them than I am. I am a quite enfeebled, good-for-nothing parasite, who can only exist under most exceptional conditions found only when thousands of people labour to support a life that is of no value to anyone. And it is I, an insect devouring the leaf of the tree, who wish to aid this growth and health of that tree and wish to heal it.

I spend my whole life in this way; eat, talk, and listen; I eat, write, or read, that is again talk and listen; I eat and play; I eat and again talk and listen; I eat and go to bed; and so it is every day, and I am unable, and do not know how, to do anything else. And that I may do this it is necessary that from morning to evening the porter, the peasant, the man and woman cook, the footman, the coachman and laundress, should work; to say nothing of those working people who are needed that these coachmen, cooks, footmen and the rest should have utensils and the things with which and on which they work for me: axes, barrels, brushes, crockery, furniture, glasses, blacking, paraffin, hay, wood-fuel, meat. And all these people work hard every day and all day, that I may be able to talk, eat and sleep. And it was I, this wretched man, who imagined that I could help others-help the very people who were supporting me.

It is not surprising that I did not help anyone and that I felt ashamed, but it is surprising that such an absurd idea could have occurred to me. The woman who tended the sick old man helped him, the peasant woman who cut a bit of bread from the loaf she had obtained from the soil, helped a beggar; Semen, who gave three kopeks he had earned, helped the beggar, because those three kopeks really represented work he had done; but I had served no one, had worked for no one, and knew well that my money did not represent work I had done.

And I came to feel that in money itself, in the very possession of it, there is something evil and immoral; and that money itself, and the fact that I possess it, is one of the chief causes of the evils I saw around me-and I asked myself: What is money?

Chapter 17

MONEY! What is money?

Money represents work. I have even met educated people who declare that money represents the work of him who possesses it. I confess that m an obscure way I formerly shared that opinion but I felt it necessary to know what money really is, and to find this out I turned to science.

Science says that there is nothing unjust or harmful in money, but that it is a natural condition of social life, necessary: (1) for convenience of exchange, (2) for fixing a measure of value, (3) for savings, and (4) for payments. The obvious fact that if I have three surplus rubles in my pocket which I can spare, I can at a whistle call together in any civilized town a hundred people who for those three rubles will perform most laborious, repulsive, and degrading tasks, is not due to the nature of money but to the very complex conditions of our economic life. The power some people have over others does not arise from money, but from the fact that the labourer does not receive the full value of his labour. That he does not receive the full value of his labour results from the nature of capital, rent, and wages, and from complex relations between these and the items of

production, distribution, and consumption, of wealth. In plain Russian it results that those who have money can twist those who have none into ropes. But science says that the truth of the matter does not lie in that. Science says that three factors enter into every kind of production: land, stored up labour (capital), and labour. From different interactions of these factors on one another, and because the first two factors-land and capital-are not in the hands of the workers but in those of other people-and from very intricate combinations arising from this, the enslavement of some people by others results. From what does the dominion of money, which amazes us by its injustice and cruelty, arise? Why do some people rule over others by means of money? Science says that this is due to the division of the factors of production, and from combinations that result there from and oppress the labourers. This reply always seemed to me strange, not merely because it leaves out one part of the question-namely, the significance of money in the matter-but also by its division of the factors of production, which at first sight always strikes one as artificial and not in accord with the facts. It is asserted that in all production three factors are always engaged: land, capital, and labour, and thereupon it is always assumed that wealth (or what represents it-money) is naturally subdivided among those who own these factors: the rent-the value of the land-belongs to the landlord; the interest to the capitalist; and wages-the payment for work-to the working man. Is that so? First of all, is it true that in all production these three factors are engaged?

Around me while I write this, hay is being produced. Of what is this production made up? I am told: of the land on which the grass has grown; of capital-the scythes, rakes, pitchforks, and carts necessary for gathering the hay; and of labour. But I see that this is not true. Besides the land the sun, water, and the social organization (which preserves these fields from trespass), the workers’ knowledge, and their ability to speak and to understand words, and many other factors which for some reason political economy does not take into account-all take part in the production of this hay.

The power of the sun is just such a factor of all production as the land, and is yet more necessary. I can imagine a condition (say in a town) in which people assume a right to shut. off the sun from others by walls or trees; why is it not included among the factors of production? Water is another factor as essential as land. So is the air also. And I can again imagine people deprived of water and of pure air because other people claim an exclusive right to the water and the air that is needed. Social security is another such essential factor, and food and clothing for the workers are also such factors of production, as some economists admit education and the ability to speak, which make it possible to apply various kinds of work, are other such factors. I could fill a whole volume with such omitted factors of production. Why then have just these three factors of production been selected and put at the basis of the science? Sunlight and water can be reckoned as separate factors of production just as land is the labourers’ food and clothing, knowledge, and its transmission, can be reckoned as separate factors of production, just like the labourers’ implements. Why are sunbeams, water, food, and knowledge not reckoned as separate factors of production, but only land, implements, and labour? Is it merely because only in rare instances do people claim rights in sunbeams, water, air, or the right to speak and to listen, while in our society such rights are constantly claimed in the use of land and the implements of labour? There is no other basis for it, and so I see, first, that the division of the factors of production into three only is quite arbitrary and does not rest on the nature of things. But perhaps this division is so natural to people that wherever

economic relations are formed these three, and only these three, factors of production come to the front. Let us see whether that is so. I look first of all around myself at the Russian settlers, of whom there are and have been millions. These settlers come to some new land, settle down on it, and begin to work; and it does not enter any of their heads that a man who does not work the land can have any right to it, and the land does not advance any separate claims of its own, on the contrary the settlers regard the land as a common possession and consider that every man has a right to mow and plough where he pleases and as much as he can manage. The settlers bring implements for the cultivation of the land, for growing vegetables, and for building their houses, and again it does not occur to anyone that the tools of labour can of themselves produce an income nor does that capital make any claim, but on the contrary the settlers consciously recognize that any profit charged for the loan of implements or for a loan of grain-that is, for capital-is unjust. The settlers work on free land with their own tools or with tools lent to them without interest, each on his own account, or all together at a common task, and in such a commune it is impossible to find rent, interest on capital, or wages. In speaking of such communes I am not inventing, but am describing what has taken place everywhere and happens now, not only among Russian settlers but everywhere, as long as nothing infringes man’s natural habits. I describe what appears to everyone natural and reasonable. People settle on the land and each one sets to work at what is natural to him; and each, having prepared what he needs for it, does his own work. If it is more convenient for them to work together they form an association, an artel; but neither in their separate farming nor in the artels are the factors of production separated, but there is only labour and the necessary conditions of labour: the sun which warms all, the air which people breathe, the water they draw, the land on which they work, clothes for their bodies, food for their stomachs, the crowbar, the spade, the plough, and the engine, with which people work; and it is evident that neither the sun, the air, the water, the land, nor the clothes for the body, nor the crowbar with which they work, nor the spade, nor the plough, nor the engine which they use in the artel can belong to anyone but to those who make use of the rays of the sun, breathe the air, drink the water eat the bread, cover their bodies, and work with the spade or the engine; because all these are needed only by those who use them. And when people act so, we all see that they act as is proper for men and as is reasonable. And so, observing the economic relations among men at the time of their formation, I do not see that the division of the factors of production into three is natural to man. On the contrary I see that it is unnatural and irrational. But perhaps it is only in primitive societies that the division into those three factors does not take place, while it is inevitable with an increase in population and the development of culture, since this division has taken place in European society and we cannot help acknowledging the accomplished fact. Let us see whether that is so. We are told that in European society the division of the factors of production has been completed that is, that some people possess the land, others the implements of production, and a third set is deprived of land and implements. The workers are deprived of land and of the implements of production. We are so accustomed to this assertion that we are no longer struck by its strangeness. But if we consider that expression, we at once perceive its incorrectness and even senselessness. There is an inner contradiction in the very expression. The conception of a labourer includes the conception-of the land on which he lives and of the tools he works with. If he did not live on the land and had no implements of labour he would not be a labourer.

There never has been or could be a labourer without land or implements. There cannot be an agricultural labourer without land on which to work, and without scythe, cart, and horse; nor can there be a shoemaker without a house on the land, without water, air, and implements of toil with which he works. If a peasant has no land, horse, or scythe, or a shoemaker has no house, water, or awl, this means that someone has driven him off the land and taken from him, or cheated him out of, his scythe, cart, horse, or awl, but it does not mean that there can be an agricultural labourer without a plough, or a shoemaker without tools. As a fisherman on land and without tackle is unthinkable unless someone has driven him off the water and taken his tackle, so is a peasant or shoemaker unimaginable without the land on which he lives and without implements of labour, unless someone has deprived him of land and taken away his tools.

There may be people who are driven from one spot to another and from whom their implements of toil have been taken, and who are compelled to work with other people’s tools at articles they do not need, but that does not indicate that such is the nature of production; it only means that there are cases when the natural conditions of production are infringed. If one accepts as the factors of production everything of which the worker may be deprived by other people’s violence why not consider a claim on a slave’s person to be a factor of production? Why not regard a claim to the sun’s rays, to the air, to the water, as being such factors? A man may appear who, having built a wall, shuts out the sun from his neighbour; there may be someone who diverts the water of a river into a pond and so pollutes the water; or someone may appear who regards another as his possession; but neither the first, nor the second, nor the third pretension, even if forcibly carried into effect, can be admitted as a basis for a division of the factors of production, and it is as incorrect to accept an imaginary right to the land and to the implements of toil as separate factors of production as it would be to reckon the imaginary right to control the rays of the sun, the air, the water, or the person of another man, as being such factors. There may be people who claim a right to the land and to a worker’s implements of toil, as there have been men who claimed a labourer’s person, and as there may be men claiming an exclusive use of the sun, of water, or of the air, and there may be men who drive the worker from place to place and forcibly take from him the produce of his toil as soon as it is made, as well as his implements of labour, and who compel him to work for a master and not for himself, as is done in factories-all this is possible; but there can still be no workman without land and without tools, just as a man cannot be another’s chattel despite the fact that men long declared that it was so.

Just as the assertion of a right of property in another man’s person cannot deprive a slave of his innate right to seek his own welfare rather than that of his owner-so now the assertion of a right of property in land and in other men’s implements of production, cannot deprive the labourer of each man’s innate right to live on the land and with his personal or communal tools to produce things he considers useful for himself. All that science, observing the present economic conditions, can say is that there exist claims made by certain people to the workers’ land and tools, in consequence of which for some of those workers (by no means for all) the conditions of production natural to man are violated in such a way that the workers are deprived of the land and of the implements of production and compelled to use other people’s tools; but it cannot be said that this casual infringement of the law of production is itself the law of production.

By affirming that this division of the factors of production is the basic law of production, an economist does what a zoologist would do who, seeing a great 1my greenfinches with clipped wings in little cages, should conclude that a little cage and a small water-pail drawn up along rails, are the essential conditions of the life of birds, and that the life of birds is composed of these three factors. However many finches there may be with clipped wings in cardboard cages, the zoologist should not consider cardboard cages a natural condition of birds. However many workers may be driven from their places and deprived of their produce and of the implements of their toil, the natural characteristic of a worker to live on the earth and produce with his own implements the things he needs will remain the same. There are the claims made by some people to the earth and to the labourers’ implements of toil, just as in the ancient world there were the claims of some men to own the persons of others; but as there cannot be a division of people into owners and slaves, such as people wished to establish in the ancient world, so there cannot be a division of the factors of production into land and capital, such as economists in present-day society wish to establish. But these unjustifiable encroachments by some men on the freedom of others, men of science call natural factors of production. Instead of taking its bases from the natural characteristics of human society, science has taken them from a specific case and, wishing to justify that specific case, has admitted one man’s right to the land whereon another feeds himself, and to the tools of labour with which another works; that is, it has admitted a right which never existed and never can exist and which bears a contradiction in its very expression, for the right a man claims to land he does not work on is really nothing but the right to use land I do not use, and the right to the tools of labour is nothing but the right to work with tools I do not work with. Science by its division of the factors of production asserts that the natural condition of the workman is the unnatural condition in which he finds himself, just as in the ancient world, by the division into citizens and slaves, people asserted that the unnatural condition of the slaves was a natural characteristic of man. That division, accepted by science merely to justify an existing evil which it has adopted as the basis of its investigations, has resulted in science vainly trying to furnish some kind of explanation of existing facts, and while denying the clearest and simplest answers to the questions presented, giving answers that amount to nothing.

The question for economic science is this: What is the cause of the fact that some people who have land and capital are able to enslave those who have no land or capital? The reply which common sense presents is that this results from money, which has the effect of enslaving people. But science denies this, and says that it does not result from the nature of money but from the fact that some people have land and capital and others have not. We ask: Why can people who have land and capital enslave those who have none?-and we are told: ‘Because they have land and capital.’ But that is what we were asking about. To be deprived of land and of the tools of production is enslavement. It is the old reply: tacit dormire quia habet virtus dormitiva.1 But life does not cease to present its essential question, and even science itself sees this and tries to give a reply, but cannot do so as long as it starts from the basis it has chosen and revolves in a vicious circle. To be able to do it, science should first of all renounce its false division of the factors of production, that is, should cease to take the results of phenomena for their causes, and should

1 It causes sleep because it has a sleep-giving quality.

first seek the nearest, and then the more remote, causes of those phenomena which form the subject of its investigation. Science should reply to the question: What is the reason of the fact that some people are deprived of the land and of the implements of production, while others possess them? Or what is the reason of the alienation of the land and the implements of labour from those who cultivate the land and use the implements? And as soon as science sets itself that question quite new considerations present themselves, turning upside down all the assumptions of the former quasi-science which revolved in a vicious circle of assertions that the poverty of the workers results from the fact that they are poor. To plain men it seems indubitable that the proximate cause of the enslavement of some people by others is money. But science denies this, and says that money is only an instrument of exchange which has nothing in common with the enslavement of people. Let us see whether that is so.

Chapter 18

WHERE does money come from? Under what conditions does a nation always have money, and under what conditions do we know nations not using it? A tribe lives in Africa or Australia, as in olden times the Scythians or the Drevlyans1 lived. Such a tribe lives, ploughing, raising cattle, and growing fruit. We hear of them at the dawn of history, and history begins with the incursion of conquerors. The conquerors always do one and the same thing: they take from the tribe all they can take, cattle, grain, woven stuffs, and even male and female prisoners, and carry it all off. Some years later the conquerors return, but the tribe has not yet recovered from its ruin and there is but little to be taken from it, so the conquerors devise other better ways of exploiting the tribe. These ways are very simple and occur naturally to everyone. The first method is personal slavery. This involves the inconvenience of having to direct the whole working force of the tribe and feed them all; so a second method naturally presents itself-that of leaving the tribe on its land, while claiming for oneself the ownership of the land and dividing it among one’s followers in order through them to exploit the people’s labour. But this method too has its inconveniences. The followers have to manage all the productive operations of the tribe; and a third method, as primitive as the others, is introduced-that of demanding a certain periodic tribute from the conquered. The conqueror’s aim is to take as much as possible of the people’s produce. Obviously, to do this, he must take the things that have the highest value among the tribesmen and that at the same time are not bulky but can conveniently be stored, such as skins and gold.

So the conqueror usually imposes on the family or tribe a periodic tribute in skins and gold and by this means exploits the toil of the people in the way most convenient to himself. The skins and the gold having been almost all taken from the tribe, the conquered people to obtain gold have to sell to one another and to the conqueror and his followers everything they have, both their property and their work. This same process went on in the ancient world and in the Middle Ages, and goes on still. In the ancient world, with the frequent conquest of one nation by another and in the absence of recognition of the equality of man, personal slavery was the most usual method by which some people enslaved others, and the centre of gravity of that enslavement rested on

1 A Slavonic tribe mentioned in early Russian history.

chattel slavery. In the Middle Ages the feudal system-that is, the property in land bound up with it, and serfdom-partly replaced chattel slavery, and the centre of gravity of the enslavement was shifted from the person to the land: in recent times, since the discovery of America and the development of trade and the influx of gold accepted as the general money standard, with the intensification of government power, money tribute has become the chief method of enslaving people and on it all the economic relations of man are based. In a volume of literary productions there is an article by Professor Yanzhul which gives the recent history of the Fiji Islands. If I wanted to invent a most striking illustration of the way in which the demand for money has become in our days the chief instrument by which some men enslave others. I could not invent anything more glaring and convincing than this true story, which is based on documentary evidence and occurred the other day.

The Fijians live in Polynesia on islands in the Southern Pacific Ocean. The whole group, Professor Yanzhul tells us, consists of small islands covering about 8,000 square miles. Only half of them are inhabited, by a population of 150,000 natives and 1,500 whites. The native inhabitants, who emerged from savagery long ago, are distinguished among the natives of Polynesia by their ability, and are capable of work and of development, as they have proved by rapidly becoming good farmers and cattle-breeders. They were thriving, but in 1859 the kingdom found itself in a desperate position. The Fijians and their King Thakombau needed money. They needed $45,000 for contributions or indemnities demanded by the United States of America for violence said to have been inflicted by Fijians on some citizens of the American republic.

To collect this sum the Americans sent a squadron, which suddenly seized some of the best islands as security and even threatened to bombard and destroy the settlements unless the contribution was paid to the American representatives by a given date. The Americans had been among the first white men to settle in Fiji with missionaries. Selecting or seizing under one pretext or another the best plots of land on the islands and laying out cotton and coffee plantations they hired whole crowds of natives, whom they bound by contracts the savages did not understand, or obtained through contractors who dealt in live chattels. Conflicts between such planters and the natives, whom they regarded as slaves, were inevitable, and a conflict of that kind served as pretext for the American demand for compensation. Despite its prosperity Fiji till then had been in the habit of making payments in kind, as was customary in Europe till the Middle Ages. The natives did not use money, and their trade was entirely done by barter; goods were exchanged for goods, and the few public or government levies were collected in country produce. What were the Fijians and their King Thakombau to do when the Americans categorically demanded $45,000 under threat of dire consequences in case of nonpayment. For the Fijians the figure itself was incomprehensible, not to speak of the money, which they had never seen in such quantities. Thakombau consulted with the other chiefs, and decided to turn to the Queen of England. At first he asked her to take the islands under her protection, and later on asked her simply to annex them. But the English treated this petition cautiously and were in no hurry to rescue the semi-savage monarch from his difficulties. Instead of a direct reply they fitted out a special expedition, in 1860, to investigate the Fiji Islands, in order to decide whether it was worth spending money on satisfying the American creditors and annexing the islands to the British dominions.

Meanwhile the American government continued to insist on payment, took possession, as security, of some of the best positions, and having observed the prosperity of the people, raised its demand from $45,000 to $90,000, and threatened to raise it still further if Thakombau did not pay promptly. So, pressed on all sides, poor Thakombau, who was ignorant of European methods of arranging credit transactions, began, on the advice of European settlers, to seek money from Melbourne merchants on any terms, even if he had to yield his whole kingdom to private persons. And so in Melbourne, in response to Thakombau’s appeal, a trading Company was formed. This Company, which took the name of the Polynesian Company, concluded an agreement with the Fiji rulers on terms very favourable to itself. Undertaking to meet the debt to the American government and engaging to pay it by certain fixed dates, the Company under its first agreement obtained 100,000, and later 200,000 acres, of the best land at its own selection, with freedom for all time from all taxes and duties for its factories, operations, and colonies, and for a prolonged period the exclusive right to establish banks in Fiji with the privilege of unlimited issue of bank-notes. Since the signing of that contract, finally concluded in 1868, the Fijians were confronted, side by side with their own government under Thakombau, by another power-the influential trading Company with great landed possessions on all the islands and a decisive influence in the government. Till then Thakombau’s government for the satisfaction of its needs had contented itself with what it obtained by various tributes in kind and by a small customs duty on imported goods. With the conclusion of this agreement, and the establishment of the powerful Polynesian Company, its financial position changed. An important part of the best land in its dominions passed over to the Company and so the taxes diminished; on the other hand, as we know, the Company had a right to the free import and export of goods, as a result of which revenue from the customs was also reduced. The natives, that is to say 99 per cent. of the population, had always been but poor contributors to the customs revenue, for they hardly used any European goods except a little cotton stuff and some metal ware; and now, when through the Polynesian Company the wealthier European inhabitants escaped the payment of customs dues, King Thakombau’s revenue became quite insignificant and he had to bestir himself to increase it. And so Thakombau consulted his white friends as to how to escape from his difficulties, and they advised him to introduce for the first time in the country direct taxation, and, no doubt to facilitate matters for him, it was to be in the form of a money-tax. The levy was instituted in the form of a general poll-tax of £1 on each male and four shillings on each woman in the islands.

Even to the present day in the Fiji Islands, as we have already mentioned, the cultivation of the soil and direct barter prevails. Very few natives have any money. Their wealth consists entirely of various raw produce and of cattle, but not of money. Yet the new tax demanded, at fixed dates and at all costs, a sum of money which for a native with a family came to a very considerable total. Till then a native had not been accustomed to pay any personal dues to the government except in the form of labour, while the taxes had all been paid by the villages or communes to which he belonged, from the common fields out of which he, too, drew his chief income. He had only one way out of the difficulty: to obtain money from the white colonists that is, to go either to a trader or a planter who had what he needed-money. To the first he had to sell his produce at any price, since the tax-collector demanded it by a given date, or he was even obliged to borrow money against future produce, a circumstance of which the trader naturally took

advantage to secure an unscrupulous profit; or else he had to turn to a planter and sell him his labour, that is to become a labourer. But it turned out that wages on the Fiji Islands, in consequence probably of much labour being offered simultaneously, were very low, not exceeding, according to the report of the present administration, a shilling a week for an adult male, or £2.125. a year; and consequently merely to obtain the money to pay his own tax, not to mention his family’s, a Fijian had to abandon his home, his family, his own land and cultivation, and often to move far off to another island and bind himself to a planter for half a year, in order to earn the £1 needed for the payment of the new tax; while for the payment of the tax for a whole family he had to seek other means. The result of such an arrangement can easily be imagined. From his 150,000 subjects Thakombau only collected £6,000; and then an intensive demand, previously unknown, began for taxes, and a series of compulsory measures. The local administration, previously honest, soon came to an understanding with the white planters who had begun to manage the country. The Fijians were taken to court for non-payment and sentenced, besides the payment of costs, to imprisonment for not less than half a year. The role of prison was played by the plantation of the first white man willing to pay the tax and legal costs for the prisoner. In this way the whites obtained cheap labour to any desired extent. At first this handing over to compulsory labour was permitted for a period of six months only, but later on the venal judges found it possible to sentence men even to eighteen months’ labour and then to renew the sentence. Very soon, in a few years, the picture of the economic condition of the inhabitants. of Fiji had completely changed. Whole flourishing districts had become half-depopulated and were extremely impoverished. The whole male population, except the old and the feeble, were working away from home for the white planters to obtain money needed for the payment of the tax, or to satisfy sentences of the court. Women in Fiji do hardly any agricultural labour, and so, m the absence of the men, the land was neglected or totally abandoned. In a few years half the population of Fiji had become slaves to, the white colonists. To improve their condition the Fijians again turned to England. A new petition appeared, to which were appended the names of many of the most notable persons and chiefs, begging to be made British subjects, and it was presented to the British consul. By this time England, thanks to its scientific expeditions, had not only studied but had even surveyed the islands and was well aware of the natural wealth of that beautiful corner of the globe. For these reasons the negotiations this time were crowned with full success, and in 1874, to the great dissatisfaction of the American planters, England officially entered into possession of the Fiji Islands, adding them to its colonies.

Thakombau died and a small pension was assigned to his heirs. The government of the islands was entrusted to Sir Hercules Robinson (Lord Rosmead), the Governor of New South Wales. During the first year of its annexation to England Fiji was without a government of its own, but Sir Hercules Robinson appointed an administrator. On taking the islands in hand the English government had a hard task to solve in fulfilling all that was expected of it. In the first place, the natives expected the abolition of the hateful poll-tax; the white colonists (who were partly American) either regarded the British rule distrustfully or (the British section) expected from it all kinds of benefits, for instance, the recognition of their dominion over the natives and the legalization of their claims to land they had seized, and so forth. The English government, however, proved competent to deal with the problem, and its first act was to abolish for ever the poll-tax which

occasioned the enslavement of the natives for the profit of a few colonists. But here Sir Hercules Robinson was confronted by a serious dilemma. It was necessary to annul the poll-tax to escape from which the Fijians had appealed to the British government, but at the same time, by the rules of English colonial policy, the colony had to pay its own way, that is to say, had to find means to meet the expenses of its administration. Yet with the abolition of the poll-tax the whole income of Fiji (from the customs dues) did not exceed £6,000, whereas the expenses of the administration demanded at least £70,000 a year. So Robinson, having abolished the money tax, devised a labour tax, that is, imposed obligatory labour on the Fijians, but this did not bring in the £70,000 required for his Own and his assistants’ maintenance. And matters did not progress till the appointment of a new Governor, Sir A. M. Gordon (Baron Stanmore), who, to obtain from the inhabitants the money needed for his own and his assistants’ support, devised the plan of not demanding money until there should be enough of it in circulation on the islands, but of collecting produce from the natives and selling it himself.

This tragic episode in the life of the Fijians is the clearest and best indication of what money is and of its significance. Here all is expressed: the first basis of slavery-cannon, threats, murder, the seizure of land, and also the chief instrument-money, which replaces all other means. What has to be followed through the course of centuries in an historic sketch of the economic development of nations, is here, when the various forms of monetary coercion have been fully developed, concentrated into a single decade. The drama begins with the American government sending ships with loaded cannon to the shores of the land, whore inhabitants it wishes to enslave.

The pretext for the threat is monetary, but the drama begins with cannon directed against all the inhabitants: women, children, the aged, and the innocent: an occurrence now being repeated in Africa, China, and Central Asia. That was the beginning of the drama: ‘Your money or your life,’ repeated in the history of all the conquests of all the nations; $45,000 and then $90,000, or a massacre. But there were no $90,000 available. The Americans had them. And then the second act of the drama begins: brief, bloody, terrible and concentrated slaughter has to be postponed, and changed for less noticeable, but more prolonged sufferings. And the tribe with its ruler seeks means to substitute monetary enslavement-slavery, for the massacre. It borrows money, and then the monetary forms of the enslavement of men are organized.

These forms at once begin to act like a disciplined army and within five years the whole work is done: the people are not only deprived of the right to use the land, and of their property, but also of their liberty; they are slaves.

The third act begins: the situation is too hard and the unfortunate people hear rumours that it is possible to exchange masters and go into slavery to someone else. (Of emancipation from the slavery imposed by money there is no longer any thought.) And the tribe calls in another master, to whom it submits with a request to mitigate its condition. The English come, see that the possession of these islands will make it possible for them to feed the drones of whom they have bred too many, and the English government annexes these islands with their inhabitants, but does not take them as chattel slaves and does not even take the land and distribute it to its own supporters. Those old

methods are now unnecessary. All that is necessary is that a tribute should be exacted; one large enough on the one hand to keep the slaves in slavery, and sufficient on the other to feed a multitude of drones.

The inhabitants had to pay £70,000 sterling. That is the fundamental condition on which England agreed to rescue the Fijians from their American slavery, and at the same time this was all that was necessary for the complete enslavement of the natives. But it turned out that under the conditions they were in the Fijians could not possibly pay £70,000. The demand was too great. The English modify the demand for a time, and take part of the claim in produce, in order, in due course, when money should be in circulation, to raise their exaction to its full amount. England did not act like the former Company, whose procedure may be compared to the first arrival of savage conquerors among a savage people, when all they want is to seize what they can get and to go away again, but England acts as a far-seeing enslaver: it does not at once kill the hen that lays the golden egg, but will even feed it, knowing the hen to be a good layer. At first she slackens the reins for her own advantage, in order later to pull them in and reduce the Fijians to the state of monetary enslavement in which the European and civilized world finds itself, and from which no emancipation is in sight.

Money is a harmless medium of exchange, only not when at the shores of a country loaded cannon are directed against its inhabitants. As soon as money is forcibly exacted at the cannon’s mouth, then inevitably that is repeated which occurred on the Fiji Islands and has been repeated, and is repeated, everywhere and always: in the case of the old Princes of Russia and the Drevlyans, and with all governments and their subjects. People who have the power to coerce others will do it by the forcible demand of such a quantity of money as will oblige the coerced to become the slaves of the coercers. And besides this, what happened in the case of the English and the Fijians always happens, namely that the coercers, in order to hasten the enslavement, will in their demands for money always exceed rather than understate the limit of what is needed for the purpose. They will reach that limit without exceeding it only if a moral feeling is present, and even if that feeling does exist, they will always reach it when they are themselves in want. But governments will always exceed that limit, first because a government has no moral feelings, and secondly because, as we know, governments are themselves in extreme want, due to wars and to the need of paying their supporters. Governments are always irredeemably in debt and, even if they wished to, could not help following the rule expressed by a Russian statesman of the eighteenth century, that ‘one must shear the peasant and not let him get overgrown’. All governments are irredeemably in debt, and this debt in its totality (apart from fortuitous diminutions in England and America) increases from year to year in a terrifying progression. Similarly do the budgets grow, that is the necessity of struggling with other aggressors and making payments of money and land to those who aid its own aggressions, and therefore the charges on land grown the same way. Wages do not grow-not on account of the law of rent, but because there is an exaction by violence, of payments to the state and for the land, which has the purpose of taking from people all their surplus so that to satisfy this demand they must sell their labour: for the exploitation of that labour is the object of the imposition. of the taxes. But the exploitation of that labour is only possible when, in the aggregate, more is demanded than the workers can pay without depriving themselves of nourishment. Raising the scale of wages would destroy the possibility of this slavery, and therefore, while there is

violence, it never can be raised. And this simple and intelligible action of one set of men on another, economists have called the ‘iron law’ while the instrument by means of which this action is produced they call a ‘medium of exchange’.

Money-this harmless medium of exchange is needed by men in their mutual intercourse. But why has there never been, or could there be, money in its present-day significance where no forcible demand for money-taxes exists? And why has there always been, and always will be as there is among the Fijians, the Kirgiz, the Africans, the Phoenicians, and in general among people who do not pay taxes-either the direct exchange of things for things, or else the use of casual tokens of value, such as sheep, furs, skins, or shells? Any particular kind of money; only obtains currency among people when it is forcibly demanded of them all. Only then does it become necessary to everyone that he may ransom himself from violence, and only then does it obtain a constant exchange value. And what then acquires value is not what is most convenient as a medium of exchange but what the government demands. If gold is demanded, gold will have value; if knucklebones were demanded, knuckle-bones would have value. If this were not so, why has the emission of this medium of exchange always formed, and why does it form, a prerogative of government? People-let us say the Fijians-have established a medium of exchange; well then let them exchange as they please, and you who have power-that is who have means to inflict violence-should not interfere with that exchange. But as it is, you coin money, forbidding anyone else to coin it, or else (as among us in Russia) you merely print bits of paper with the Tsar’s head on them and sign them with a particular signature, exacting penalties for any imitation of this money, and you distribute it to your assistants, and in payment of state and land taxes demand just these coins or these bits of paper with just that signature, and so much of it that a workman has to give his whole labour to obtain these same bits of paper, or coins, and you assure us that we need this money-as a ‘medium of exchange’. Men are all free and they do not oppress one another, do not, hold one another in slavery, only there is this money in use and an iron law according to which rent rises and wages dwindle to a minimum! The fact that half (and more than half) the Russian peasants are enslaved as labourers to landowners and to mill-owners, on account of direct and indirect taxes and land dues, does not at all mean, what is obvious, that the compulsory exaction of direct indirect, and land taxes paid in money to the government and to its assistants-the land-owners-compels workmen to go into slavery to those who take the money, but it means that money exists-a medium of exchange-and that there is an iron law!

Before the serfs were emancipated I could compel Vanka to do any kind of work, and if he refused I sent him to the rural police and they whipped his bottom till Vanka submitted. At the same time if I made Vanka overwork himself or did not give him land or food, the matter went before the authorities and I had to answer for it. Now men are free but I can make Vanka, Sidorka, or Petrushka do any kind of work, and if he refuses I do not give him money for his taxes and they will whip his bottom till he submits; besides which I can make a German, a Frenchman, a Chinaman or a Hindu who lacks land and bread, work for me by not giving him money to hire land or buy bread unless he submits to me. And if I make him work without food beyond his strength, and if I kill him with work, no one will say a word to me, and if in addition I have read books on political economy I may be firmly convinced that all men are free and that money does. not occasion slavery. The peasants have long known that ‘a ruble hits harder than an oak

cudgel’. But the economists do not wish to see this. To say that money does not cause slavery, is just like saying half a century ago that the serf law did not produce slavery. Economists say that despite the fact that the possession of money enables one man to enslave another, money is a harmless medium of exchange. Why should one not have said half a century ago, that despite the fact that the serf-law could enslave a man, the law was not a means of enslavement but a harmless medium of mutual service? Some people gave rough labour, others attended to the physical and mental welfare of the slaves and organized their work. I even think that that used to be said.

Chapter 19

IF this pseudo-science, political economy, were not occupied, like all the juridical sciences, with devising excuses for violence, it could not avoid taking note of the strange fact that the distribution of wealth-the circumstance that some people are deprived of land and capital and that some men enslave others-is all dependent on money, and only by means of money does one set of men now exploit the labour of others, that is, enslave others.

I repeat: a man who has money can buy up all the corn and starve another and make a complete slave of him through his need of bread. And this is done before our eyes on an enormous scale. It would seem necessary to seek the connexion between the phenomena of slavery and money; but science asserts with full confidence that money has nothing to do with the enslavement of men.

Science says: money is a commodity like any other the value of which is fixed by its cost of production, the only difference being that this commodity has been chosen as most convenient to serve as a standard of values, for savings, as a means of exchange, and to effect payments: one man makes boots and another grows grain, while a third raises sheep; and more conveniently to exchange their produce they introduce money which represents a proportionate amount of work, and by its means they can exchange leather soles for sheep’s ribs and ten pounds of flour.

The exponents of this pseudo-science are very fond of imagining such a state of affairs to themselves, but it never existed in the world. Such a conception of society is like the conception of a primitive uncorrupted perfect human society that philosophers used to be fond of devising. But there never was such a state. In all human societies where money has existed as such, violence has always been exerted by the strong and well armed against the weak and unarmed; and where there was violence the standard of values, money-whatever it may have been: cattle, hides, furs, or metals-inevitably lost that significance and became merely a means of ransom from violence. Money certainly has the innocuous qualities science enumerates, but they would be its essential qualities only in a society where there was no violence of man to man-in an ideal society; and in such a society money as money-a common measure of values-would not exist at all, just as it has not existed and could not exist in any society not subjected to general governmental violence. But in all societies known to us where money exists it has obtained importance as a medium of exchange only because it has served as an instrument of violence. And Its chief significance is not as a medium of exchange but as an instrument of violence. Where there is violence money cannot be a regular medium of exchange because it

cannot be a standard of values. It cannot be a standard of values because as soon as one man in a society can deprive another of the products of his labour, this standard is at once infringed. If horses and cows are brought to market some of which have been reared by their owners while others have been forcibly taken from those who reared them, it is plain that the price of horses and cows in that market will not correspond to the cost of rearing the stock, and that the prices of all articles will be altered as a consequence of this alteration, and money will not have fixed the price of those articles. Moreover if one can acquire a cow, a horse, or a house, by force, it is also possible to take money itself by force and with that money to obtain all kinds of produce. But if money itself is obtained by violence and used to purchase commodities, it quite loses every semblance of a medium of exchange. The oppressor, when he seizes the money and gives it for things produced by labour, does not exchange, but by means of money takes whatever he wants.

But even if such an imaginary and impossible society had existed in which, without any general governmental violence exercised over men, money-silver or gold-had the significance of a standard of values and a medium of exchange, even then as soon as violence was introduced money would at once lose that significance. An oppressor makes his appearance in such a society as a conqueror. This man, let us suppose, seizes cows, horses, clothing, and the houses of the inhabitants, but finds it inconvenient to deal with all these, and so it naturally occurs to him to take from these people whatever among them represents all kinds of values and can be exchanged for all kinds of articles, namely, money. Money at once ceases to have significance as a standard of values in that society, because the value of all articles will depend on the caprice of the oppressor. The article the oppressor needs most and for which he will give most money, will become the most valuable, and vice versa. So that in a society subjected to violence money at once acquires the predominant significance of a means whereby the oppressor exercises his violence, and it will retain significance as a medium of exchange among the oppressed only in so far and to such an extent as is convenient to the oppressor.

Let us imagine matters in such a society. Serfs furnish their owner with linen, poultry, sheep, and day-labour. The owner substitutes money dues for these payments in kind and fixes prices for the various articles brought him. Anyone who can supply no linen, corn, cattle, or day labour, may pay a fixed sum of money. Evidently among this owner’s serfs the price of articles will always depend on the arbitrary will of the serf owner. He uses the articles he receives; and some he needs more and others less, and accordingly fixes higher or lower prices for them. Evidently his whims or needs will decide the prices of these articles among those who have to pay him. If he needs grain he will fix a higher payment for not furnishing the allotted quantity of gram and a cheaper rate for not furnishing linen, cattle, and day-labour; and so those who have no grain will sell their produce, labour, linen, or cattle, to others in order to be able to buy grain to satisfy the proprietor. If the serf-owner decides to put all these obligations on a money basis, again the price of the commodities will not depend on their labour value but, first, on the amount of money the estate owner demands, and, secondly, on the question which of the articles produced by the peasants he most needs and for which therefore he will pay more, and for which less, money. The exaction by the estate-owner of money from the peasants would only fall to influence the price of articles among those peasants themselves-first, if the serfs of this owner lived in isolation from others and had no intercourse except among themselves and with their owner; and, secondly, if he used the

money not to purchase commodities in his own village, but outside it. Only under such conditions would the prices of the commodities though nominally altered, remain relatively true, and money would have the significance of a standard of values and of exchange; but if the peasants had economic relations with the surrounding population, the estate-owner’s greater or lesser demand for money would heighten or lower the price of the articles they produced, in relation to their neighbours. (If less money were demanded of their neighbours than of them, their produce would be sold more cheaply than that of their neighbours and vice versa.) And, secondly only if the money he collected were not used to purchase the productions of his own peasants would the estate-owner’s exaction of money from the peasants fail to influence the value of their produce. But if he uses the money to buy things his peasants produce, it is evident that among them the relation of prices between various commodities will constantly change according to the estate-owner’s purchases of this or that commodity. Let us suppose that one estate-owner charged very highly for permission to allow his serfs to work or trade on their own account while a neighbouring proprietor made a small charge for the same privilege, it is plain that within the domain of the former all commodities will be cheaper than in the domain of the second, and that prices in the one .domain and the other will depend directly on the increase or decrease of the dues the serfs have to pay. Such is one of the influences of violence on price. Another, resulting from the former, will consist in the relation between the values of the different products. Let us suppose that one estate-owner is fond of horses and pays well for them, while another likes towels and pays well for them. Evidently in the domain of both these owners the price for horses and towels will be high, and the price of these commodities will be out of proportion to that of cows and grain. Next day the man fond of towels dies, and his successor is fond of poultry: evidently the price of linen will fall and the price of poultry will rise. Where the violent coercion of one man by another exists m a society, the significance of money as a standard of values at once succumbs to the arbitrary will of the oppressor and its significance as a medium for the exchange of the products of toil gives way to its significance as the most convenient means of exploiting the labour of others. The oppressor needs the money not as a means of exchange, nor to fix the standard of values-he fixes that himself-but only for convenience in his oppression, since money can be stored up and money affords the easiest method of keeping the greatest number of people in slavery. To seize all the animals, in order always to have as many horses and cows and sheep as may be wanted, is inconvenient, for they have to be fed; and it is the same with grain, which may spoil; and it is the same with labour and the corvee: at one time a thousand labourers are wanted, at another time not even one. Money demanded from those who have none makes it possible to avoid all these inconveniences and always to have everything that is wanted, and just for this purpose does the oppressor need it. Besides that, money is required by the oppressor in order that his power to exploit the labour of others may not be limited to certain people but may extend to all who need money. If there was no money each estate-owner could exploit only the labour of his own serfs; but when two of them agree to take from their serfs money which those serfs do not possess, they can both equally exploit all the forces on the two estates.

And so an oppressor finds it more convenient to make his demands on other people’s work by means of money, and he needs money simply for this purpose. And for a man subjected to violence-a man from whom his work is taken money is not necessary either

for exchange (he exchanges without money as all nations without governments have done) or to fix a standard of values, for that fixing is done apart from him; or for savings, for a man from whom the produce of his labour is taken cannot save; or for payments, because a man who is oppressed will have to pay out more than he receives or, if he does receive, the payments made him are not in money but in goods (in cases where he receives payment for his work directly from his employer’s stores) and the same is practically the case if all he earns is spent on articles of primary necessity in outside shops. Money is demanded of him and he is told that if he does not pay it he will get no land or grain, or his cow or his house will be taken from him and he will be hired out to labour or will be put in prison. From this he can escape only by selling the produce of his labour and his labour itself at prices fixed not by fair exchange but by the power which demands the money of him.

And under such conditions-the influence on values of tribute or of taxes, which is seen always and everywhere: with land-owners on a small scale and in kingdoms on a large scale-under these conditions, when the cause of the change in prices is as plain as the reason why marionettes move their limbs is plain to him who looks behind the wings-under these conditions to speak of money as representing a medium of exchange and a standard of values is, to say the least, amazing.

Chapter 20

EVERY enslavement of one man by another is based entirely on the fact that one man can deprive another of life, and while maintaining that menacing position can compel the other to obey his will.

One may say with confidence that if there is any enslavement of man, if, that is, one man at the will of another and contrary to his own desire performs actions undesirable to the doer, the cause of this is simply violence and is based on a threat to the man’s life. If a man gives his whole work to others, gets insufficient nourishment, hands his little children over to hard labour, leaves the land and devotes his whole life to hateful labour on things he does not himself want-as occurs before our eyes in our world (which we call cultured, because we live in it), it is safe to say that he does this only because he is threatened with death if he does not do it. And so in our cultured world, where the majority of people do work that is hateful and unnecessary to them under terrible privations, the majority of people are in a state of slavery based on threats to their lives. In what does this enslavement consist? And wherein lies the threat to their lives?

In ancient times the method of enslavement and the threat to life were obvious: a primitive method of enslaving people was employed. It consisted in a direct threat to kill them by the sword. The armed man said to him who was unarmed: I can kill you, as you see I have just killed your brother, but I do not wish to-I spare you because, first of all, it will be more advantageous both for you and for me if you work for me than if you are killed. So do everything I order, for if you refuse I shall kill you. And the unarmed man submitted to him that was armed and did all he commanded. The unarmed man worked, the armed man threatened. That was the personal slavery that first appeared among all peoples and is still to be met with among primitive tribes. That form of enslavement comes first, but as life becomes more complex it changes its form. As life becomes more

complicated that method presents great inconvenience to the oppressor. To exploit the labour of the weak it is necessary to clothe and feed them that is, to keep them so that they are fit for work-and this of itself limits the number of the slaves; besides, this method obliges the oppressor to stand always over the slaves threatening them with death. And so another method of enslaving them is devised.

Five thousand years ago, as is written in the Bible, Joseph in Egypt invented this new, more convenient, and broader method of enslaving people. It is the same that in modern times is employed for taming unruly horses and wild beasts in menageries. It is-hunger.

This is how this invention is described in the Book of Genesis, in the Bible:

‘Ch. xli, v. 48. And he gathered up all the food of the seven [fruitful] years which were in the land of Egypt, and laid up the food in the cities: the food of the field, which was round about every city, laid he up in the same.

‘49. And Joseph laid up corn as the sand of the sea, very much, until he left numbering; for it was without number.

‘53. And the seven years of plenty, that was in the land of Egypt, came to an end.

‘54. And the seven years of famine began to come, according as Joseph had said: and there was famine in all lands; but in all the land of Egypt there was bread.

‘55. And when all the land of Egypt was famished the people cried to Pharaoh for bread: and Pharaoh said unto all the Egyptians, Go unto Joseph; what he saith to you, do.

‘56. And the famine was over all the face of the earth: and Joseph opened all the storehouses, and sold unto the Egyptians; and the famine was sore in the land of Egypt.

‘57. And all countries came into Egypt to Joseph for to buy corn; because the famine was sore in all the earth.’

Joseph, employing the primitive method of the enslavement of people by threat of the sword, collected the grain in the fruitful years, in anticipation of bad years which usually follow good ones, as everyone knows even without Pharaoh’s dream, and by that means-hunger-he enslaved both the Egyptians and the inhabitants of the surrounding countries by methods more powerful and more convenient to Pharaoh. When the people began to hunger, he arranged matters so as to keep them permanently in his power-by hunger. This is described in Chapter xlvii:

‘13. And there was no bread in all the land; for the famine was very sore, so that the land of Egypt and the land of Canaan fainted by reason of the famine.

‘14. And Joseph gathered up all the money that was found in the land of Egypt, and in the land of Canaan, for the corn which they bought: and Joseph brought the money into Pharaoh’s house.

‘15. And when the money was all spent in the land of Egypt, and in the land of Canaan, all the Egyptians came unto Joseph, and said, Give us bread: for why should we die in thy presence? for our money faileth.

‘16. And Joseph said, Give your cattle; and I will give you for your cattle, if money fail.

‘17. And they brought their cattle unto Joseph: and Joseph gave them bread in exchange for the horses, and for the flocks, and for the herds, and for the asses: and he fed them with bread in exchange for all their cattle for that year.

‘18. And when that year was ended, they came unto him the second year, and said unto him, We will not hide from my lord, how that our money is all spent; and the herds of cattle are my lord’s; there is nought left in the sight of my lord, but our bodies, and our lands:

‘19. wherefore should we die before thine eyes, both we and our land? buy us and our land for bread, and we and our land will be servants unto Pharaoh: and give us seed, that we may live, and not die, and that the land be not desolate.

‘20. So Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh; for the Egyptians sold every man his field, because the famine was sore upon them: and the land became Pharaoh’s.

‘21. And as for the people, he removed them to the cities from one end of the border of Egypt even to the other end thereof.

‘22. Only the land of the priests bought he not: for the priests had a portion from Pharaoh, and did eat their portion which Pharaoh gave them; wherefore they sold not their land.

‘23. Then Joseph said unto the people, Behold, I have bought you this day and your land for Pharaoh: lo, here is seed for you, and ye shall sow the land.

‘24. And it shall come to pass at the in-gatherings, that ye shall give a fifth unto Pharaoh, and four parts shall be your own, for seed of the field, and for your food, and for them of your households, and for food for your little ones.

‘25. And they said, Thou hast saved our lives: let us find grace in the sight of my lord, and we will be Pharaoh’s servants.

‘26. And Joseph made it a statute concerning the land of Egypt unto this day, that Pharaoh should have the fifth; only the land of the priests alone became not Pharaoh’s.’

Previously Pharaoh, to exploit the labour of the people, had to compel them to work by force; but now, when the stores and the land were Pharaoh’s, he only had to guard those stores by force, and hunger enabled him to compel them to work for him.

The land is all Pharaoh’s and the stores (the part he collects) are always his, and so, instead of driving with the sword each man individually to work, it is only necessary to use force to guard the stores, and the people are enslaved not by the sword but by hunger.

In a year of famine all may be starved at Pharaoh’s will, and in a year of plenty those who owing to some mishap are short of grain can be starved.

And the second method of enslavement is instituted not directly by the sword, that is, not by the strong man driving the weaker man to work by threats of killing him, but by the oppressor, having taken the supplies and guarded them with the sword, compelling the weaker man to labour for his food.

Joseph says to the hungry: ‘I can starve you to death as I have the corn, but I spare you on condition that, for the grain I give you, you will do whatever I command.’

For the first method of enslavement the man in power needs only warriors constantly riding about among the people and, by threats of death, seeing that his orders are obeyed. For the first method the oppressor need only divide up with his warriors. But under the second method, besides warriors, the oppressor needs another kind of assistants to preserve the stores of grain and the land from the hungry people-he needs great and little Josephs, managers and distributors of the grain. And the strong man has to divide up with them, and to give Joseph a vesture of fine linen, a gold ring, and servants, and grain, and silver for his brethren and his relatives. Besides. by the nature of the case, under the second method not only the managers and their relatives but all those who have stores of grain become sharers in the advantage of the violence used. As under the first method founded on sheer force, everyone who had arms became a participant in the violence employed, so under the second method based on hunger, all who have supplies share in the benefits of the oppression and lord it over those who have none.

For the oppressor the advantage of this method over the former is that, first and chiefly, he is no longer obliged to coerce the workers by force to do his will, but they come themselves and sell themselves to him; secondly, a smaller number escape his coercion. The only disadvantage of this method for the oppressor is that it obliges him to share with a larger number of people. The advantage of this method for the oppressed is that they are no longer subject to coarse violence, but are left to themselves and can always hope under fortunate conditions to pass over from the ranks of the oppressed to the ranks of the oppressors; the disadvantage for them is that they can never more escape from some measure of coercion. This new method of enslavement generally comes into use together with the old method, and the strong man reduces the one and extends the other as may be required. But this method of enslavement still does not fully satisfy the strong man’s desire-to take as much as possible of the produce of their labour from the greatest number of workers and to enslave as great a number of people as possible-and does not keep pace with the increasing complexity of life’s conditions, and a still newer method of enslavement is devised. The new, and third, method is that of tribute. This method like the second is based on hunger, but to the method of enslaving people by depriving them of bread is added that of depriving them also of other necessaries. The oppressor demands from the slaves such a quantity of monetary tokens, which he himself possesses, that to obtain them the slaves are obliged to sell not only more than the fifth of their store of grain that Joseph fixed, but also articles of prime necessity: meat, skins, wool, clothes, fuel, even buildings, and thus the oppressor always holds the slaves in subjection not only by hunger, but also by thirst, want, cold, and all other kinds of privation.

And a third form of slavery is organized-the monetary, which consists in the strong man saying to the weak one: I can do what I like with each of you separately, I can simply take a gun and shoot each of you, or I can kill you by taking the land that feeds you; I can, with the money you have to bring me, buy up all the grain that feeds you, and I can sell it to other people and starve you all at any moment, and I can take from you all that you have: cattle, dwellings, and clothes; but that is inconvenient and unpleasant for me, and therefore I allow you all to arrange your own work and your own production as you please-only bring me so many pieces of money, the demand for which I will assess either per head or according to the land you hold, or by the quantity of food and drink you have, or by your clothes, or your buildings. Bring me these money tokens and arrange matters among yourselves as you please, but know that I shall defend and protect

not widows, nor orphans, nor the sick, nor the old, nor those who have suffered from fires, but only the regularity of circulation of these money tokens. That man only will be justified before me and protected by me who regularly brings me the required number of money tokens I demand. But how he gets them is a matter of indifference to me.

And the strong man only issues these tokens as receipts for the fulfilment of his demands.

The second method of enslavement is that by taking a fifth part of the crops and laying up stores of grain, Pharaoh, besides personal enslavement by the sword, obtains in common with his assistants the possibility of ruling all the workers in times of famine and some of them whenever calamity befalls them.

The third method is, that Pharaoh demands of the workers more than would pay for the fifth of the crops which he formerly took from them, and with his assistants obtains a new means of ruling over the workmen not only in time off amine and casual misfortune but at all times. Under the second method the people kept some supplies of grain, which enabled them without surrendering themselves to slavery to bear small failures of harvest and casual mishaps, but under the third method, when the exactions are greater, their supplies of grain and all other supplies of prime necessities are taken from them and at the slightest mishap the worker, having no reserves of grain or other supplies which he could exchange for grain, has to go into slavery to those who have money. For the first method the oppressor need only have soldiers and need only divide with them; for the second, besides guards over the land and the stores of grain, he also requires collectors and clerks to distribute the grain; under the third method he can no longer himself own all the land, but besides warriors to guard the land and the wealth, he must also have landowners and tax-collectors, officials to allot the taxes and assess them per head or according to the articles used; inspectors, customs-officers, revenue officers and assessors. The organization of the third method is much more complex than that of the second; under the second method the collection of the grain can be farmed out as was done in ancient times and is still done in Turkey; but when the enslaved are taxed, a complex administration is needed to watch that the people or their taxable actions should not escape the tribute. And so under the third method, the oppressor has to share with a still greater number of people than under the second method; besides which, by the very nature of the case, all people either of that same or of other countries who have money become participants. The advantages for the oppressor of this method over the first or second methods are the following:

In the first place, by means of this method a greater amount of labour can be taken and taken in a more convenient manner, for a money tax is like a screw, it can be easily and conveniently turned to the utmost limit which does not kill the golden hen; so that it is not necessary to await a famine year as in Joseph’s time-for the famine year can always be arranged.

Secondly, because under this method the coercion is extended to all those landless people who formerly escaped and gave only part of their labour for bread, but who are now obliged in addition to that part to give also part of their labour for taxes to the oppressor. The disadvantage for the oppressor is that under this method he has to share with a greater number of people: not only his immediate assistants but, first, with all those private landowners who usually appear where this system is adopted, and secondly, with

all those people of his own or even of other nations who have such money tokens as are demanded from the slaves.

The advantage for the oppressed in comparison with the second method is only this, that he has still more personal independence from the oppressor; he can live where he pleases, do what he pleases, and sow or not sow grain; he is not obliged to account for his work, and if he has money he can consider himself quite free, and he can always hope, or actually attain if but for a time-when he has money to spare or has land bought for it-not merely a position of independence but even that of an oppressor. The disadvantage for him is that, under this third method, the position of the oppressed in general becomes far harder and they are deprived of the greater part of what they produce, since under this third method the number of people who live on the labour of others is still greater and therefore the burden of supporting them falls on a smaller number. This third method of enslavement is also a very old one, and comes into use together with the two previous ones without entirely excluding them. None of the three methods of enslavement has ever ceased to exist. All three methods may be compared to screws which press down a board that lies on the workers and squeezes them. The chief, fundamental, and central screw, without which the others cannot hold-the one which is first screwed down and never ceases to act-is that of personal slavery, the enslavement of one set of people by another by means of threats to kill them with the sword; the second-which is screwed down after the former-is the enslavement of people by depriving them of land and of stores of food, a deprivation supported by the personal threat of death; and the third screw is the enslavement of people by a demand for money tokens they have not got, and that too is supported by the threat of murder. All three screws are operated, and only when one is tightened are the others relaxed. For the complete enslavement of the workers all three screws-all three methods of enslavement-are needed, and in our society all three methods are constantly in use-all three screws are tightened.

The first method, enslaving men by personal violence and by threats to kill them by the sword, has never been abandoned, and will not be abandoned as long as there is any enslavement of man by man, because all enslavement depends upon it. We are all very naively confident that personally slavery has been abandoned in our civilized world, that the last remnants of it were abolished in America and Russia, and that now only among savages is there slavery, but that we have none. We forget only one small circumstance namely about those millions of men who in standing armies without which no single government exists and with the abolition of which the whole economic structure of every government would inevitably go to pieces. But what are those millions of soldiers if not the personal slaves of those who rule over them? Are not they compelled to do the will of their owners under threat of torture and death-a threat frequently put into execution? The only difference is that the subjection of these slaves is not called slavery but discipline, and that while the others were slaves from birth to death these are so for the period, more or less brief of what is termed their ‘service’. Personal slavery is not only not abolished in our civilized societies but with the introduction of universal military conscription it has of late been strengthened and still remains what it has always been though somewhat modified. And it cannot fail to exist, for as long as there is any enslavement of man by man there will be this personal slavery which by threat of the sword maintains the territorial and tax enslavement of men. It may that this slavery that of the army, may be very necessary, as is alleged, for the defence and glory of our

fatherland, though this advantage is more than doubtful, for we see that in unsuccessful wars it often serves for the enslavement and degradation of the country; but what is evident is the suitability of this slavery for the maintenance of land and tax slavery. If the Irish or the Russian peasants seized. the land from the estate-owners, the troops would come and take it back again. Build distilleries or breweries and fail to pay the excise dues, and soldiers come and close the establishment. Refuse to pay taxes and the same will happen.

The second screw is the method of enslavement by depriving people of land and therefore of their food supplies. This method of enslavement also has existed and does exist wherever people are enslaved, and however much its form may be altered it exists everywhere. Sometimes the land all belongs to the sovereign, as in Turkey, and a tithe of the harvest is taken for the treasury; sometimes only part of the land, and a tax is collected from it; sometimes again the land all belongs to a small number of people and part of the labour is taken for it, as in England; or a larger or smaller part of it belongs to great landowners, as in Russia, Germany, and France. But where there is enslavement there is also appropriation of land by means of enslavement. This screw for the enslavement of people is slackened or tightened in proportion to the strain on the other screws’ thus, in Russia when personal enslavement extended to the majority of workmen, land slavery was superfluous; but the screw of personal slavery in Russia was only relaxed when the screws of land and tax enslavement were tightened. The people were all inscribed in communes, their migration or change of location was made difficult, the land was appropriated or given to private owners, and then the peasants were set ‘free’. In England, for instance, the land enslavement is what chiefly acts, and the question of the nationalization of the land merely consists in tightening the tax screw in order to relax the screw of territorial enslavement.

The third method of enslavement-by tribute or taxation-also existed before, and in our time, with the diffusion of uniform money tokens in various states and the intensification of governmental power, it has acquired special force. This method has been so elaborated in our time that it bids fair to replace the second-the territorial-method of enslavement. It is the screw with the tightening of which the land-screw relaxes, as is evident in the economic condition of all Europe. Within our own memory, we have lived through two transitions of slavery from one form to another in Russia: when we freed the serfs and left the proprietors in possession of most of the land, the proprietors feared that their power over the slaves would slip away; but experience showed that when letting go of the old chain of personal slavery they only had to seize the other, that of land-ownership. The peasant lacked bread to eat and the proprietor had the land and the stores of grain, and therefore the peasant remained a slave as before. The next transition was when government demands greatly tightened the other screw-that of taxation, and most of the labourers were obliged to sell themselves into bondage to the estate-owners or to the factories. And the new form of slavery held the people yet more thoroughly, so that nine-tenths of the Russian working classes work for proprietors and factory owners only because they are compelled to do so by the demands for State and land taxes. This is so obvious that were the government to try the experiment of not collecting direct, indirect, and land taxes for a year, all the work on other people’s land and at the factories would come to a standstill. Nine-tenths of the Russian people hire themselves out when the taxes are being collected, and on account of those taxes.

All three methods of enslavement have existed continuously and still exist; but people are inclined not to notice them as soon as new justifications are alleged for them. And what is strange is that this very method on which at the present time everything is based, the screw holding everything together, is just what is not noticed.

When in the ancient world the whole economic structure was based on personal slavery, the greatest intellects did not notice it. To Xenophon and Plato and Aristotle and to the Romans it seemed that things could not be otherwise, and that slavery was an inevitable and natural outcome of wars, without which the existence of humanity was unthinkable. So also in the Middle Ages, and even down to recent times, people I did not see the significance of land-ownership and the slavery resulting from it, on which the whole economic structure of the Middle Ages rested. And just in the same way now, no one sees or even wishes to see that in our time the enslavement of the majority of people depends on money-taxes-State and land taxes-demanded by the governments and their dependants and collected by the administration and the army-the very administration and army that are paid for out of those taxes.

Chapter 21

WHAT is surprising is not that the slaves themselves-subjected to slavery from of old-are not conscious of their condition and consider the slavery in which they have always lived to be a natural condition of human life, and regard a change in the form of slavery as an alleviation; nor is it surprising that slave-owners sometimes sincerely think they are emancipating their slaves by loosening one screw when another is already screwed tight. Both slaves and owners are accustomed to their position, and the slaves, not knowing freedom only seek alleviation or a mere chancre of the form of their slavery, while the slave-owners-desiring to hide their injustice-wish to attribute a special significance to the new forms of slavery they impose on the people m place of the old. But it is surprising that science, which is called liberal, can when investigating the economic conditions of a people’s life avoid seeing what is at the base of the whole economic condition of the people. One would think it the business of science to discover the connexion between phenomena and the common cause of a series of phenomena. But political economy does just the opposite: it carefully conceals the connexion of the phenomena and their significance and carefully avoids answering the simplest and most essential questions; like a lazy and restive horse it only goes well down hill when there is nothing to pull, but as soon as it is necessary to pull, it swerves, pretending that it has to go aside to do its own business. As soon as a serious essential question presents itself to science, a learned discussion is at once begun on irrelevant matters, merely with the purpose of distracting attention from the question at issue.

You ask: What is the cause of the unnatural, abnormal, irrational, and not merely useless but harmful phenomenon-that some men cannot eat or work except by the will of others? And science, with most serious mien, replies: Because some people control the work and the nourishment of others-such being the law of production.

You ask: What is this right of property on the basis of which some people appropriate the land, food, and instruments of labour of others? Science answers with most serious mien:

This right is based on the protection of a man’s work; that is, that the protection of the work of one set of men expresses itself by seizing the work of other men.

You ask: What is this money that is everywhere coined and printed by governments, that is, by the authorities, and which is forcibly demanded of the workers in such enormous quantities, and in the form of national debts is imposed on future generations of labourers? You ask whether this money exacted as taxes in quantities increased to the utmost possibility, has not an effect on the economic relations of the payers towards the receivers? And science with most serious face replies: Money is a commodity like sugar or chintz, and is distinguished only by the fact that it is the most convenient medium of exchange, but taxes have no influence on the economic condition of the people: the laws of the production, exchange, and distribution of wealth are one thing, while taxes are another.

You ask whether the circumstance that government can at its pleasure raise or lower prices, and by increasing taxes can bind in slavery all who do not possess land, has not an influence on economic conditions? And science with most serious face replies: None at all! The laws of production, distribution, and exchange are one science; taxes and State affairs in general are another science-that of finance.

You ask, finally, about the whole people being m slavery to the government, about the government being able at its own will to ruin everybody, to take all the produce of their labour and even to tear the men themselves from their work, putting them into military slavery; you ask whether this circumstance has no influence on economic conditions. To this science does not even take the trouble to reply: this is quite a separate matter-State law. Science most seriously examining the laws of the economic life of the people whose every function and whole activity depends on the oppressor’s will, and regarding this influence of the oppressor as a natural condition of people’s life, does what an investigator of the economic conditions of the life of personal slaves of various owners would do if he did not take into account the influence exerted on the lives of those slaves by the will of the owner who at his own caprice obliges them to do this or that work and drives them at will from place to place, feeds them or leaves them unfed, and kills them or lets them live.

We should like to think that science does this out of stupidity, but one only has to penetrate and examine the propositions of the science to convince oneself that it is not due to stupidity but to great ingenuity.

This science has a very definite aim, which it attains. That aim is to maintain superstition and deception among the people and thereby hinder the progress of humanity towards truth and welfare. There has long existed, and still exists, a terrible superstition which has done almost more harm than the most fearful religious superstitions. And it is this superstition which so-called science maintains with all its might and main. This superstition is quite similar to the religious superstitions: it consists in the assertion that, besides man’s duty to man, there exist yet more Important obligations to an imaginary being. For theology this imaginary being is God, but for political science it is the State. The religious superstition consists in this, that sacrifices, sometimes of human lives, to this imaginary being are necessary, and men may and should be brought to them by all means, not excluding violence. The political superstition consists in this, that besides the

duties of man to man there exist more important duties to the imaginary being, and that sacrifices, very often of human life, offered up to this imaginary being, the State, are also necessary, and that men may and should be brought to them by all possible means not even excluding violence. This superstition, formerly supported by the priests of various religions, is now supported by so-called science. Men are thrust into a most terrible slavery, worse than ever before; but science tries to assure people that this is necessary and cannot be otherwise.

The State must exist for the good of the people and must carryon its business: govern the people and defend them from enemies. For this the State needs money and soldiers. The money must be supplied by all the citizens of the State, and therefore all the relations of men must be viewed under the necessary conditions of statehood.

‘I want to help my father in his farm work,’ says a simple ignorant man; ‘I want. to marry, but they take me, and send me for six years to Kazan as a soldier. I leave the army and want to plough the land and support my family, but for a hundred versts around me I am not allowed to plough unless I pay money, which I have not got to people who do not know how to plough and who demand so much money for it that I have to give them all my labour; but for all that I earn something and want to give what I have saved to my children; but an official comes to me and takes away my savings for taxes; again I earn something, and again it is all taken away from me. All my economic activity, all of it without exception, is dependent on the demands of the State, and it seems to me that an Improvement in my condition and in that of my brothers must come from our emancipation from the demands of the State.’

But Science says: Your conclusions are the result of your ignorance. Learn the laws of the production distribution, and exchange of wealth, and do not confuse economic with political questions. The facts you refer to are not infringements of your liberty but necessary sacrifices which you, like other people, must bear for your own freedom and welfare. ‘But, you see, they have taken. my son and promise to carry off all my sons as soon as’ they grow up,’ again replies the simple man. ‘They took him by force and have driven him under fire into some strange land of which we had never heard and for aims we cannot understand. And, you see, the land we are not allowed to plough and for want of which we starve is owned by a man we have never seen and whose usefulness we cannot even comprehend. And the taxes for which the policeman took the cow from my children by force, will for all I know go to that same policeman who took the cow, and to various members of Commissions and Ministries whom I do not know and in whose utility I do not believe. How can all this violence secure my liberty, and all this evil promote my welfare?’

It is possible to compel a man to be a slave and to do. what he considers bad for himself, but it is impossible to make him think that while suffering violence he is free and that the evident evil he endures forms his welfare. That seems impossible, but is just what has been done in our time by the aid of science.

The government, that is armed men using force, decide what they must take from those whom they coerce: like the English in dealing with the Fijians, they decide how much labour require of their slaves, beside how many assistants they need to collect this labour, organize their assistants as soldiers, as landed proprietors, and as tax collectors and the

slaves yield their labour and at the same time believe that they give it up not because their masters wish it, but because, for their own freedom and welfare, service and bloody sacrifice offered to a divinity called ‘the State’ are essential, and that while paying this service to this divinity they remain free. They believe this because formerly religion and the priests said so, and now science and the learned people talk that way. But we need only cease to believe blindly what others, calling themselves priests and learned men, for the absurdity of such assertions to become evident. People who do violence to others assure them that this violence is necessary for the State and that the State is necessary for the freedom and welfare of the people: it turns out that the oppressors oppress the people to promote their freedom, and harm them for their good. But men are rational beings that they may understand wherein their welfare lies and may promote it freely. And affairs the goodness of which is unintelligible to people and to which they are driven by force, cannot be good for them, for a rational being can regard as good only what presents itself to his reason as being so. If from passion or lack of sense men are drawn towards evil, all that others who do not commit the same errors can do is to persuade them to do what accords with their real welfare. People may be persuaded that their welfare will be greater if they all become soldiers, are all deprived of land, and give their whole labour for taxes; but until all men regard this as their welfare and therefore do it voluntarily, it cannot be called the general good of man. The sole sign of the goodness of an undertaking is that people do it of their own free will, and man’s life is full of such affairs.

Ten workmen provide themselves with cooper’s tools in order to work together, and doing this they do what is certainly for their common welfare; but it is not possible to suppose that these workmen if they compel by violence an eleventh man to participate in their association, could affirm that what was their common good would also be good for this eleventh man.

So also with gentlemen who give a dinner to a friend of theirs; it is impossible to assert that this dinner will be good for someone from whom they take ten rubles by force for it. So also with peasants who decide to dig a pond for their convenience. For those who consider the existence of the pond a benefit worth more than the cost of labour expended upon it, the making of it will be a common good, but for him who considers the existence of this pond as less important than the harvesting of a field with which he is behind-hand, the digging of this pond cannot be considered a good. So also of roads people make, and of churches, and museums, and a great variety of social and political affairs. All these things can be a good only for those who regard them as such and engage on them freely and willingly, as in the case of the purchase of the cooper’s tools for the association, the dinner given by the gentlemen, or the pond dug by the peasants. But undertakings to which people have to be forcibly driven cease to be a common good just on account of that violence.

This is all so clear and simple that if people had not so long been deceived it would not be necessary to explain anything. We live, let us suppose, in a village, and we, all the villagers, have decided to build a bridge across a bog into which we sink. We have agreed or promised to give so much money, or timber, or so many days’ work from each household. We have agreed to do this because this bridge will be worth more to us than its building will cost. But among us there are some for whom it is better not to have the bridge than to spend money on it, or who at least think that this is so.

Can coercing these people to take part in building the bridge make it a benefit to them? Evidently not, for those who considered free participation in the building of the bridge disadvantageous will consider it yet more disadvantageous when it is compulsory. Let us even suppose that we all without exception agreed to build this bridge and promised to contribute so much money or labour from each household for the work, but it so happens that some of those who promised to contribute have not done so because their circumstances changed, causing them to think it better to be without a bridge than to spend money on it; or simply they have changed their minds; or even reckon on others building the bridge without their contribution and on still being able to use it. Can the compelling of these people to take part in building the bridge make their compulsory sacrifice a benefit to them? Evidently not, for if they did not fulfill their promise owing to altered circumstances which made it harder for them to contribute to the bridge than to do without a bridge, obligatory contributions will be only a greater evil to them. And if the ref users aimed at taking advantage of the labour of others, still, compelling them to make sacrifices will merely be a punishment for their intention, and a quite unproven intention punished before it had been carried into effect; but in neither case will compulsion to participate in an undesired affair be an advantage to them.

So it is when sacrifices are undertaken for an affair intelligible to everyone and of evident and undoubted utility, such as a bridge across a bog all have to cross. How much more unjust and senseless will it be to compel millions of people to make sacrifices for an aim that is unintelligible, intangible, and often indubitably harmful, as is the case with military service and the payment of taxes. But according to science what appears to everyone an evil is a common good; it seems that there are people, a tiny minority, who alone know wherein the common good lies, and, though all the rest of the people consider this common good to be an evil, this minority, while compelling all the rest to do this evil, can consider this evil to be a common good. . . .

Therein lies the chief superstition and chief deception hindering the progress of humanity towards truth and welfare. The maintenance of this superstition and this deception is the aim of political sciences in general and of what. is called political economy m particular Its aim is to hide from people the condition of oppression and slavery in which they are. The means it employs for this purpose are, when dealing with the violence that conditions the whole economic life of the enslaved, purposely to treat this violence as natural and inevitable, and thus to deceive people and divert their eyes from the real cause of their misery.

Slavery has long been abolished. It was abolished in Rome, and in America, and in Russia, but what was abolished was the word and not the thing itself.

Slavery consists in some men freeing themselves from labour (needed for the satisfaction of their wants) which is compulsorily put upon others; and where there is a man not working, not because others work for him lovingly but because instead of working himself he is able to compel others to work for him-there slavery exists. And where, as in all European countries, there are people utilizing the labour of thousands of others by means of violence and believing that they have a right to do so-while others submit to this coercion and regard it as their duty to do so-there slavery of terrible dimensions exists.

Slavery exists. In what does it consist? In that in which it has always consisted and without which it can never exist-the violence of the strong and armed towards the weak and unarmed.

Slavery in its three fundamental methods of personal violence-military service; land tribute enforced by soldiery; and tribute imposed on inhabitants in the form of direct and indirect taxes and maintained by that same soldiery exists just as it used to. We do not see it only because each of the three forms of slavery has received a new justification, hiding its meaning from us.

The personal violence of the armed towards the unarmed has been justified as the defence of the fatherland against its imaginary foes; in reality it has its old meaning, namely the subjection of the vanquished by oppressors. The violence exerted in depriving the workers of the land they work has received justification as a reward for services supposed to have been rendered to the common good, and it is confirmed by the right of inheritance; in reality it is the same deprivation of land and enslavement of the people, effected by the army (the authorities).

The last, the monetary coercion of taxation the strongest and now the chief method-has received the most amazing justification, namely that people are deprived of their property and freedom and of their whole good for the sake of freedom and general welfare. In reality it is nothing but the same slavery, except that it is impersonal.

Where violence is legalized, there slavery exists. Whether the violence is expressed by incursions made by princes and their retainers, killing women and children and burning the villages; or by slave-owners taking work or money from their slaves for land and in case of non-payment calling in armed forces; or by some people laying tribute on others and riding armed through the villages; or by the Ministry of the Interior collecting money through Provincial Governors and the rural police, and in case of refusals to pay sending in the military-in a word, so long as there is violence supported by bayonets, there will not be a distribution of wealth among the people, but all wealth will go to the oppressors.

A striking illustration of the truth of this conclusion is supplied by Henry George’s project for nationalizing the land.1 George proposes to recognize all land as belonging to the State, and therefore to replace all taxes, both direct and indirect, by a ground rent. That is to say, every one making use of land should pay to the State the rental-value of such land.

What would result? Agricultural slavery would be abolished within the bounds of the State, that is, the land would belong to the State: England would have its own, America its own, and the slave-dues a man had to pay would be determined by the amount of land he used.

Perhaps the position of some of the workers (agrarian) would be improved, but as long as the forcible collection of a rent tax remained there would be slavery. An agriculturalist unable after a failure of crops to pay the rent forcibly demanded of him, to retain his land and not lose everything would have to go into bondage to a man who had money.

1 Accustomed as we are in England to hear of Land Nationalization as a rival project to Henry George’s taxation of land values, Tolstoy’s way of stating the case seems strange. But as his meaning is clear enough, the Russian text has been closely followed in this translation.-A.M.

If a bucket leaks there is certainly a hole in it. Looking at the bottom of a bucket it may seem that the water leaks out of several holes, but however much we may stop up these imaginary holes from outside, the water will still leak out. To stop the flow we must find the place where the water. escapes from the bucket and stop it up from inside. The same must be done with measures proposed for stopping the ill-distribution of wealth-for stopping up the holes through which wealth. leaks away from the people. People say: ‘organize workers’ associations, make capital public property, make the land public property!’ All this is only external plugging of the places from which the water seems to leak. To stop the leakage of the workers’ wealth into the hands of the leisured classes it is necessary to find from within the hole through which this leakage takes place. This hole is the coercion armed men exert on the unarmed; the violence of troops by means of which the people themselves are taken from their work, and the land and the produce of people’s toil taken from the people. As long as there exists a single armed man arrogating to himself the right to kill any other man whatever, so long will the irregular distribution of wealth exist, that is, slavery.

Chapter 22

I AM always surprised by the oft-repeated words: ‘Yes, in theory that is so, but how is it in practice?’ Just as if theory were some nice phrases needed for conversation but not in order that practice, that is one’s whole activity, should necessarily be based on it. There must have been a terrible number of stupid theories in the world for such a remarkable opinion to be generally accepted. Theory is what a man thinks on a subject, and practice is what he does. How then can it be that a man thinks he should do a thing this way and then does it the opposite way? If the theory of bread-baking is that it has first to be kneaded and then set to rise, no one knowing the theory, except a lunatic, will do the reverse. Yet with us it has become the fashion to say, ‘In theory that is so, but how is it in practice?’

In the matter with which I am engaged, what I had always thought was the case has been confirmed, namely, that practice inevitably follows theory and, I will not say justifies it, but cannot be different, and that if! have understood a matter about which I have thought, I cannot do it otherwise than as I understand it.

I wished to help the poor just because I had money and shared the common superstition that money represents work, or is in general a legitimate and good thing. But when I began giving away money I saw that I was giving drafts I had collected-which were drawn on the poor. I was doing what many land-owners used to do, making some serfs serve other serfs. I saw that every use of money, whether by purchase of anything, or as a free gift of it to someone, is the issuing for collection of a draft on the poor, or the giving of it to someone for collection from the poor. And therefore the absurdity of what I wished to do-help the poor by exactions on the poor-became plain to me. I saw that money in itself is not merely not a good, but is an evident evil, depriving people of the greatest blessing-that of labouring and utilizing the fruits of one’s own exertions-and that I cannot transmit this blessing to anyone, because I myself lack it: I do not labour and have not the happiness of utilizing my own labour.

It might seem that there was nothing particular in this abstract reflection on the question, What is money? But this reflection, which I entered upon not as a mere reflection but to solve a question of my life and sufferings, gave me the answer to the question, What must we do?

As soon as I understood what riches are and what money is, it not only became clear and indubitable to me what I must do, but also what everybody ought to do, and what they will, therefore, inevitably do. In reality I merely understood what I had long known-the truth transmitted to mankind in remote times by Buddha, and Isaiah, and Lao-tsze, and Socrates, and to us particularly clearly and indubitably by Jesus Christ and his forerunner John the Baptist. In reply to the people’s question: What then must we do? John the Baptist replied simply, briefly, and clearly: ‘He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath food, let him do likewise’ (Luke iii. 10, 11). The same was said by Christ many times and yet more clearly. He said, ‘Blessed are the poor, and woe unto ye that are rich.’ He said, ‘Ye cannot serve God and mammon.’ He forbade his disciples to take money or even two coats. He told the rich young man that because he was rich, he could not enter the kingdom of God, and that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. He said that he who will not renounce all-house, and children, and fields, to follow him, is not his disciple. He spoke the parable of the rich man, who like our rich men did nothing bad but merely clothed himself well and ate and drank sumptuously, and thereby ruined his soul, and of the pauper Lazarus, who did nothing good, but was saved just by the fact that he was a pauper.

That truth had been known to me well enough, but the false teaching of the world had so obscured it that it had become to me merely a ‘theory’ in the sense people like to give that word, that is to say, it was mere empty words. But as soon as I succeeded in destroying in my consciousness the sophistries of the worldly teaching, theory merged with practice and the reality of my own life and of the life of all men showed up as its inevitable consequence.

I understood that man, besides living for his personal welfare, must necessarily serve the welfare of others: that if we are to draw a comparison from the world of animals, as some people are fond of doing when defending violence and strife by the struggle for existence in the animal kingdom, we should draw it from the social animals, such as bees, and that therefore man, to say nothing of his reason or innate love of his fellow man is called on by his very nature to serve others and to serve the common human ends. I understood that that is the natural law of man under which alone he can fulfil his destiny and so be happy. I understood that this law has been infringed, and is infringed, by the fact that people, like robber bees, forcibly avoid toll and exploit the labour of others and direct their toil not to the common good but to the personal gratification of ever spreading passions (lusts), and themselves like the robber bees, perish thereby. I understood that men’s misfortunes come from the slavery in which some hold others. I understood that the slavery of our time was produced by the violence of militarism, by the appropriation of the land and by the exaction. of money. And having understood the meaning of all three instruments of the new slavery, I could not but wish to free myself from taking part in it.

When I was a serf-owner and understood the immorality of that position, I tried to liberate myself from it, like others who understood it. Considering my rights as slave-

owner to be immoral, I tried (until it should be possible to free myself completely from that position) to exert those rights as little as possible and to live and let others live as if those rights did not exist; and at the same time I tried by all means to instill into other slave-owners a sense of the wrongness and inhumanity of our imaginary rights. I cannot but do the same in regard to the present slavery. Until I can completely renounce the rights given me by the possession of landed property and money, which are maintained by military violence, I can but exact my rights as little as possible and at the same time do all that I possibly can to make plain to others the illegitimacy and inhumanity of those pseudo rights. The participation of a slave-owner in slavery consists in making use of other people’s labour, whether that slavery rests on his right to the slave or on his possession of land or money.

And therefore if a man really dislikes slavery and does not wish to be a participant in it, the first thing he will do will be not to use other people’s labour, either by owning land, by accepting government employment, or by money.

And the rejection of all the customary means of exploiting other people’s labour will inevitably make it necessary for such a man, on the one hand to restrict his needs, and, on the other, to do for himself what others formerly did for him.

This very simple and inevitable deduction enters into all the details of my life, immediately alters it all, and at once releases me from the moral sufferings I experienced at the sight of the miseries and depravity of men, and destroys all those three causes which made it impossible to help the poor and which I had encountered when seeking the causes of my failure.

The first cause was the crowding of the people into the towns and the consumption in towns of the wealth of the villages. It is only necessary for a man to wish not to exploit other people’s labour by means of government service, land-ownership, or money-and to wish therefore to satisfy his needs himself to the best of his strength and ability, for it never to enter his head to leave the village, where it is easiest to satisfy one’s needs, for the town where everything is the product of someone else’s labour and everything has to be bought. Then, in the village, he will be in a position to help the needy, and will not experience the feeling of helplessness I experienced in town when I tried to help people not by my own labour but by other people’s labour.

The second cause was the separation of the rich from the poor. It is only necessary for a man not to wish to exploit other people’s labour by means of state service, land-ownership, or by money, for him to find himself obliged to satisfy his wants himself, and immediately the wall separating him from the working people will disappear of itself, and he will blend with them and stand shoulder to shoulder with them, and it will become possible for him to help them.

The third cause was shame, based on conscious-ness of the immorality of my possession of the money with which I wanted to help others. We only need cease to wish to exploit other people’s work by means of government service, ownership of land, or by money, and we shall never have that superfluous mad money, my possession of which evoked in others, who had none, the demands I was unable to satisfy, and evoked in me a consciousness of being in the wrong.

Chapter 23

I SAW that the cause of men’s sufferings and depravity was that some are in slavery to others, and so I drew the simple conclusion that if! wish to help others I must first of all cease causing sufferings I wish to relieve, that is, must not take part in the enslavement of men. But what drew me to enslave people was that from childhood I had been accustomed not to work but to make use of the labour of others, and I had lived, and still live, in a society that is not merely accustomed to this enslavement, but justifies it by all sorts of artful and artless sophistries. And I came to the following simple conclusion, that in order not to cause suffering and depravity I must make as little use as possible of the work of others and must myself work as much as possible. By a long path I reached the inevitable conclusion reached thousands of years ago by the Chinese in the saying: ‘If there is one idle man, another will be starving.’ I came to the simple and natural conclusion that if I pity a tired horse on which I am riding, the first thing I must do if I am really sorry for it, is to get off and walk on my own feet.

That reply, which gives full satisfaction to our moral feelings, was clear to my eyes and is clear to the eyes of us all, but we look aside and do not see it.

In our search for a cure of our social evils we seek on all sides-in governmental, anti-governmental, scientific, and philanthropic superstitions, and do not see what strikes everyone’s eyes.

We use a close-stool and want others to carry it out for us, and we pretend to be very sorry for them and to want to make it easier for them and we invent all kinds of devices except the very simple one of carrying it out for ourselves if we want to use the stool in the house, or of going outside to do our business.

For him who sincerely suffers at seeing the sufferings of those about us, there is a very clear, simple, and easy means, the only possible one for the cure of the evils surrounding us and to enable us to feel that we are living legitimately-the same that John the Baptist gave in reply to the question: ‘What then must we do?’ and which Christ confirmed: not to have more than one coat and not to have money, that is, not to make use of other people’s labour and therefore first to do all we can with our own hands.

This is so simple and so clear. But it is simple and clear when the needs are simple and clear and when a man is still fresh and not spoilt to the marrow of his bones by laziness and idleness. I live in a village and lie on the stove,1 and I order a neighbour who is in debt to me, to chop wood and heat my stove. It is very clear that I am lazy and am taking my neighbour from his work; and I shall feel ashamed, and it will be tiresome to be always lying down, and if my muscles are strong and I am accustomed to work I shall go and chop the wood myself.

But the temptation of slavery of all kinds has existed so long and so many artificial wants have grown up on it, there are so many people bound up one with another who are accustomed in various degrees to these wants, and people have been so spoilt and pampered for generations, and so complex are the temptations and the justifications that have been devised for luxury and idleness, that for a man at the top of the ladder of idle

1 In Russian peasant huts the brick stove is built so as to heat the hut and to serve as an oven, and its flat top furnishes a warm and convenient place to sleep on.-A. M.

people it is far from being as easy to understand his sin as it is for a peasant who makes his neighbour heat his stove.

It is terribly hard for people who are on the upper rungs of that ladder to understand what is demanded of them. Their heads are made dizzy by the height of the ladder of lies they stand on, when they see the place below to which they must descend in order to live their life not entirely well but even not quite inhumanly; and therefore this simple and clear truth seems strange to them.

For a man with ten servants, liveries, coachmen, a chef, pictures, and pianos, it certainly seems strange and even ridiculous to do what is the simplest and first action of anyone who is, I will not say a good man but merely a man and not an animal: himself to chop the wood with which his food is cooked and with which he is warmed; himself to clean the boots and goloshes with which he has carelessly stepped into some dirt; himself to bring the water with which he keeps himself clean, and carry out the dirty water in which he has washed.

But besides the remoteness of people from the truth, there is another cause which keeps them from seeing that it is obligatory for them to undertake the simplest and most natural physical work: this is the complexity of the circumstances and inter-connected interests of those among whom a rich man lives.

This morning I went out into the corridor where the stoves are lighted. A peasant was heating the stove that warms my son’s room. I went into his room; he was still asleep. It was eleven o’clock. To-day is a holiday; and so excuses-there are no lessons.

A plump eighteen-year-old lad with a beard, who has eaten much the evening before, sleeps till eleven o’clock. But a peasant of his own age has got up in the morning, has already done a lot of things and is heating the tenth stove, while my son sleeps. ‘Better let the peasant not heat the stove to warm that sleek lazy body!’ thought 1. But at once I remembered that this stove warms also the housekeeper’s room, who is a woman of forty and till three in the morning prepared everything for the supper my son ate, and then put away the dishes, but who still got up at seven. She could not heat the stove for herself, she would not have time. The peasant was heating for her also, and on her account the lazy fellow gets warmed.

It is true that the interests of all are interwoven, but with no prolonged reckoning each man’s conscience tells him on whose side is the labour and on whose the idleness. And not only does conscience tell it, it is told most clearly of all by his account-book. The more money anyone spends the more he obliges others to work for him; the less he spends the more he works.

But industry, public works, and finally that most terrible of words: culture-the development of science and art?

Chapter 24

LAST year,1 in March, I was returning home late one evening. Turning from Zubov street to Khamovniki side-street I saw some black spots on the snow of the Virgin’s Field. Something was moving there. I should not have paid attention to it if a policeman standing at the entrance to the side-street had not shouted in the direction of the black spots:

‘Vasili! Why don’t you bring her?’

‘She won’t come!’ replied a voice from there, and after that the black spots moved towards the policeman.

I stopped and asked him what it was. He said: ‘They have arrested the wenches at the Rzhanov House and taken them to the police-station. This one lagged behind, you see she won’t move.’

A yard-porter in a sheepskin coat was fetching her. She walked in front and he kept pushing her from behind. We, the porter, the policeman, and I, were all wearing winter things, but she had only her dress on. In the dusk I could only make out a brown dress, and a kerchief on her head and neck. She was short, as starvelings are, with short legs and a disproportionately broad ill shaped figure.

‘Now, carrion, we’re waiting for you. Get along, I say! I’ll give it you!’ shouted the policeman. It was plain he was tired and had lost patience with her. She went a few steps and again stopped. The elderly yard-porter, a good-natured fellow (I know him personally), pulled her by the arm:

‘There, I’ll teach you to stop! Go on!’ he said, pretending to be angry. She staggered and began to speak in a grating voice. Every sound she uttered was a false note, hoarse and squeaking.

‘Now then! What are you shoving for? I’ll get there!’ ‘You’ll freeze,’ said the porter. ‘Our kind don’t freeze. I’m a hot ‘un.’

She meant it as a jest but it sounded like abuse. Near the lamp-post that stands not far from the gate of our house she again stopped and leant almost fell-against the wooden fence of the yard, and began fumbling in her skirts with clumsy benumbed fingers. They again shouted at her, but she only muttered and went on with what she was doing. In one hand she held a cigarette bent like an are, and in the other some sulphur matches. I stopped, ashamed to go past her though also ashamed to stand and look on. At last I made up my mind and went up to her. She leant with her shoulder against the wooden fence, and vainly trying to strike the sulphur matches against it threw them away. I looked at her face. She was a starveling, but it seemed to me no longer young. I supposed her to be about thirty. She had a dirty-coloured face, small, dim, and drunken eyes, a knob-shaped nose, crooked slobbering lips that turned down at the corners, and a short strand of dry hair showed from under her kerchief. Her figure was long and flat and her hands and feet

1 That is, in 1884.

stumpy. I stopped opposite her. She looked at me and smirked, as if to say she knew what I was thinking about.

I felt I had to say something to her, and I wished to show her that I pitied her. ‘Are your parents alive?’ I asked.

She laughed hoarsely, then suddenly stopped and, raising her brows, looked at me. ‘Are your parents alive?’ I repeated.

She smirked with an expression which seemed to say: ‘You have found a queer thing to ask about!’

‘I have a mother,’ she said. ‘What is it to you?’ ‘And how old are you?’

‘Over fifteen,’ said she, promptly answering a question she was evidently accustomed to.

‘Now, get on! We shall freeze to death with you here, blast you!’ shouted the policeman, and she staggered away from the fence and swaying to and fro went down Khamovniki street to the police-station, while I turned in at the gate, entered the house, and asked if my daughters had come home. I was told that they had been to a party, had enjoyed themselves very much, had returned, and were already asleep.

Next morning I wanted to go to the police-station to learn what they had done with this unfortunate woman, and I was setting out rather early, when one of those gentry1 whose weaknesses have caused them to fall from the comfortable life to which they are accustomed and who are now up and now down again, came to see me. I had known this one three years. During that time he had several times pawned everything he had, even to the clothes he was wearing. Such a misfortune had happened to him quite recently, and now he was spending his nights in one of the night-lodgings at Rzhanov House and coming to me in the daytime. He met me as I was going out and, without listening to what I wanted to say, at once began to tell me what had happened at Rzhanov House that night. Before he had half finished the story he, an old man who had seen all phases of life, burst into sobs, began to cry, and turned to the wall. This is what he told me. All he said was perfectly true. I afterwards verified it on the spot, and learnt additional details which I will add to his story.

In that doss-lodging on the ground floor, in Number 32 where my friend slept, among various transient night-lodgers, men and women who came together for five kopeks, there lived a washerwoman of about thirty years old, a blond woman, quiet and well-conducted but sickly. The landlady of the tenement is a boatman’s mistress. In summer her lover keeps a boat, but in winter they make a living by letting bunks for the night, at three kopeks without a pillow or five kopeks with a pillow. The washerwoman had lived there for some months and was a quiet woman; but of late they had taken a dislike to her because her coughing prevented the lodgers sleeping. In particular a half-crazy old woman of eighty, who was also a permanent lodger there, took a violent dislike to the washerwoman and was always nagging at her for spoiling her sleep and for hawking all

1 This was A. P. Ivanov who for many years worked intermittently, between his fits of drinking, as a copyist for Tolstoy, as mentioned at p. 330 of Vol. II of The Life of Tolstoy in this edition.-A. M.

night like a sheep. The washerwoman kept silent; she was in debt for her lodging and felt guilty, and so she had to be quiet. She was less and less often able to go to work, her strength was failing, and so she could not pay the mistress of the room; for the last week she had not been out to work at all, and with her cough only poisoned the life of them all, especially of the old woman who also did not go out. Four days before, the mistress told her she could not remain there: she was already owing sixty kopeks1 and did not pay them, and there seemed little hope of their being paid; the bunks were all occupied, and the other lodgers complained of her coughing.

When the mistress told the washerwoman to leave unless she could pay, the old woman was delighted, and pushed her out into the yard. The washerwoman went away but returned an hour later-and the mistress had not the heart to drive her away again. And on the next and the third day the mistress did not drive her out. ‘Where shall I go to?’ said the washerwoman. But on the third day the landlady’s lover, a Moscovite and one who knew town ways and regulations, went for the police. A policeman, with a sword and a pistol on a red cord, came to the lodging, and using only polite and proper words fetched the washerwoman out into the street.

It was a clear, sunny, but frosty, March day. Water was running down the gutters, and the yard-porters were breaking up the ice on the pavements. The sledges of the cab-drivers bumped over the crusted snow and screeched as they scraped on bare stones. The washerwoman went up the sunny side of the slope, came to the church, and sat down on the sunny side of its porch. But when the sun began to sink behind the house and the puddles began again to coat with ice, she felt cold and frightened. She got up and dragged herself along... Where to? Home, to the only home she had had latterly. Before she got there, resting on her way, it was growing dark. She came to the gates, turned in at them, slipped, uttered an exclamation, and fell.

One man passed, and then another. ‘Must be drunk.’ Yet another man passed, stumbled over the washerwoman, and said to the yard-porter: ‘Some drunken woman is lying in your gateway, I nearly broke my head tumbling over her. Get her moved away, can’t you!’

The yard-porter went to see about it... but the washerwoman was dead. That is what my friend told me. It may be thought that I am selecting the facts-my meeting with the fifteen year-old prostitute and the story of this washer-woman but do not let that be supposed; it happened just so, in one night-I do not remember the date, but in March 1884.

And then having heard my friend’s account I went to the police station, meaning to go from there to Rzhanov House to get further details about the washerwoman. The weather was fine, sunny, and in the shade between the frost-crystals the night frost had formed, running water was again visible, while in the blaze of the sun on the Khamovniki square everything was thawing and the water was running. One heard a noise from the river. The trees of the Sans-Souci gardens showed up blue across the river, the browned sparrows, unnoticed in winter, caught one’s eye by their merriment; and men too seemed to wish to be merry, but they all had too many cares. The sound of the church bells was heard, and

1 About Is. 3d.

against a background of these mingling sounds one heard that of firing in the barracks; the whistle of bullets and their smack against a target.

I came to the police station. In it were several armed men-they took me to their chief. He, too, was armed with a sword and pistol, and was busy giving directions about a ragged shivering old man who stood before him and was too feeble to answer clearly the questions put to him. When he had finished with the old man he turned to me. I asked about yesterday’s girl. At first he listened to me attentively, but then smiled at my not knowing the regulations or why they are taken to the police-station,1 and especially at my being surprised at her youth.

‘Why really, there are some twelve-year-old ones, and lots of thirteen and fourteen,’ said he cheerfully.

In reply to my question about yesterday’s girl, he explained that she had probably been sent to the Committee. (I think that was what he said.) And he replied vaguely when I asked where she had spent the night. He did not remember the particular girl I was asking about. There were so many of them every day.

At Rzhanov House, in Number 32, I found a church chanter already reading the Psalms over the deceased woman. She had been placed on what had been her bunk, and the lodgers (all quite poor people) had collected among themselves enough money to pay for the prayers, a coffin, and a shroud, and the old women had dressed her and laid her out. The church chanter was reading in the dim light, a woman in a cloak was standing with a wax taper in her hand, and another such taper was held by a man (a gentleman, I should say) who was standing in a clean overcoat with a good astrakhan collar, shining goloshes, and a starched shirt. This was her brother. They had traced and found him.

I went past the deceased woman to the mistress’s corner and asked her all about it. She was frightened at my questions; she evidently feared she might be accused of something; but after a while she began to speak freely and told me everything. As I went out I looked at the dead woman. There is a beauty about all dead people, but this one was specially beautiful and touching in her coffin: her face clean and pale, with prominent closed eyes, sunken cheeks, and soft flaxen hair above the high brows; a tired kindly face, and not sad but surprised. And indeed, if the living do not see, the dead must be surprised.

The day I wrote this down, there was a great ball given in Moscow.

That evening I left home after eight o’clock. I live in a place surrounded by factories, and I left the house after the factory whistles had sounded, which after a week’s incessant work let the men out for a holiday.

I passed, and was passed by, workmen making for the dram-shops and taverns. Many were already drunk and many had women with them.

I live amid factories. Every morning at five a whistle is heard, then a second, a third, a tenth, and others farther and farther away. This means that work has begun for women, children, and old men. At eight o’clock the whistle sounds again for half an hour’s interval. At noon there is a third: this is an hour for dinner; and at eight a fourth sounds, for closing.

1 For medical examination, as prostitutes.-A. M.

Curiously enough all the three factories around me produce exclusively articles needed for balls.

In the nearest one stockings are made; at another, silk stuffs; in the third, perfumery and pomades.

It is possible to hear those whistles and to attach to them no idea but that of time. ‘Ah, there’s the whistle already, so it is time for my walk’; but it is also possible to realize what really is the case: that the first whistle at five in the morning means that people-sleeping in a damp basement, often men and women side by side-get up in the dark and are hurrying to the buildings where the machines drone and taking their places at work to which they foresee no end and for themselves no use; and so they work, often in hot, stuffy, dirty rooms, with very short intervals, for one, two, three... twelve and more hours a day. They sleep and again get up, and again and again continue the same work-which has no meaning for them and to which they are driven by sheer necessity.

And so week passes after week, with the intervention of holidays, and here I saw these workers let out for one of these holidays. They come out into the street: everywhere taverns, Imperial dram-shops, and wenches. And tipsily they drag one another along by the arm, and drag with them girls such as the one that was taken to the police station, and hire sledges,1 and drive or walk from tavern to tavern, swearing and staggering and saying they know not what. Formerly I had seen such staggering factory-hands and fastidiously avoided them and almost blamed them; but since I have heard those whistles every day and know their meaning, I am only surprised that all these men do not become roughs such as those of whom Moscow is full, and not all the women come to be like the girl I saw near my house.

So I walked about, watching these workmen making turmoil in the streets till about eleven o’clock. Then their movement began to quiet down. Only a few drunken ones remained, and here and there men and women who were being taken to the police station. And now from all sides carriages began to appear all driving in one direction.

On the boxes were coachmen and footmen well-dressed and wearing cockades. The well-fed caparisoned trotters flew over the snow at fourteen miles an hour, and in the carriages were ladies wrapped in warm cloaks and careful of their flowers and coiffures. Everything-from the horses’ harness, the carriages, the rubber tyres, and the cloth of the coachmen’s warm coats, to the stockings, shoes, flowers, velvet, gloves, and perfumes-was made by those people some of whom are sprawling drunk in their bunks in the dormitories, some are with prostitutes in the dosshouses, or distributed in the lock-ups. Past them on what was all theirs and in what was all theirs drive those going to the ball; and it never enters their heads that there is any connexion between the ball to which they are going and those drunkards at whom their coachmen shout so sternly.

These people with quiet consciences-in full confidence that they are doing nothing bad but something very good-amuse themselves at the ball.

Amuse themselves! Amuse themselves from eleven till six in the morning, through the very middle of the night, while others are tossing with empty stomachs in doss-houses, and some are dying like the washerwoman.

1 These could often be hired for short distances for two or three pence a ride.-A. M.

The amusement consists in married women and girls baring their breasts, padding themselves out behind, and showing themselves in this unseemly condition in which an unperverted girl or woman would not for the world wish to exhibit herself to a man; and in that semi-nude condition, with bare breasts protruding and arms uncovered to the shoulder, with bustles behind and dresses drawn tight to their hips, in the strongest illumination, women and girls, whose chief virtue has always been modesty, appear among strange men similarly clad in improperly close-fitting garments, whom to the sound of intoxicating music they embrace, and with whom they whirl around. The old women, often exposing their persons as much as the young ones, sit, look on, and eat and drink things that taste nice; the old men doing the same. No wonder this is done at night when the common people, being all asleep, do not see it. But that is not done to hide it; it seems to the doers that there is nothing it is necessary to hide, that it is very good, and that by this amusement in which they consume the painful labour of thousands, they not only injure no one, but actually feed the poor.

It may be very merry at balls. But how does this happen? When among ourselves we see that some one has not eaten or is cold, we are ashamed to be merry, and cannot be merry till he has been fed and warmed; and we do not understand people making merry with sports that cause others to suffer. We dislike and do not understand the mirth of cruel boys who squeeze a dog’s tail in a cleft stick and make merry over it.

Then how is it that here in these amusements of ours blindness has befallen us, and we do not see the cleft stick in which we squeeze the tails of those who suffer for our amusement?

Not one of the women who drove to this ball in a one hundred and fifty ruble dress was born at the ball, or at Madame Minanquoit’s,1 and each of them has lived in the country and seen peasants, and knows her own nurse and lady’s-maid who have poor fathers or brothers for whom to save a hundred and fifty rubles to build a hut is the aim of a long and laborious life. She knows this-how then can she be merry, knowing that at this ball she wears on her half-naked body the hut that is the dream of her good maid’s brother? But granting that this may not have struck her the fact that velvet, silk, sweets, flowers, laces, and dresses do not grow of themselves but are made by people, is one that it would seem she cannot but know-or what kind of people make these things, and under what conditions they make them, and why. She must know that the seamstress she scolded did not make that dress for her at all out of love of her, and so she cannot help knowing that it was all made for her under compulsion, and that, like her dress, the lace and flowers and velvet were made for the same reason. Perhaps, however, they are so befogged that they do not see even that. But the fact that five or six people, old, decent, often infirm, footmen and maids have missed their sleep and been put to trouble on her account she cannot help knowing. She has seen their weary, gloomy faces. She cannot but know also that the frost that night reached thirty-one degrees below zero Fahrenheit? and that in that frost the old coachman sat on his box all night. But I know that they really do not see this. And if the young married women and girls from the hypnotism produced on them by the ball, do not see it, they must not be condemned. They, poor things, are doing what their elders consider right; but can one explain the cruelty shown by those elders?

1 A fashionable Moscow dressmaker.

The elders always give one and the same explanation: I do not force anyone; I buy the things and hire people-the maids and the coachmen. There is nothing wrong in buying and hiring. I do not force anyone, I hire them; what is wrong in that?’

The other day I called on an acquaintance of mine. Passing through the first room, I was surprised to see two women there at the table for I knew my acquaintance was a bachelor. A lean, sallow, old-looking woman of about thirty, wearing a kerchief, was doing something very rapidly with her hands and fingers under the table and was twitching nervously as if in a fit. Sideways to her sat a little girl who was doing something and twitching in just the same way. Both women seemed as if subject to St. Vitus’s dance. I went to them and looked at what they were doing. They glanced up at me and continued their work with the same concentration. Before them lay some loose tobacco and paper cartridges. They were making Cigarettes. The woman rubbed the tobacco between her hands, placed it in a machine, drew on the cartridge, pressed it home, and threw It to !he girl. The girl rolled up a piece of paper, pushing a wad into the Cigarette, threw it aside, and started on another. This all was done with such rapidity and with such tension that it is impossible to describe it to a man who has not seen it. I expressed surprise at their rapidity.

‘Have been doing nothing else for fourteen years,’ said the woman. ‘Is it hard?’

‘Yes one’s chest hurts and it is hard to breathe.’ Indeed she need not have said so. One had only to look at her and at the little girl. The girl has been working for over two years, and anyone seeing her at it would say that she had a strong constitution but was already beginning to break up. My acquaintance, a kindly and. liberal minded man, had hired them to fill cigarettes at two rubles fifty kopeks1 a thousand. He has money and gives it them for their work-what harm is there in that? He gets up about noon; spends his evenings from six till two in the morning at cards or at the piano, and eats tasty and sweet food; other people do all his work for him. He devised a new pleasure-smoking. I remember when he began it.

Here are a woman and a girl who by making machines of themselves can barely manage to support themselves, and who spend their whole lives inhaling tobacco, and so ruin their health. He has money which he did not earn, and he prefers to play bridge2 to making cigarettes for himself. He gives money to these women only on condition that they continue to live as wretchedly as before, that is, that they make cigarettes for him.

I like cleanliness, and give my money only on condition that a laundress washes the shirt I change twice a day, and this work has drained her last strength and she has died.

‘What is there bad in it? People buy and hire whether I do or not, and will go on compelling others to make velvet and sweets and will buy them, and will go on hiring people to make cigarettes and to wash shirts, even if I don’t. So why should I deprive myself of velvet and sweets and cigarettes and clean shirts, if things are so arranged?’ I often, almost always, hear this argument. It is the same that is used by a maddened crowd that is destroying something. It is the same that dogs are guided by when one of them flies at

1 About 5s. . . .

2 The game actually mentioned in the Russian is vint, which much resembles bridge.

another and overthrows it, and the rest rush at it and tear it to pieces. Once it has been started and injury has been done, why should not I share in it? ‘Well, what good will it do if I wear a dirty shirt and make my own cigarettes? Would anyone be the better for it?’ ask those who wish to justify themselves. Were we not so far from the truth one would be ashamed to reply to such a question, but we are so entangled that this question seems natural to us, and, ashamed as one is to answer it, it must be met.

What difference will it make if I wear my shirt for a week instead of a day and make my cigarettes myself, or do not smoke at all?

This difference, that some washerwoman and some cigarette-maker will strain her strength less, and the money I should have paid for the washing and cigarette-making I shall be able to give to that washerwoman, or even to quite other washerwomen and workers who are weary of work, and who, instead of working beyond their strength, may then rest and drink tea. But to this I hear a reply (so reluctant are the rich, luxurious people to understand their position). They reply: ‘Even if I wear dirty linen and stop smoking and give this money to the poor instead, all the same the poor will have everything taken from them, and my drop in the ocean will not help matters.’

One feels still more ashamed to reply to this retort, but it must be answered. It is such a common rejoinder and the answer is so simple.

If I visit savages and they treat me to tasty cutlets, and next day I learn (or perhaps see) that these tasty cutlets are made of a prisoner whom they have killed to make them; then if I do not think it right to eat people, however tasty the cutlets may be and however general the practice of eating men may be among those I am living with, and however little the prisoners who are kept to serve as food may gain by my refusal to eat the cutlets, still I shall not and cannot eat them again. Perhaps I might even eat human flesh if compelled by hunger, but I should not entertain others at, or take part in, feasts where human flesh was eaten, and should not seek such feasts or feel proud of taking part in them.

Chapter 25

‘WELL, what must we do? We didn’t make things so.’ But if not we, who did? We say: we did not do it, it has just done itself, as children when they have broken something say it broke itself. We say that once the towns exist we, living in them, support people by buying their labour .

But it is not true, and we need only consider how we live in the country and support people there.

The winter is past in town, and Easter Week comes. In town that same orgy of the rich continues; on the boulevards, in the gardens, in the parks and on the river, are music, theatres, rides, promenades, all kinds of illuminations and fireworks, but in the country there are still better things-the air is better, the trees, the meadows, and the flowers are fresher. We must go where all this is budding and flowering. And so most rich people, utilizing the labour of others, go to the country to breathe this better air and to see these still better meadows and woods.

And so the rich people settle down in the country amid the rough peasants who live on rye bread and onion, work eighteen hours a day, do not get enough sleep at night, and wear tattered clothes. Here at least no one has tempted these people: there are no mills or factories here, and no idle hands of whom there are so many in town, and whom we are supposed to feed by giving them work. Here during the whole summer the people are unable to keep up with their work, and not only are there no unemployed hands but quantities of things perish for lack of labour, and many people, children, old men, and women with child, perish by overstraining themselves. How do the rich folk arrange their lives here?

Why... in this way. If there is an old house built in the days of serfdom, it is renovated and ornamented; or if there is none, a new one is built-two or three stories high, with from twelve to twenty or more rooms all about fourteen feet high.

Parquet floors are laid, the windows have large glass panes, there are costly carpets, expensive furniture, with a sideboard costing from two hundred to six hundred rubles.

The paths near the house are made of gravel, the ground is levelled, flower-beds are set out, a croquet-ground is arranged, a giant-stride is put up, reflecting globes are set up, and often conservatories, hot-houses, and high stables, always with ornamented ridge-pieces. It is all painted with oil-colours-made with the oil the old peasants and their children do not get in their porridge. If the rich man is able he settles down in such a house, or if he cannot afford that, he hires such a house; but however poor and liberal minded a man of our circle may be, when he settles in the country he settles in a house for the building and cleaning of which dozens of working people have to be taken from the village where they are unable to cope with the work needed for growing grain for their own sustenance.

There at least one cannot say that factories exist and it will be all the same whether I do or do not make use of them; here it cannot be said that I feed idle hands; here we directly introduce the manufacture of things we want and directly exploit the needs of those around us, tearing them away from work necessary for them, for us, and for everybody, and we thus pervert some and ruin the life and the health of others.

An educated and honourable family let us say, of the gentry or official class, is living in the country.

All the members of the family and their guests gather there in the middle of June, for till then they have been studying and passing their examinations-that is, they arrive at the beginning of the mowing and stay there till September, that is, till the harvest and the sowing of the winter corn. The members of this family (like almost all people of that circle) remain in the country from the beginning of the busy season of urgent work-not to the end of it, for in September the sowing of the winter corn and the stacking of potatoes is still in progress, but-till the work is slackening.

All the time they are in the country the peasants’ summer work goes on around them and beside them, of the intensity of which, however much we may have heard or read or witnessed it, we can form no conception unless we try it ourselves.

And the members of the family, some ten people, live just as they did in town or worse if possible than in town, for here in the country it is considered that the family are resting

(from doing nothing), and so they have no longer any semblance of work or any excuse for their idleness.

During the Petrov fast1-the strict fast, when the peasants’ food is kvas, rye-bread, and onions-mowing begins. The gentlefolk living in the country see this work, to some extent they give orders for it, to some extent admire it, are pleased by the odour of the wilting hay, the sound of the women’s songs, the clanging of the scythes, and the sight of the rows of mowers and the women raking the hay.

They see this near the house, and then the young people and children, having done nothing all day, have to be driven half a verst for their bathe.

The work done at hay-making is one of the most important undertakings in the world. Almost every year, from lack of labourers and time, the meadows may be drenched with rain before the mowing is completed, and the greater or lesser intensity of the work decides whether twenty or more per cent. of hay shall be added to the peoples’ wealth or shall rot and perish on its roots. If more hay is gathered there will be more meat for the old men and more milk for the children. So it is in general; but for each of the mowers in particular the question of bread and of milk for himself and his children for the winter is here being decided. Each of the men and women knows this and even the children know that this work is important and that one must work to the limit of one’s strength, carrying the jug of kvas to father in the field and, changing the heavy jug from hand to hand, running barefoot as fast as possible a mile and a half from the village to be in time for his dinner and that daddy may not scold. Everyone knows that from hay-time till harvest there will be no break in the work and no time for resting.

It is not the hay-making alone; everyone has work to do besides the mowing: there is land to turn up and harrow, the women have to bleach the linen and attend to the bread and the washing, and the men have to drive to the mill and to town, look after the village communal affairs, attend the law courts, see the rural police-officer, and do the carting, and at night feed the horses; and all-old, young, and sick-work to the limit of their strength. The peasants work so that always, before the end of each turn of work the weak, the striplings, and the old men, tottering, hardly manage to do the last rows, and can scarcely rise again after the pause; and so do the women work, though they are often pregnant or nursing.

The work is intense and ceaseless. All work with their utmost strength and during this work eats up not only all their scanty supplies of food but also any reserves they may have had: never too stout, they grow leaner by the end of the harvest work.

Here is a small group engaged on mowing: three peasants-one an old man, another his nephew (a young married lad), and a boot-maker, a sinewy fellow who has been a domestic serf-this hay-harvest decides their fate for the coming winter for them all: whether they can keep a cow and pay the taxes. They have already worked unceasingly and continuously for two weeks. Rain has hindered the work. After the rain, when the wind has dried the grass, they decide to finish the work, and to get on more quickly they decide each to bring two women to it. With the old man comes his wife, a woman of fifty worn out by hard work and eleven childbirths, and deaf but still a good worker, and his

1 The fast of St. Peter and St. Paul, from the ninth week after Easter till the 29th June, old style.-A. M.

thirteen-year-old daughter, a small girl but strong and quick. With the nephew comes his wife, a woman as strong and tall as a man, and his sister-in-law the pregnant wife of a soldier. With the boot maker comes his wife, a good worker, and her mother, an old woman finishing her eighth decade and who usually goes out begging. They all line up, and work from morning till evening in the sweltering blaze of the June sun. It is steaming and the rain threatens. Every hour of work is precious. They grudge the time to fetch water or kvas.

A tiny boy, the old woman’s grandson, fetches some water for them. The old woman, evidently only anxious not to be driven away from the work, does not let the rake out of her hands, though she can hardly, with effort, move along. The lad, all bent up and taking short steps with his bare little feet, brings along the jug of water which is heavier than himself, changing it from hand to hand. The girl shoulders a load of hay which is also heavier than she; she takes a few steps, stops, and throws it down unable to carry it farther. The old woman of fifty rakes unceasingly and, with her kerchief brushed to one side, drags the hay along, breathing heavily and tottering in her walk; the woman of eighty does nothing but rake, but even that is beyond her strength: she slowly drags her feet in their bark shoes, and with wrinkled brows looks sombrely before her like one who is seriously ill or is dying. The old man purposely sends her farther away from the others to rake near the hay-cocks so that she should not have to keep up with them, but without pause and with the same death-like sombre face she works on as long as the others do.

The sun is already setting behind the woods and the hay-cocks are not yet all cleared away and much remains to be done.

All feel it is time to knock off. but no one speaks waiting for the others to do so. At last the boot maker, feeling that he has no strength left, proposes to the old man to leave the cocks till tomorrow and the old man agrees, and the women at once run for their clothes, for the jugs, for the hay-forks, and the old woman sits down immediately where she stands, and then lies down still looking straight before her with the same deathlike face. But the women are going, and she gets up groaning and drags herself away after them.

But here is the proprietor’s house. That same evening when from the village is heard the clang of the whetstones of the exhausted hay-makers returning from the fields, the sounds of the hammers straightening out the dents in the scythe blades, the shouts of women and girls who, having just had time to put down their rakes are already running to drive in the cattle-from the proprietor’s house other sounds are heard; drin, drin, drin! goes the piano, and an Hungarian song rings out, and amid those songs occasionally comes the sound of the knock of croquet-mallets on the balls. Near the stable stands a carriage to which four well-fed horses are harnessed. It is a smart hired carriage.

Guests have arrived who have paid ten rubles to be driven ten miles. The horses harnessed to the carriage are making their bells tinkle. There is hay in their trough and they trample it underfoot-the very hay that there in the hay field is collected with such effort. At the proprietor s house there is movement-a healthy well-fed lad in a pink shirt (given him for his services as yard porter is calling the coachmen to harness and saddle some horses. Two peasants who live here as coachmen come out of the coachmen’s room and go leisurely to saddle the horses for the gentlefolk. .

Still nearer to the proprietor’s house one hears the sounds of another piano. This is a young lady student of the Conservatoire, who lives here to teach the children and is practicing Schumann. The sounds of the one piano break in on those of the other. Close to the house two nurses are passing: one of them is young, the other old. They are taking and carrying children-of the same age as those who had run from the village with the jugs-to put them to bed. One of the nurses is English and cannot speak Russian. She was imported from England not for any known qualities, but only because she could not talk Russian. Farther off a peasant and two peasant women are watering flowers near the house, while another is cleaning a gun for the young master.

And here are two women carrying a basket with clean clothes; they have washed the linen for the gentry and for the English and French teachers. In that house two women hardly manage to wash up all the crockery for the gentlefolk who have just had a meal, and two peasants in dress coats are running up and down stairs serving coffee, tea, wine, and seltzer water. Upstairs a table is spread: they have just finished eating and will soon eat again till midnight, till three o’clock, often till cock-crow.

Some of them sit smoking and playing cards, others sit and smoke talking liberalism; others move about from place to place, eat, smoke, and not knowing what to do decide to go out for a drive. There are some fifteen healthy men and women there and some thirty able-bodied men and women servants working for them.

And this is happening where every hour and every boy is precious. And it will continue in July when the peasants, going short of sleep, will mow the oats by night not to let them shack, and the women will rise while it is still dark to thrash straw for sheaf-bands, and when that old woman by then quite worn out with the harvest work, and the woman with child, and the young lads, overstrain themselves and get ill from drinking too much water; and when there is a shortage of bands and horses and carts to carry to the stacks the corn which feeds everyone, and of which millions of puds1 are needed every day in Russia that people may not die; and all this time the gentlefolk will continue the same way of life there will be theatricals, picnics, hunts, drinking, eating, piano-playing, singing, dancing, in an unceasing orgy.

Here it is no longer possible to make the excuse that such is the order of things; none of it was prearranged. We ourselves carefully arrange this way of life, taking grain and labour away from the overburdened peasant folk. We live as though we had no connexion with the dying washerwoman, the fifteen-year-old prostitute, the woman fagged out by cigarette-making, and the strained, excessive labour of the old women and children around us who lack a sufficiency of food; we live-enjoying ourselves in luxury-as if there were no connexion between those things and our life; we do not wish to see that were it not for our idle, luxurious and depraved way of life, there would also not be this excessive toil, and that without this excessive toil such lives as ours would be impossible.

We imagine that their sufferings are one thing and our life another, and that we, living as we do, are as innocent and pure as doves.

We read descriptions of the lives of the Romans and marvel at the inhumanity of the soulless Luculli glutting themselves on delicacies and costly drinks while people died of

1 The pud is about 36 lbs. avoirdupois.-A. M.

hunger; we shake our heads and marvel at the savagery of our grandfathers, the serf-owners who organized domestic orchestras and theatres and allotted whole villages for the upkeep of their gardens, and from the height of our humanitarianism we wonder at them.

We read the words of Isaiah, Chapter V:

‘8. Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth.

‘11. Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning, that they may follow strong drink; that continue until night, till wine inflame them!

‘12. And the harp, and the viol, the tabret, and pipe, and wine, are in their feasts: but they regard not the work of the Lord, neither consider the operation of his hands.

‘18. Woe unto them that draw iniquity with cords of vanity, and sin as it were with a cart rope:

‘20. Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!

‘21. Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight!

‘22. Woe unto them that are mighty to drink wine, and men of strength to mingle strong drink:

‘23. Which justify the wicked for reward, and take away the righteousness of the righteous from him!’

We read these words, and it seems to us that it does not refer to us. We read in the Gospels: Matthew iii. 10:

‘And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.’

And we are fully convinced that we are just the good tree that brings forth fruit, and that these words are not addressed to us, but to some others, to bad people.

We read the words of Isaiah, vi:

‘10. Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and convert and be healed.

‘11. Then said I, Lord, how long? And he answered, Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant, and the houses without man, and the land be utterly desolate.’

We read this and are fully persuaded that this wonderful thing is not done to us, but to some other people. But the reason why we see nothing is just because this wonderful work is being done to us: we do not hear, nor see, nor understand with our hearts. How did this come about?

Chapter 26

How can one who considers himself, I will not say a Christian or even a cultured or humane man, but simply a man with some traces of reason and conscience, live in such a way so that, without taking part in the struggle of all humanity for life, he devours the labour of those who do struggle and increases by his demands the burden of the strug-glers and the number of those who perish in that struggle? Yet our so-called Christian and cultured world is full of such people. Not only is our world full of such, but the ideal of people of our Christian and cultured world is to acquire the greatest possible fortune-that is, riches affording comfort and idleness: in other words, liberation from the struggle for life and opportunity to avail oneself fully of the labour of one’s brethren, who are perishing in that struggle. How could people fall into such an amazing error?

How could they come to the pass of not seeing, nor hearing, nor understanding with their hearts, what is so clear, obvious, and indubitable?

One need but reflect for a moment, to be horrified at the amazing contradiction between our life and what we-I will not say Christian, but humane and cultured people-profess.

Whether well or ill arranged by the God, or the law of nature, by which the world and mankind exist-the position of man in the world from the time we first know it, has been and is, that men are naked, without wool on their bodies, without burrows in which to shelter, without food they can find in the fields like Robinson Crusoe on his island, and they are all so placed as to have constantly and ceaselessly to struggle with nature in order to cover their bodies, make themselves clothes, fence themselves in, have a roof over their heads, and produce their food, so as two or three times’ a day to satisfy their hunger and that of their children and old folk who cannot work.

Wherever, at whatever period and in whatever number, we observe the life of men, in Europe, China, America, or Russia, and whether we observe the whole of humanity or only some small part of it, in ancient times in the nomad state or in our times with steam-engines, sewing machines, electric lights, and improved agricultural methods, we see one and the same thing: that people, working incessantly and intensely, are unable to secure sufficient food, clothing, and shelter for themselves and their children and old people, and that a considerable number, now as in earlier ages, perish from lack of sufficient means of life and from excessive labour to obtain those means.

Live where we may, if we draw a circle around us of a hundred thousand, of a thousand, of ten miles, or of one mile, and observe the lives of those whom our circle encloses, we shall see in it starveling children, old men and old women, women in confinement, the sick and the weak, who have not sufficient food or rest and who therefore die prematurely, and we shall see men in their prime who are simply killed by dangerous and harmful work.

Since the world began we see that men have struggled with their common need and despite terrible efforts, deprivations, and sufferings, have not been able to vanquish it. We also know that each of us, wherever he may be and however he may live, every day and every hour, voluntarily or not, consumes part of the produce the labour of humanity has produced. Wherever and however he lives, the house and the roof over his head did not grow of their own accord. The wood in his stove did not walk in of itself, nor did the

water; neither did the baked bread, the dinner, the clothes, and his boots, fall from the sky; but it has all been made not by men of the past alone, who are already dead, but has been, and is being, made for him now by people hundreds and thousands of whom wither up and die in unavailing efforts to obtain for themselves and their children the essentials of life-shelter, food, and clothing-the means to save themselves and their children from suffering and premature death. They all struggle against want: struggle with such tension that every moment their brethren perish around them: fathers, mothers, and children.

People in this world, like men on a waterlogged vessel with a small supply of food, are placed by God or by Nature so that they must spare the food and unceasingly exert themselves to avoid a calamity. Every stoppage of that work by any of us, every consumption by us of the work of others, that is not necessary for the common aim, is ruinous for ourselves and for our fellow-men.

How has it happened that the majority of the educated people of our time, without themselves labouring, calmly consume other people’s labours which are necessary for the maintenance of life, and consider that to do so is quite natural and reasonable?

To free ourselves from the toil proper and natural to all and to lay it on others without considering ourselves traitors and thieves, only two assumptions are possible: first, that we-those who do not share in the common toil-are beings distinct from the working people and have a special function in society, like the drones or queen bees that have a different function from working bees; and secondly, that what we, who are freed from the struggle for life, are doing for the others is so useful for all men that it certainly compensates for the harm we do by making their burden heavier.

In former times people who exploited the labour of others asserted, first that they were a special breed, and secondly that they were specially appointed by God to care for the welfare of the others, that is to govern them and teach them, and so they assured others, and often themselves believed, that what they were doing was more necessary and important for the people than was the labour they consumed. And that justification sufficed as long as people doubted neither the direct intervention of the Divinity in human affairs nor the distinction between different breeds. But with the coming of Christianity and the consciousness of the equality and unity of all men that flows from it, this justification could no longer be presented in that form. It was no longer possible to assert that people are born of different breeds and distinctions and with different functions, and the old justification, though still maintained by some people, was gradually abolished and now hardly exists.

The justification of the difference between various human breeds has disappeared, but the fact of the emancipation of self from toil and the consumption of the labour of others by those who have power to do so, remains as before, and new justifications for the existing fact have continually been devised, so that even without acknowledging a special breed of people it should seem right for those who can manage it to exempt themselves from labour. Very many such justifications have been devised. Strange as it may appear, the chief occupation of the activity that at a particular period was called science-the thing that constituted the ruling tendency of science-was, and still continues to be, the discovery of such justifications. That was the aim of the activity of the theological and of the juridical sciences, it was the aim of so-called philosophy, and it has latterly become (strange as

this appears to contemporaries who employ this justification) the aim of present-day experimental science.

All the theological subtlety that tried to prove that a certain church is the only true successor of Christ and that therefore it alone has full and unlimited power over the people’s souls and even over their bodies has that for its chief aim.

The juridical sciences: political, criminal, civil, ,and international law, all have that one purpose; most philosophic theories, especially the Hegelian theory that so long prevailed, with its assertion that whatever exists is reasonable and that the State is a form necessary for the perfecting of personality, have solely that aim.

A very inferior English publicist, whose other works have all been forgotten and acknowledged to be insignificant among the insignificant, writes a treatise on population in which he invents a pseudo-law about the increase of population disproportionately to the increase in means of subsistence. He sets out his pseudo-law in baseless mathematical formulae and publishes it to the world. From the levity and lack of talent of this work one would expect it not to attract anyone’s attention and to be forgotten like all the same author’s subsequent writings; but what happened was just the opposite. The publicist who wrote that treatise at once became a scientific authority, and remained so for nearly half a century. Malthus! Malthus’s theory-the law of the increase of population in geometrical, and of the means of subsistence in arithmetical, progression, and of the natural and rational methods of limiting population, all became scientific, indubitable truths, which were not verified but were employed as axioms from which to deduce further conclusions. That was how learned, educated-people behaved; and among the masses of idle people there was respectful faith in the great law discovered by Malthus.

Why did this happen? These seem to be scientific deductions which have nothing in common with the instincts of the herd.

But that only appears so to one who believes that science is something self-existent, like the Church, which is not subject to error; and not simply the thoughts of weak and erring men who just for importance’ sake call their thoughts and words ‘science’.

It was only necessary to make practical deductions from the theory of Malthus to see that that theory was a very human one with very definite aims.

The deductions that flowed directly from that theory were as follows: the wretched condition of the working people is not due to cruelty, egotism, or lack of understanding, on the part of the rich and powerful, but is what it is by an immutable law not dependent on man, and if anyone is to blame for it, it is the hungry workmen themselves: why have they been so stupid as to be born when they know they will have nothing to eat? And so the rich and powerful classes are not to blame for anything and may quietly continue to live as before.

And this deduction was so valuable for the crowd of idle people, that all the learned people overlooked the lack of proof, the incorrectness, and the completely arbitrary nature of this proposition, and the crowd of educated, that is to say idle, people, scenting what these propositions led to, enthusiastically acclaimed it, stamped it with the seal of truth, that is of science, and made much of it for half a century.

The positivist philosophy of Comte and the I doctrine deduced from it that humanity is an organism, and Darwin’s doctrine of a law of the struggle for existence that is supposed to govern life, with the differentiation of various breeds of people which follows from it, and the anthropology, biology, and sociology of which people are now so fond-all have the same aim. These have all become favourite sciences because they serve to justify the way in which people free themselves from the human obligation to labour, while consuming the fruits of other people’s labour.

All these theories, as is always the case, are first formulated in the secret sanctuaries of the priests, and are diffused among the masses in indefinite, obscure expressions, and are so adopted by them. As in olden times all the theological subtleties justifying the violence committed by the Church and the State remained the special knowledge of the priests, while among the masses readymade conclusions circulated that were accepted on faith, to the effect that the power of the kings, the priests, and the nobles, was sacred; so later on the philosophic and juridical subtleties of so called science were the possession of the priests of science, while among the masses only conclusions accepted on faith were current, to the effect that the organization of society should be such as it is, and that it cannot be otherwise.

And so now, it is only in the sanctuaries of the priests of science that the laws of life and the evolution of organisms are analysed, while among the masses conclusions are accepted on faith, to the effect that the division of labour is a law confirmed by science and that things should be so: some should work and die of hunger, while others must everlastingly make holiday; and that just this very perdition of some and banqueting of others is an indubitable law of human life to which we ought to submit.

The current justification of this idleness among the mass of the so-called educated people, with their various activities, from railway officials to writers and artists, is now this:

We people who have emancipated ourselves from the duty common to humanity of taking part in the struggle for existence, are serving progress and thereby render service to the whole of society which compensates for all the harm we do to people by consuming their labour.

That reasoning appears to men of our time quite unlike that by which people who did not work used to justify themselves formerly; just as the reasoning of the Roman emperors and citizens that without them the cultured world would perish, seemed to them quite apart from the reasoning of the Egyptians and the Persians, and just as similar reasoning seemed to the medieval knights and clergy to be quite distinct from the reasoning of the Romans.

But that only seems so; it is only necessary to examine the essence of our present justification to become convinced that there is nothing new in it.

It is only a little disguised, but is the same, for it is founded on the same thing. Every justification of man for consuming the labour of others without himself working-the justification of Pharaoh and the priests, of the Roman and medieval emperors, and of the knights, priests, and clerics-was always constructed on two assumptions: (1) We take the labour of the common people because we are a special kind of people destined by God to rule the common folk and teach them divine truths; (2) members of the common

people cannot be judges of the amount of labour we take from the common people, because, as was said already by the Pharisees (John vii. 49), This multitude which knoweth not the law are accursed. The people do not understand what is good for them, and cannot therefore be the judge of the benefits conferred on them.

The justification employed in our time, despite its apparent difference, is constructed essentially of those same two fundamental propositions: (1) We are special people, we educated people who serve progress and civilization and thereby confer great benefit on the common folk; (2) the common uneducated people do not understand the benefit we confer on them and therefore cannot be judges of it.

We free ourselves from toil, and use up the toil of others and thereby make their condition more burdensome, and we affirm that in exchange for this we render them great service of which, from their ignorance, they cannot be the judges.

Is not this the same? The difference is only in the fact that formerly the right to other people’s work belonged to the Roman citizens, priests, knights, and nobles, but now to one caste of people who call themselves the educated classes. The falsehood is the same, for the false position of the people justifying themselves is the same. That falsehood lies in the fact that before reasoning about the advantage rendered to the people by those who free themselves from toil, certain people, the Pharaohs, the priests, or we educated people, occupy that position, maintain it, and then devise a justification for it.

That position of some people coercing others, both in former times and in the present, serves as the basis of it all.

The only difference between our justification and the most ancient one is that ours is more fallacious and has less basis than the former.

The ancient emperors and popes if they themselves and the people believed in their divine appointment, could explain simply why they were the people who should have the use of other people’s labour: they said they were appointed thereto by God himself, and that God destined them to transmit to the people the divine truths which had been revealed to them, and to govern the people.

But educated people of our times who do not work with their hands, acknowledging the equality of man, can no longer explain why just they and their children (for education also is only obtained by money, that is by power) are the chosen, fortunate people ordained to confer a certain easy benefit, and not others from among the millions who perish by hundreds and thousands while rendering education for the few possible.

Their only justification is that they-those who are there now-in exchange for the evil they do to people by avoiding work and consuming the labour of others confer on the people a benefit the people do dot understand, but which compensates for all the harm they do.

Chapter 27

proposition by which people who have emancipated themselves from labour justify their emancipation, in its simplest and at the same time its most exact expression is this: We, people who, having emancipated ourselves from labour, are able by violence to

make use of other people s work as a result of this position of ours confer benefits on those other people; or in other words, certain people in exchange for palpable and comprehensible harm they inflict on the masses by forcibly taking their labour and thus augmenting the hardship of their struggle with nature, confer a benefit on the masses which is impalpable and incomprehensible to them. This proposition is a very strange one, but like the people of former times those of the present who sit on the backs of the working folk believe in it and relieve their consciences by it.

Let us see how this proposition is in our times justified among the various classes that have emancipated themselves from labour.

I serve people by my official or ecclesiastical activity, as a king, a minister of state, or a prelate; I serve people by my commercial. or industrial activity, I serve people by my scientific or artistic activity. All our activities are as necessary to the people as their work is to us.

So say the various kinds of people of our day who have exempted themselves from labour.

Let us examine in succession each of the grounds on which they affirm the utility of their activities.

There can only be two tests of the utility of one man’s activity for another: the external, consisting in the recognition of this utility by him who is benefited, and the internal, a desire to benefit another which lies at the root of the activity of him who confers the benefit.

The government people (I include among them the ecclesiastics of the Church established by the State) confer benefit on those whom they rule.

An emperor, king, president of a republic, prime minister, minister of justice, minister of war of education, a bishop, and all their subordinates who serve the State, live exempting themselves from the struggle of humanity for life and leaving the whole burden of that struggle to other people, on the ground that their activity compensates for this. .

Let us apply the first test: is the benefit conferred by this activity recognized by the working men upon whom the activity of the governing class is directly exerted?

Yes, it is acknowledged: the majority of men consider the governmental activity to be necessary for them-the majority acknowledges the usefulness of this activity in principle; but in all its known manifestations, in all particular cases known to us, each of the institutions and acts of that activity encounters in the circle of those for whose benefit it is done not merely a denial of benefit received, but assertion that this activity is harmful and disastrous.

There is no State or social activity which is not considered to be harmful by very many people; there is no institution which is not considered harmful: the courts, banks, county councils, district, councils, the police, the clergy, every State activity from the highest authorities down to the town and rural police, from the bishops to the sextons, IS by some people considered to be beneficial and by others harmful. And this is so not in Russia only, but in the whole world also-in France, and in America.

The whole activity of the Republican party is considered harmful by the Democratic party, and vice, versa; the whole activity of the Democratic party, if it is in power, is considered harmful by the Republican party and by others.

But not only is the activity of the government people in general never considered useful by all men-that activity has also this characteristic that it always has to be enforced by violence, and that to attain its benefit murders executions jails, forcibly collected taxes and so forth, are necessary.

It turns out, therefore, that besides the fact that the advantage of government activity is not acknowledged by all men and is always denied by part of the people, this benefit is characterized by always manifesting itself by means of violence. And so the benefit of political activity cannot be confirmed on the ground that it is acknowledged by those people for whom it is carried on.

Let us apply the second test. Let us question the government people themselves, from king to policeman, from president to office-clerk, and from patriarch to sexton, asking them to reply sincerely: Have they all of them in view, when occupying their positions, the benefit they wish to confer on the people, or some other aim? Are they prompted in their wish to occupy the post of king, president, minister, rural policeman, sexton, or schoolmaster, by a striving for other people’s benefit or for their own personal advantage?

And the reply of conscientious men will be, that their chief impulse is their own personal advantage.

And so it appears that one class of people availing themselves of the work of others, who perish at their labour, redeem the indubitable harm they cause, by an activity which is always considered by very many people to be not a benefit but an injury, and is not accepted voluntarily but must always be enforced by violence, and the aim of which is not the benefit of others but the personal advantage of those who exert it.

What then confirms the supposition. that governmental activity is beneficial to the people?

Only this, that those who carry it on are firmly convinced that it is useful, and that this activity has always existed. But institutions have always existed which were not merely useless but even harmful, such as slavery, prostitution, and wars. Industrialists-including under that heading traders, manufacturers, railroad men, bankers, and landowners-believe that they confer benefits which redeem the unquestionable harm they do.

On what grounds do they think so?

To the question, who and what sort of people acknowledge the usefulness of their activity, the participants in government, including the ecclesiastics, could point to thousands and millions of working people who in principle acknowledge the utility of governmental and clerical activity; but to whom will the bankers and the manufacturers of vodka, velvet, bronzes, and mirrors, to say nothing of cannon, refer us? To whom will the traders and land-owners refer us when we ask them whether the benefits which they confer are admitted by public opinion? If some people are found who consider the production of chintz, rails, beer, and similar articles, to be useful, others in greater numbers can be found who consider the production of these articles harmful. No one will defend the activity of landowners and of traders who raise the price of commodities.

Besides this, such activity is always connected with harm to the labourers and violence, which though less direct than the violence of government is equally cruel in its consequences, since industrial and commercial activities are all founded on taking advantage of want in every form: taking advantage of it to compel the workers to do hard and undesirable labour; taking advantage of it again to purchase materials at cheap prices and to sell things the people need at the highest possible prices; and taking advantage of it to exact interest for money lent. From whatever side we view their activity, we see that the benefit rendered by the industrialists is not acknowledged by those for whom it is exerted, either in principle or in particular cases, and for the most part is considered simply harmful.

If we apply the second test and ask what is the impelling motive of the activity of the industrialists, we receive a yet more definite answer than on the activity of those who govern.

If a man employed by government says that besides his personal advantage he has the public welfare in view, one has to believe him, and we all know such men; but an industrialist by the very raison d’etre of his business cannot have the public welfare for his aim, but will appear ridiculous to his fellows if in his business he pursues any other aim than the increase or maintenance of his wealth.

So the working people do not consider the activity of the industrialists useful to them.

That activity is accompanied by violence employed against the workers, and its aim is not to benefit the working people but is always personal advantage; and yet-strange to say-these industrialists are so convinced of the benefit they confer on people by their activity, that for the sake of that imaginary benefit they inflict undoubted and obvious harm on the workers by exempting themselves from labour and consuming what the workers produce by labour.

The scientists and artists have exempted themselves from labour and have imposed that labour on others, and live with calm consciences, firmly convinced that they confer on others benefits compensating for all that.

On what is their conviction based?

Let us ask them as we asked the government men and the industrialists: do all or even a majority of working folk acknowledge the benefit science and art confers on them?

The reply will be a most lamentable one.

The activity of the rulers and the Church people is, in principle, considered useful by nearly everybody and in its application is so considered by more than half the working people on whom it is directed; the activity of the industrialists is considered useful by a small number of working people; but the activity of the men of science and art is not recognized as useful by any working people. The utility of that activity is recognized only by those who carry it on or wish to carry it on. The working people-those who bear on their shoulders the whole labour of life, and feed and clothe the scientists and artists-cannot recognize the activity of those men as being of use to them, for they cannot even have any conception of this activity which is so useful to them. That activity appears to the working folk to be useless and even corrupting.

That is how all working folk regard the universities, libraries, conservatories, picture-and sculpture-galleries, and the theatres, which are built at their expense. A labouring man so definitely regards this activity as an evil that he does not send his children to school, and to compel the masses to accept this activity it has everywhere been necessary to pass laws to compel school attendance. A labouring man always regards this activity with hostility, and will only cease so to regard it when he himself ceases to be a labourer and, by gain and afterwards by what is called education, passes from the ranks. of labour into the ranks of those who live on the backs of others. Yet despite the fact that the activity of the scientists and artists is not recognized and cannot be recognized by any of the workers, the latter are nevertheless compelled to make sacrifices for the benefit of that activity.

A man of the executive sends another directly to the guillotine or to jail; a trader exploiting the labour of another takes all he possesses from him, leaving him to choose between starvation or pernicious work; but a scientist or artist does not seem to compel others, he only offers his wares to those who wish to take them; but to produce his wares, which the working man does not want, he takes from them by force, through government agents, a large part of their labour for the erection and maintenance of academies, universities, high schools, primary schools, museums, libraries, conservatories, and for the support of the scientists and artists.

If we ask the scientists and artists about the aim they pursue in their activities, we get most remarkable replies. A man belonging to the government can reply that his aim is the common good, and in such a reply there is a measure of truth confirmed by public opinion. In the reply of an industrialist that his aim is the common good there would be less probability, but even that might be affirmed.

But the reply made by the scientists and artists is startlingly unproven and audacious.

The scientists and artists, without offering any proofs of it, say just what the priests of old said, that their activity is most important and necessary for all men and that without this activity all humanity would perish. They affirm this although no one but they understands or recognizes their activity and despite the fact that true science and true art, by their own definition, ought not to aim at utility. And scientists and artists devote themselves to their favourite occupation regardless of what benefit people may derive from it, and are always convinced that they are doing most important and necessary work for humanity. So that while a sincere man engaged in the government, acknowledging the chief motive of his activity to be a personal impulse, tries as far as possible to be useful to the working people, and an industrialist, admitting the selfishness of his activity, tries to give it a character of public utility, scientists and artists do not even consider it necessary to appear to try to be useful, and even reject the aim of utility, so confident are they not merely of the utility but even of the sanctity of their avocations.

And so it turns out that a third division people, having exempted themselves from labour and imposed it on others, are busying themselves with things quite incomprehensible to the workers, which the latter regard as rubbish and often as harmful rubbish; and they busy themselves with these things without any thought of being useful to the people, merely for their own pleasure, being for some reason fully convinced that their activity will always be such as is essential for the life of the working folk.

Men have exempted themselves from labour for life and have thrown that work onto others who perish in their toil. They exploit such labour, and assert that their own occupations, incomprehensible to the people and not directed towards the service of others, redeem all the harm they inflict by exempting themselves from labour for the maintenance of life and by consuming the labour of others.

The men engaged in the government, to compensate for the ‘undoubted and evident evil they inflict by exploiting other people’s work and exempting themselves from the struggle with nature, add another evident and undoubted evil-that of inflicting all sorts of violence.

The industrialists, to redeem the undoubted and evident evil they cause by using up the fruits of their toil, strive to obtain for themselves and consequently to take from others as much wealth as possible, that is, as much of people’s labour as possible.

Scientists and artists, in return for the unquestionable and obvious harm they do to the labouring people, occupy themselves with things that are incomprehensible to the labourers and which, on their own assertion, to be real must not aim at utility-but to which they feel drawn. And so all these people are quite convinced that their right to consume other people’s labour is impregnable.

It would seem obvious that all these people who have exempted themselves from labour to maintain life, have no ground for this. But amazing to say, they firmly behave in their own integrity and live as they do with a calm conscience.

There must be some ground-there must be some false doctrine-underlying such a terrible delusion!

Chapter 28

AND indeed, underlying the position of people who live on work done by others there lies not only a belief but a whole doctrine, and not one doctrine but three, which during ages have grown up one on the other and solidified into one monstrous deception-or humbug, as the English expression has it-which hides their injustice.

The most ancient doctrine in our world justifying people’s neglect of the fundamental duty of working for their living was the Church-Christian doctrine, according to which men are differentiated one from another by God’s will, as the sun differs from the moon and stars, and the stars from one another: some men being appointed by God to rule over all the rest, others over many, others again over a few, and the rest being appointed to obey.

That doctrine, though now shaken to its foundations, still continues by inertia to act on people, so that many without accepting the teaching and often without being acquainted with it are still guided by it.

The second justificatory doctrine in our world is one I do not know how to describe otherwise than as the State-philosophic. According to that doctrine, fully expressed by Hegel, all that exists is reasonable, and the order of life people have set up and are maintaining is not established and maintained by men but is the only possible form for the manifestation of the spirit, or in general for the life of humanity. This doctrine, too, is

no longer held by those who guide public opinion in our day, but only maintains itself by force of inertia.

The third and now dominant doctrine-on which is based the justification now adopted alike by scientific and artistic people-is not a scientific doctrine in the simple meaning of that word as indicating knowledge in general, but in the sense of one kind of knowledge special both in form and in matter.

This new doctrine, called scientific, is what in our day chiefly supports the justification that hides from idle people their neglect of their duty.

This doctrine made its appearance in Europe contemporaneously with a large class of rich and idle people who served neither Church nor State and were in want of a justification corresponding to their position.

Not very long ago, up to the time of the French revolution, all in Europe who were not workers, in order to have a right to appropriate other people’s work had to have some very definite occupation in the service of the Church, the Government, or the Army. The men who served the Government ruled the people, those who served the Church taught people divine truths, while those who served in the Army defended the people.

Only three classes-the clergy, the rulers, and the military-considered themselves to have a right to appropriate the labour of the workers, and they could always adduce the services they rendered to the people: other rich men who had not that justification were despised and, conscious of their fault, felt ashamed of their wealth and idleness.

But a time came when this class of rich people not belonging to the clergy, the government, or the army, multiplied and became powerful thanks to the defects of those three classes, and these new people needed a justification. And the justification was produced.

Not a century passed before all these people, not serving State or Church and taking no part in their affairs, had not only obtained the same right to appropriate other people’s labour as the former classes, and ceased to be ashamed of their wealth and idleness, but had come to consider their position fully justified. And an enormous number of such people have arisen in our times and their number continually increases. And what is surprising is that these new people, the very ones the justice of whose exemption from toil was so recently not acknowledged, now consider that they alone are fully justified, and attack the three earlier classes-the servants of the Church, the State and the Army-considering their exemption from toil to be unjust and even considering their activity harmful.

And what is still more surprising is that the former servants of the State, the Church, and the Army, no longer rely on their divine vocation, nor even on the philosophic importance of the State as necessary for the manifestation of individuality, but they abandon these supports which so long maintained them, and now seek the support on which the new dominant class stands headed by scientists and artists-which has now found a fresh justification. If a man of the government now sometimes by old habit defends his position on the ground that he was set in it by God, or that the State is a form of the development of personality, this indicates that he lags behind the age, and he feels that no one believes him. To defend himself effectively he must now no longer produce

theological or philosophic supports, but other, new, scientific ones. He has to put forward the principle of national or organic development, and has to curry favour with the dominant order, as in the Middle Ages it was necessary to curry favour with the churchmen, and at the end of the eighteenth century with the philosophers, as was done by Frederick and Catherine the Great.

If now a rich man sometimes, by old habit, speaks of the divine will that chose him to be rich, or of the importance of an aristocracy for the nation’s good, he does so because he lags behind the times. To justify himself effectively he ought to put forward the assistance he renders to the progress of civilization by improvement in methods of production, cheapening articles of consumption, or promoting international intercourse. A rich man should talk the language of science and should offer sacrifices to the dominant order, as was formerly done to ecclesiastics; he should publish newspapers and books, arrange a picture. gallery, musical societies, a kindergarten, or technical schools.

The dominant order consists of the scientists and artists of a certain tendency: they possess a complete justification of their avoidance of toil, and on their justification, as formerly on the theological and afterwards on the philosophic, all justification now rests, and it is these men who now issue diplomas of exemption to other classes.

The class that now has a complete justification for its avoidance of toil is that of scientists, and especially experimental, positive, critical, evolutionary scientists, and the class of artists who follow the same tendency.

If a scientist or artist, by old association, now speaks about prophecy, revelation, or the manifestation of the spirit, he does so because he lags behind the age, and he fails to justify himself: to stand firmly he must somehow associate his activity with experimental, positive, critical science, and must put that science at the base of his activity.

Only then will the science or art he is occupied with be real, and only then will he, in our day, stand on unshakable foundations and be certain of the benefit he confers on humanity.

On experimental, critical, positive science the justification of all who have exempted themselves from labour now rests.

The theological and philosophic justifications are obsolete, announce themselves timidly and shamefacedly, and try to transform themselves into the scientific justification; while the scientific justification boldly upsets and destroys the remains of the former justifications, ousts them everywhere, and lifts its head high, assured of its own invincibility.

The theological justification said that people by their vocation were called-some to command, others to obey, some to live sumptuously, others to live in want; and therefore those who believed in the revelation of God could not doubt the justice of the position of those who by the will of God were called to command and be rich.

The State-philosophic justification said that the State, with all its institutions and grades differing in property and rights, is that historic form which is essential for the due manifestation of the spirit in mankind, and that therefore the position each one occupies in the State and in society in respect of property and rights, should be what it is for the due life of mankind.

The scientific theory says that the others are all nonsense and superstition: the one the fruit of thought of the theological period, the other of the metaphysical period. For the study of the laws of the life of human societies there is only one sure method-that of positive, experimental, critical science. Only sociology, based on biology, based on all the other positive sciences, can give us the laws of the life of humanity. Humanity, or human society, is an organism, formed or still in process of formation and subject to all the laws of the evolution of organisms. One of the chief of these laws is division of labour among the parts of the organism. If some people command and others obey, if some live in opulence and others in want, this occurs, not by the will of God, and not because the State is a form of the manifestation of personality, but because in societies as in organisms a division of labour occurs which is necessary for the life of the whole: some people in society perform the muscular work, others the brain work.

On that doctrine in our times the dominant excuse is built.

Chapter 29

A NEW teaching is preached by Christ and recorded in the Gospels. This teaching is persecuted and not accepted, and a story is invented of the fall of the first man and of the first angel and this invention is accepted as being the teaching of Christ. This invention is absurd and quite unfounded, but from it the deduction naturally flows that man may live badly and yet consider himself justified by Christ, and this deduction is so convenient for the crowd of weak people who dislike moral exertion that it is at once accepted as the truth, and even as divine revealed truth, though nowhere in what is called revelation is there even a hint of it-and for a thousand years this invention is made the basis of the labours of the learned theologians on which they construct their theories.

The learned theologians split up into sects, begin to deny each other’s constructions, and themselves begin to feel that they are confused and no longer understand what they are saying; but the crowd demands of them confirmation of the favourite doctrine and they pretend that they understand and believe what they say, and continue to preach it. But a time comes when the deductions prove unnecessary, the crowd peeps into the sanctuaries of the priests, and to its astonishment, instead of the solemn undoubted truths the mysteries of theology had appeared to it to be, sees that there is and has been nothing there except the grossest deception, and it marvels at its own blindness.

The same thing happened with philosophy, not philosophy in the sense of the wisdom of a Confucius, a Socrates, or an Epictetus, but with proffessorial philosophy, when it pandered to the instincts of the idle rich.

Not long ago in the learned educated world the philosophy of the spirit reigned, according to which it appeared that all that exists is reasonable, that there is no evil and no good, and that man need riot struggle with evil but need only manifest the spirit: one man in military service, another in the law-courts, and a third on a fiddle.

There have been many different expressions of human wisdom and those expressions were known to the men of the nineteenth century. Rousseau and Pascal and Lessing and Spinoza were known, as well ‘as all the wisdom of antiquity, but no one else’s wisdom captured the crowd. Nor can it be said that Hegel’s success depended on the symmetry of

his theories. There were other equally symmetrical theories: Fichte’s, and Schopenhauer’s. There was only one cause of that theory having become, for a short time, the belief of the whole world; the cause was the same as that of the success of the theory of the fall and redemption of man, namely that the deductions flowing from this philosophic theory pandered to men’s weaknesses. They said: everything is reasonable, everything is good, no one is to blame for anything. And just as the theologians had built on the theory of redemption, so the philosophers built their tower of Babel on Hegelian foundations (and some backward people still sit in it even now) and their tongues became similarly confused, and similarly they felt that they did not themselves know what they were saying, and in the same way, without sweeping the rubbish out of their house, they laboriously strove to maintain their authority with the crowd and, as before, the crowd demanded confirmation of what suited it and believed that what to it seemed obscure and contradictory was all clear as day there, on the philosophic heights. And again, in the same way, a time came when that theory was worn out and a new one appeared in its place; the old one became useless, the crowd peeped into the secret sanctuaries of the priests and saw that there was nothing there and never had been anything but very obscure and senseless words. That happened within my own recollection.

When I started life Hegelianism was the basis of everything: it was in the air, found expression in magazine and newspaper articles, in novels and essays, in art, in histories, in sermons, and in conversation. A man unacquainted with Hegel had no right to speak: he who wished to know the truth studied Hegel. Everything rested on him; and suddenly forty years have gone by and there is nothing left of him, he is not even mentioned-as though he had never existed. And what is most remarkable is that, like pseudo-Christianity, Hegelianism fell not because anyone refuted it, but because it suddenly became evident that neither the one nor the other was needed by our learned, educated world.

If we now speak to a modern educated man about the fall of the angel and of Adam, or about redemption, he will not attempt to argue or to prove the falsity of it, but will ask with perplexity:

What angel? Why Adam? What redemption? What use is it to me? Similarly with Hegelianism, a man of our time will not argue about it but will only be surprised. What spirit? Where does it come from? Why does it manifest itself? What use is it to me?

‘Yes, that came about’-say the present-day scientists-’because of the ravings of the theological and the metaphysical periods; now we have critical, positive science which does not deceive because it is based on induction and experiment. Now our knowledge is not shaky, as that was, and only along our path lie the answers to all the questions of mankind.’

But then that is just what the theologians said, and they were certainly not fools, for we know that among them were men of immense intellect; and within my own recollection the Hegelians spoke with no less confidence, and were not less accepted by the crowd of so-called educated people. And they-our Herzens, Stankeviches, and Belinskis, for instance-were not fools either. Why then did this surprising phenomenon occur that clever people should preach with the greatest confidence, and the crowd should

reverently accept, such unfounded and empty doctrines? The reason is the same, namely-that the doctrines justify people in their bad lives.

Is not the reason of the confidence of the positive, critical, experimental scientists, and of the reverent attitude of the crowd towards their doctrines, still the same? At first it seems strange how the theory of evolution (which, like the redemption in theology, serves the majority as a popular expression of the whole new creed) can justify people in their injustice, and it seems as if the scientific theory dealt only with facts and did nothing but observe facts.

But that only seems so. It seemed just the same in the case of theological doctrine: theology, it seemed, was only occupied with dogmas and had no relation to people’s lives, and it seemed the same with regard to philosophy, which appeared to be occupied solely with transcendental reasonings.

But that only seemed so. It was just the same with the Hegelian doctrine on a large scale and with the particular case of the Malthusian teaching.

Hegelianism seemed to be concerned only with its logical constructions and to have no relation to people’s lives; and this seemed to be the case with the Malthusian theory also-it seemed solely occupied with statistical facts. But that only seemed to be so.

Contemporary science investigates facts.

But what facts? Why those particular facts and not others?

Scientists of to-day are very fond of saying solemnly and confidently: ‘We only investigate facts,’ imagining these words to have some meaning.

One cannot possibly only investigate facts for the number of facts available for investigation is innumerable (in the exact sense of that word). Before investigating the facts one must have a theory on the basis of which such or such facts are selected from among the innumerable quantity. And such a theory exists and is even very definitely expressed, though many of those engaged on contemporary science either ignore it, that is, do not wish to know it, or actually do not know it, or pretend not to. So it has always been with all reigning, guiding creeds-both theological and philosophic.

The foundations of every creed are always contained in the theory, and the so-called learned people only devise further deductions from the given data, sometimes without knowing them. But there always is a fundamental theory. So now, contemporary science chooses its facts on the basis of a very definite theory which it sometimes knows, sometimes does not wish to know, and sometimes really does not know, though that theory exists.

The theory is this: all mankind is an undying organism, men are the particles of this organism and each of them has his special vocation in the service of the whole.

Just as the cells composing an organism divide among themselves the labour needed for the struggle for the existence of the whole organism strengthen one quality and weaken another, and coalesce with one organ the better to satisfy the needs of the whole organism: and just as among social animals-ants and bees-separate individuals divide the work among themselves: the queen lays eggs, the drone fertilizes her, and the workers

labour for the life of the whole-so in humanity and human societies the same differentiation and integration of parts occurs.

And therefore to discover the law of man’s life it is necessary to study the laws of the life and development of organisms; in the life and development of organisms we find the following laws: a law that every phenomenon is accompanied by other consequences besides its immediate one, another law of the frailty of the undifferentiated, and a third law of heterogeneity and homogeneity, and so forth. All this seems very innocent, but it is only necessary to draw deductions from all these observed facts in order to see at once whither they tend. They all tend to one thing, namely, to the recognition of humanity or human society as an organism, and so to a recognition of the division of activities that exists in human societies as organic, that is to say, as necessary; and as in human societies very many cruelties and abominations are perceptible, these phenomena must not be regarded as cruel or abominable but must be regarded as indubitable facts confirming a general law-namely, the law of the division of labour.

The philosophy of the spirit also justified every cruelty and abomination, but there it was philosophic and is therefore considered questionable; but in science it all turns out to be scientific and therefore indubitable.

How can one help accepting so admirable a theory! One has only to regard human society as an object of observation and one can calmly devour the labour of others who are perishing, comforting oneself with the reflection that one’s activity as a dancer, lawyer, doctor, philosopher, actor, investigator of mediumism, or of the form); of atoms, is a functional activity of the human organism, so that there can be no question of whether it is just that I should make use of the labour of others (I only do what pleases me) as there can be no question of the justice of the activity of a brain-cell which avails itself of the work of the cells in the muscles.

How can we help accepting such a practical theory enabling us to pocket our conscience for ever and quietly live an unrestrained animal life, feeling under our feet the unshakable support of modern science? And it is on this new creed that the justification of the idleness and cruelty of men is now built.

Chapter 30

THIS creed began but recently-some fifty years ago. Its chief founder was the French savant, A. Comte. Under the influence of Bichat’s physiological researches, which were then new, he, a systematizer and a religious man, was struck by the old idea expressed long ago by Menenius Agrippa, that human societies and even all humanity may be regarded as one whole, as an organism, and men may be regarded as the living cells of separate organs each having its definite function in the service of the whole organism. This thought so pleased Comte that he began to construct a philosophic theory on it, and he was so carried away by this theory that he quite forgot that his starting-point was merely a nice little analogy, suitable in a fable but quite unsuitable for the foundation of a science. As often happens, he regarded his favourite supposition as an axiom and imagined that his whole theory was based on the firmest experimental foundations. According to his theory it appeared that as humanity is an organism, the knowledge of

what man is and what his relations to the universe should be can be attained only by studying the properties of this organism. In order to learn these properties man can make observations on other-lower-organisms and draw inferences from the facts of their life.

In the first place, the only true and scientific method according to Comte is therefore the inductive method and science is only such as is based on experiment. Secondly, the aim and apex of science is the new science of the imaginary organism of humanity or of the super-organic being-humanity: this new imaginary science being sociology. From this view of science in general it appeared that all former knowledge was false, and the whole history of humanity’s knowledge of itself fell into three, or really two, periods:

(1) The theological and metaphysical periods, lasting from the commencement of the world until Comte, and (2) the present period of true science-positivism-which began with Comte.

This was all very nice; there was only one error, namely, that the whole edifice was built on the sand-on the arbitrary assertion that humanity is an organism.

That assertion was arbitrary because we have no more right to acknowledge the existence of an organism of humanity not subject to observation than we have to acknowledge the existence of a triune God and similar theological propositions.

That assertion was fallacious because to the conception of humanity, that is, of men, the definition of an organism was incorrectly affixed despite the fact that humanity lacks the essential sign of an organism, namely a centre of sensation and consciousness. We only call an elephant or a bacterium an ‘organism’ because, by analogy we attribute to those beings a similar unification of sensation and of consciousness to that we are conscious of in ourselves; but in human societies and in humanity this essential indication is lacking, and therefore, however many other indications we may detect that are common to humanity and to an organism, in the absence of that essential indication, the acknowledgement of humanity as an organism is incorrect.

But despite the arbitrariness and incorrectness of its fundamental basis the positive philosophy was accepted most cordially by the so-called educated world, so important for that world was the justification this philosophy afforded to the existing order of things by regarding the present rule of violence among men as Just. What is remarkable in this connexion is that of Comte’s works which consist of two parts-the positive philosophy and the positive politics-the learned world only accepted the first: the part which. on the new experimental basis, offered a justification for the existing evil of human societies; but the second part, dealing with the moral obligations of altruism resulting from acknowledging humanity as an organism, was considered not merely unimportant but even insignificant and unscientific.

What had occurred with the two parts of Kant’s philosophy was repeated. The criticism of pure reason was accepted by the learned crowd, but the criticism of practical reason-the part which contained the essence of his moral teaching-was rejected. In Comte’s teaching I they accepted as scientific what pandered to the prevailing evil. But the positive philosophy accepted by the crowd, being based on an arbitrary and unsound proposition, was itself so unfounded and therefore so unstable that it could not be maintained by itself. And then among the many idle speculations of so-called science

there appears an assertion-lacking equally in novelty and in truth-to the effect that living creatures, that is organisms, have been derived from one another-not only one organism from another but one organism from many: that is, that in a very long period of time, in a million years, a fish and a duck, for instance, may not merely have come from one and the same ancestor but that one organism may have come from many separate organisms, so that, for instance, a single animal might be produced from a swarm of bees. And this arbitrary and incorrect assertion was accepted by the learned world with yet greater sympathy. This assertion was arbitrary because no one has ever seen how some organisms are produced from others, and so the assumption about the origin of species always remains an assumption and not a fact of experience. And the assumption was incorrect because the solution of the question of the origin of species by the assertion that they were produced in accordance with a law of heredity and adaptation during an infinitely long period of time is not at all a solution, but only the repetition of the question in a new form.

According to the solution of the question by Moses (in a polemic with whom lies the whole importance of the theory) it appears that the diversity of the species of living beings is due to God’s will and infinite power, but according to the theory of evolution it turns out that the diversity of living beings came about of itself in consequence of endlessly varied conditions of heredity and environment during an infinite period of time. The theory of evolution, put into plain words, only asserts that in infinite time anything you please may originate from anything you please.

There is no reply to the question but the same statement is differently put: instead of a will, accident is predicated, and the coefficient of infinity is transferred from power to time. But this new assertion (made still more arbitrary and incorrect by Darwin’s followers) supported the former assertion of Comte, and so became the revelation of our age and the basis of all the sciences, even of history, philology, and religion, and more than that, according to the naive confession of the founder of the theory-Darwin his idea was suggested by Malthus’s law and therefore put forward the theory of the struggle of living beings and of men for existence as a fundamental law of all life. And one sees that that was just what the crowd of idle people needed for their justification.

Two unstable theories which did not stand I firmly on their own feet, supported one another and obtained a semblance of stability. Both theories contained within them the meaning so precious to the crowd-that men are not to blame for the existing evil in human societies but that the existing order is just the one that ought to exist; and the new theory was accepted by the crowd, in the sense in which it was needed, with full faith and unheard-of enthusiasm. And on these two arbitrary and incorrect propositions, accepted as articles of faith, the new scientific creed was consolidated.

Both in subject and in form this new creed is extraordinarily like the Church-Christian creed.

As to the subject, the resemblance consists in the fact that in both of them an unreal fantastic meaning is ascribed to something real and this unreal meaning is made the subject of investigation.

In the Church-Christian creed to Christ who really existed is attached the fantastic meaning of God Himself, while in the positivist creed, to mankind which really exists is attached the fantastic meaning of an organism.

In form, the resemblance of the two creeds is striking, for both in the one and in the other a certain conception held by some people is accepted as the one infallibly true conception.

In Church-Christianity the conception of a divine revelation to men who call themselves the Church is accepted as being sacred and exclusively true; according to the Positivist creed the comprehension of science by the men who call themselves scientific is accepted as indubitable and true. Just as the Church-Christians acknowledged a beginning of true knowledge of God only from the institution of their Church, and merely as it were out of civility said that earlier believers were also a Church; so also positivist science, according to its assertion, began only with Comte, and these scientists, again merely out of civility, admit a previous existence of science, and that only in certain representatives such as Aristotle. Just like the Church, positivist science excludes the knowledge possessed by all the rest of humanity, treating all knowledge outside its own as an error.

The resemblance goes farther: just as to aid the fundamental dogma of theology-the divinity of Christ and the Trinity-there came the old dogma, which received a new meaning, of the fall of man and his redemption by Christ’s death, and out of these two dogmas the popular Church doctrine was composed-so in our time, to the aid of Comte’s fundamental dogma about the organism of humanity, came the old dogma of evolution but with a new meaning, and out of them both the popular scientific creed was composed.

In both creeds the new dogma was necessary for the support of the old one and is intelligible only in connexion with the fundamental dogma. If to a believer in the divinity of Christ it is not clear or intelligible why God came down to earth, the dogma of the redemption supplies an explanation.

If to a believer in the organism of humanity it is not clear why an aggregate of individuals should be considered an organism, the dogma of evolution furnishes this explanation.

The dogma of the redemption is needed to reconcile the contradiction between the first dogma and reality.

God came to earth to save men but men have not been saved-how reconcile this contradiction? The dogma of the redemption says: ‘He has saved those who believe in the redemption: if you believe in it you are saved.’

Similarly the dogma of evolution is needed to solve the contradiction between reality and the previous dogma: humanity is an organism yet we see that it does not respond to the chief sign of an organism-how is this to be harmonized? Then the dogma of evolution says: ‘Humanity is an organism in process of formation. If you believe this you can regard humanity as an organism.’

And as it is impossible for a man free from superstitious belief in a Trinity and the divinity of Christ even to understand wherein the interest and meaning of the doctrine of the redemption lies, and that meaning is explained only by recognizing the fundamental dogma about Christ being God Himself-so also to humanity free from the positivist superstition it is impossible even to understand wherein lies the interest of the teaching

about the origin of species, and this interest is explained only when one knows the fundamental dogma that humanity is an organism.

And just as all the refinements of theology are intelligible only to him who believes in the basic dogmas, so also all the refinements of sociology, which now occupy the minds of all the very latest and profoundest scientists, are intelligible only to believers.

The resemblance of the two creeds lies also in this, that propositions once accepted on faith and no longer subject to investigation serve as basis for the strangest theories, and the preachers of these theories, having adopted a method of asserting their right to consider themselves holy in theology and scientific in knowledge-that is to say, infallible-arrive at most arbitrary, improbable, and quite unfounded assertions, which they express most solemnly and. seriously, and the details of which are disputed with similar seriousness and solemnity by those who disagree on particular points but equally accept the basic dogmas.

The Basil the Great of this creed, Herbert Spencer, for example, in one of his first works expresses it thus: Society and organisms resemble one another in the following:

(1) That beginning as small aggregates, they imperceptibly grow in mass till they sometimes reach dimensions ten thousand times greater than their original size;

(2) That whereas at first they are of such simple structure that they may be regarded as deprived of all structure, during their growth they acquire a continually increasing complexity;

(3) That though in their early, undeveloped period there hardly exists any interdependence of parts, their parts gradually acquire a mutual interdependence, which at last becomes so strong that the activity and life of each part is only made possible by the activity and life of the rest;

(4) That the life and development of society are independent of, and more prolonged than, the life and development of any of its component units, which are born, grow, act, reproduce, and die, while the body politic they form continues to live generation after generation and increases in size owing to the perfection of its structure and functional activity.

After that follow points of difference between organisms and societies, and it is shown that these differences are only apparently so, but that organisms and societies are completely alike.

To a new observer the question plainly presents itself: ‘What are you talking about? Why is humanity an organism? Or how does it resemble one?

‘You say that societies according to these four indications resemble organisms, but nothing of the kind is true. You only take a few signs of an organism and place human societies under those signs.

‘You adduce four signs of resemblance, then take signs of differences, but these (in your opinion) are so only in appearance, and you conclude that human societies may be regarded as organisms. But that is nothing but an idle play of dialectics. On such a basis anything you please can be brought under the signs of an organism.’

I take the first thing that occurs to me, say, for instance, a wood as it is sown in the field and grows up:

(1) ‘Beginning as small aggregates,’ etc., just the same occurs in the fields when the seeds gradually take root in them and the fields become overgrown with trees’.

(2) ‘At first the structure is simple, afterwards the complexity increases,’ &c.; just the same occurs with the wood: first there are only birch trees, then willows and hazel bushes; at first they all grow straight, afterwards their branches intertwine.

(3) ‘The interdependence of the parts increases so that the life of each part depends on the life and activity of the rest’; it is just the same with the trees: the hazel bushes warm the trunks (cut them out and the other trees will freeze), the outskirts of the wood protect it from the wind, the seed trees continue the species, tall and leafy trees give shade, and the life of one tree depends on another.

(4) ‘The separate parts may die, but the whole lives’; the same is true of a wood. As the proverb says: ‘The wood does not weep for a tree.’

It is just the same with the example usually adduced by defenders of the theory: that if you cut off an arm the ‘arm perishes. Transplant a tree beyond the shade and the forest-soil, and it dies.

There is also a remarkable resemblance between this creed and the Church-Christian creed and all other creeds founded on dogmas that are accepted on faith, in its imperviousness to logical arguments. Having shown that on their theory you have a right to consider a wood to be an organism, you think you have shown them the incorrectness of their definition-but not at, all!

The definition they give to an organism is so inexact and elastic that they can bring anything they please in under it.

‘Yes,’ they will say, ‘a wood may also be regarded as an organism. A wood is a peaceful interaction of individual parts which do not destroy one another-an aggregate-whose parts can come into closer connexion and like a swarm of bees may become an organism.’

Then you remark that, if so, then the birds and insects and grasses of that wood, which interact and do not destroy one another, together with the trees may also be regarded as an organism.

They will agree even to that. Every aggregate of living things interacting and not destroying one another may, according to their theory be regarded as an organism. You may assert a connexion and co-operation between any things you please, and you may say that by evolution from anything you please may be produced anything you please m a very great length of time.

To believers in the triune nature of God it is impossible to prove that it is not so but it is possible to show them that their assertion is an assertion not of knowledge but of belief, and that If they assert that there are three Gods I with equal right may assert that there are seventeen and a half. Gods, and the adherents of positive and evolutionary science may be met similarly and yet more indubitably. On the basis of that science I will undertake to prove anything you please. And what is most remarkable is that this same positive science recognizes the scientific method as a sign of true knowledge and has itself

defined what it calls ‘the scientific method’. What it calls ‘the scientific method’ is common sense. And just this common sense exposes it at every step.

As soon as those who occupied the seats of the Saints felt that there was nothing saintly left in them and that they were all accused, they immediately (like the Pope and our Synod) called themselves not merely Holy but Most Holy. And as soon as science felt that nothing reasonable was left in it, it called itself reasonable, that is, ‘scientific’ science.

Chapter 31

DIVISION of labour is the law of all that exists, and so it must exist in human societies. Very likely that is so, but the question still remains: Is the division of labour now existing in human societies quite the division which should exist? For if a certain division of labour appears to men unreasonable and unjust, no science can prove to them that what they consider unreasonable and unjust ought to prevail.

Theological theory proved that power is ordained by God and very likely it is so, but the question remained: Whose power is from God-Catherine’s or Pugachev’s?1 And no finesse of theology has been able to solve that doubt.

The philosophy of the Spirit showed the State to be a form of the development of personality, but the question remained: Should the State of a Nero or Genghis Khan be considered a form of the development of personality? And no transcendental words could solve that problem.

The same applies to the science of the scientists.

Division of labour is a condition of the life of organisms and of human societies; but what are we to consider an organic division of labour in human societies? However much science may study the division of labour among the cells of the tapeworm, such observations will fail to induce a man to consider a division of labour just which his reason and conscience repudiate.

However convincing may be the proofs of the division of labour among the cells of the organisms we investigate, man, as long as he is not deprived of reason, will still say that no one ought to have to weave cotton cloth all his life long, and that such an employment is not a division of labour but an oppression of men.

Spencer and others say there are whole populations of weavers and that therefore the weaver’s activity is an organic division of labour-but in saying this they are in fact saying precisely what the theologians said.

There is a power and therefore it is from God no matter what it may be like. There are weavers, so such is the proper division of labour. It would be all right to say so if the power and the population of weavers had resulted of themselves, but we know that they do not come of themselves but that we produced them. So we have to know whether we

1 Catherine II (the Great) of Russia reigned from 1761 to 1796. Pugachev was leader of a very serious peasant revolt from 1773 to 1775; he captured several towns and overran several provinces.-A. M.

produced that power by God’s will or by our own, and whether we made these weavers by an organic law or by something else?

Men live and support themselves by agriculture as is proper for all men: one man puts up a forge and mends his plough, and his neighbour comes and asks him to mend his and promises to pay him with work or with money. A third and a fourth come and among these people there is a division of labour: a blacksmith is set up. Another man teaches his children well and his neighbour brings his children to him and asks him to teach them-a teacher has been set up. But both the smith and the teacher became and remain such because they were asked, and they remain such only so long as they are asked to be smith or teacher. But should it happen that many smiths or teachers appear or that their work is not wanted, they would, as common sense demands and as always happens where there are no causes infringing the proper division of labour-at once give up those occupations and return to agriculture.

People who act so are guided by their reason and their conscience, and therefore we, men endowed with reason and conscience, declare such division of labour to be proper. But if it happened that blacksmiths were able to compel others to work for them and continued to make horseshoes when these were not wanted, and that teachers taught when there was no one to teach, it would be plain to every new-comer endowed with reason and conscience that this was not a division but an exploitation of other men’s labour, for such activity would infringe the only standard by which a fair division of labour can be known-a demand made for such labour by others, and a voluntary offer of remuneration for it. And yet it is just such an exploitation that the scientists’ science calls ‘the division of labour’.

People make things that others do not think of asking for, and demand to be fed for doing so and say that this is proper because it is a division of labour.

What constitutes the chief public evil the people suffer from-not in our country alone-is the Government, the innumerable quantity of officials; and the cause of the economic distress of our time is what the English call over-production: the making of a quantity of goods no one wants or knows what to do with, and all this results from the strange conception people have of the division of labour.

It would be strange to find a shoemaker who considered that people were bound to feed him because he unceasingly made boots that had long since ceased to be wanted by anyone; but what are we to say of those occupied with Government, the Church, science, and art, who produce nothing palpable or useful to the people, and whose goods find no demand, but who yet (pleading the division of labour) boldly demand to be well fed and well dressed?

There may be wizards whose activity meets a demand and to whom cakes and ale are’ given, but it is difficult to imagine that there can be wizards whose witchery nobody wants but who yet boldly demand to be well fed for their performances.

Yet that is just what is happening in our world among those employed in Government, and in the Church, and on science and art.

And all this results from a false understanding of the division of labour, defined not by man’s conscience but by the investigations that are announced with such unanimity by the men of science.

A division of labour always has existed and does exist, but it is only justified when man’s conscience and reason decide what it should be, and not when man merely observes that it does exist. And the conscience and reason of all men decide this question very simply, indubitably, and unanimously.

They decide that the division of labour is fair only when a man’s special activity is so needed by others that they, asking him to serve them, willingly offer him support in return for what he does for them.

But when a man can live on the backs of others from childhood till he is thirty, promising when he has finished his education to do something useful, that no one asks him to do, and when from the age of thirty till death he can go on living in the same way, still promising to do something no one asks him to do, this cannot be, and in our society is not, a division of labour, but simply a seizure by the strong of the fruits of the labour of others: ‘it is the very robbery theologians used to speak of as a ‘divine dispensation’, and philosophers afterwards declared to be ‘a necessary form of life’, and the scientists’ science now calls ‘the organic division of labour’.

The whole significance of the reigning science lies simply in that.

It has now become the granter of diplomas for idleness, for it alone in its sanctuaries examines and decides what is a parasitic and what an organic activity in the social organism-as if every man cannot recognize that much more truly and quickly by consulting his reason and conscience.

And as formerly for the priesthood and afterwards for the government, there could be no doubt as to who were the people others most needed, so now to the scientists’ science it seems there can be no doubt that its activity is unquestionably organic: they, the scientists and artists, are the most precious brain-cells of the organism. But God be with them! Let them reign, eat and drink well, and live idly, as the priests and the sophists of old lived and reigned, if only they did not, like those priests and sophists, pervert people.

Since men, rational beings, existed they have discriminated between good and evil and have made use of the distinctions those who went before them had made in this respect. They have striven against evil, sought the true and best path, and slowly but steadily advanced along it. And, obstructing that path, various deceptions have always been set in their way in order to show that this should not be done, but that men should go on living as of old. The terrible old deceptions of the Church arose, with fearful struggles and labour men gradually freed themselves from these, but before they were completely free there arose a new-State-philosophic-fraud to replace the old one. Men broke through that also. And now a new and yet worse fraud has grown up obstructing man’s path: the scientific fraud.

This new fraud is just like the old ones: its essence lies in substituting something external for the use of our own reason and conscience and that of our predecessors: in the Church teaching this external thing was revelation, in the scientific teaching it is observation.

The trick played by this science is to destroy man’s faith in reason and conscience by directing attention to the grossest deviations from the use of human reason and conscience, and having clothed the deception in a scientific theory, to assure them that by acquiring knowledge of external phenomena they will get to know indubitable facts which will reveal to them the law of man’s life. And the mental demoralization consists in this, that coming to believe that things which should be decided by conscience and reason are decided by observation, these people lose their consciousness of good and evil and become incapable of understanding the expression and definitions of good and evil that have been formed by the whole preceding life of humanity. All this, in their jargon, is conditional and subjective. It must all be abandoned-they say-the truth cannot be understood by one’s reason, for one may err, but there is another path which is infallible and almost mechanical: one must study facts. And facts must be studied on the basis of the scientists’ science, that is, on the basis of two unfounded propositions: positivism and evolution which are put forward as indubitable truths.

And the reigning science, with not less misleading solemnity than the Church, announces that the solution of all questions of life is only possible by the study of the facts of nature, and especially of organisms.

A frivolous crowd of youths mastered by the novelty of this authority, which is as yet not merely not destroyed but not even touched by criticism, throws itself into the study of these facts of natural science as the sole path which, according to the assertions of the prevailing doctrine, can lead to the elucidation of the questions of life.

But the further these disciples advance in this study the further and further are they removed not only from the possibility but even from the very thought of solving life’s problems, and the more they become accustomed not so much to observe as to take on trust what they are told of the observations of others (to believe in cells, in protoplasm, in the fourth state of matter,1 &c.), the more and more does the form hide the contents from them; the more and more do they lose consciousness of good and evil and capacity to understand the expressions and definitions of good and evil worked out by the whole preceding life of humanity; the more and more do they adopt the specialized scientific jargon of conventional expressions which have no general human significance; the farther and farther do they wander among the debris of quite unilluminated observations; the more and more do they lose capacity not only to think independently but even to understand another man’s fresh human thought lying outside their Talmud; and, what is most important, they pass their best years in growing unaccustomed to life, that is, to labour, and grow accustomed to consider their condition justified, while they become physically good-for-nothing parasites. And just like the theologians and the Talmudists they completely castrate their brains and become eunuchs of thought. And just like them, to the degree to which they become stupefied, they acquire a self-confidence which deprives them for ever of the possibility of returning to a simple clear and human way of thinking.

1 A reference to Sir Wm. Crookes’ theory of the ‘fourth state of matter’, a novelty at the time Tolstoy wrote this work.-A.M.

Chapter 32

DIVISION of labour has always existed in human society, and probably always will; but the question for us is not whether it exists and will exist, but what we must be guided by to see that the division shall be a fair one. If we take observation for our standard we thereby renounce all standards, and any division of labour we see existing that seems to us suitable, we shall accept as right, and this is what the reigning science leads us to.

Division of labour! Some are occupied with mental and spiritual, others with muscular physical work. With what assurance people say that! They wish to believe so, and it seems to them that in fact a perfectly correct exchange of services occurs, whereas what exists is really only a simple and very old form of coercion.

‘Thou, or rather you’ (for it always takes many to feed one), ‘feed me, clothe me, and do all that rough work for me which I demand and to your performance of which I have been accustomed from childhood, and I will do for you the mental work of which I am capable and to which I am accustomed. You give me bodily food and I will give you spiritual food.’ (The account seems quite correct, and would be correct if this exchange of services were voluntary; if those who supply the bodily food were not obliged to furnish it before they receive the spiritual food.)

The producer of spiritual food says: ‘In order that I may give you spiritual food, feed me, clothe me, and clean up all the dirt I make.’ But the producer of bodily food has to do all this without presenting any demands, and must deliver the bodily food even if he does not receive any spiritual food. If the exchange were voluntary the conditions of the two would be alike.

We agree that spiritual food is as necessary for man as bodily food. The savant and the artist say: ‘Before we can begin to serve men with spiritual food we require them to supply us with bodily food.’ But why does not the producer of bodily food say that before he serves them with bodily food he needs spiritual food, and unless he receives it he cannot work?

You say: ‘I need the work of a ploughman, blacksmith, boot maker, carpenter, bricklayer, privy-cleaner, and others, in order that I may prepare my spiritual food.’ Every labourer ought equally to say: ‘Before I go to work to prepare bodily food for you, I must first have the fruits of your spiritual work. To have strength for my work I need religious teaching, good order in social life, applications of science to my work, and the enjoyments and consolations afforded by art. I have not time to work out my own explanation of the meaning of life-furnish me with it. I have not time to devise regulations for social life which would prevent infringements of justice-furnish me with them. I have not time to busy myself with mechanics, physics, chemistry, and technology-give me books which show how to improve my tools, my methods of work, my dwelling, my heating, and my lighting. I have not time to busy myself with poetry, plastic art, and music-furnish me with the stimulations and consolations that life requires; supply me with the products of art. You say you cannot occupy yourself with your important and necessary affairs if you are deprived of the work done for you by the labouring people, but I say,’ the labourer remarks, ‘that I cannot occupy myself with my not less important and necessary labours-ploughing, carting manure, and cleaning up your dirt-if I am deprived of religious guidance adapted to the demands of my reason

and conscience, of wise government to make my labour secure, of indications supplied by knowledge to facilitate my work, and of the joys of art to ennoble my toil. All that you have as yet offered me as spiritual food does not suit me, I cannot even understand what good it can be to anyone. And till I receive food suitable for me, as for every man, I cannot feed you with the bodily food that I produce.’ What will happen if the labourer says that?

If he should, you know it will not be a joke but the simplest justice.

If a labourer should say that, justice will be far more on his side than on that of the mental worker. Justice will be more on his side because the work supplied by the labourer is more important, more indispensable, than the work of the mental worker, and because nothing prevents the mental worker from giving the labourer the spiritual food promised him; while the labourer is hindered from supplying bodily food by the fact that he himself has not enough of it.

What shall we, mental workers, reply if such simple and legitimate demands are presented to us? How shall we satisfy them? With Filaret’s Catechism, Sokolov’s Sacred Stories, and with leaflets issued by various monasteries and from St. Isaac’s Cathedral-to satisfy his religious needs; with the Code of Laws, decisions of the various Departments of the Court of Appeal and the statutes of various Committees and Commissions-to satisfy his demands for social justice; with spectral analysis, measurements of the Milky Way, abstract geometry, microscopic investigations, disputes about spiritualism and mediumism, the proceedings of the Academy of Science-to satisfy his demands for knowledge? With what shall we satisfy his artistic demands? With Pushkin, Dostoevski, Turgenev, L. Tolstoy, with pictures from the French Salon and by our own artists, representing naked women, satin, velvet, landscapes, and genre pictures, with Wagner’s music and that of our own composers? None of these things suits him or can suit him, for we with our right to make use of the labour of the people and the absence of any obligation as to our production of spiritual food have entirely lost sight of the one purpose our activity should have. We do not even know what the working-folk need, we have forgotten their manner of life, their view of things, and their way of speaking; we have even forgotten the labouring man himself, and study. him as an ethnographic rarity or as a newly discovered America.

So we demanding bodily food for ourselves, have undertaken to supply spiritual food, but as a result of an imaginary division of labour allowing us not only to dine first and then work, but allowing whole generations to eat well without producing anything-we have prepared as payment to the people for our sustenance something that is only suitable, or it appears to us suitable, for science and art-but unsuitable and (like Limburg cheese) quite incomprehensible and repulsive to the very people whose labour we have devoured on the pretext that we would supply them with spiritual food.

We in our blindness have to such an extent lost sight of the obligation we had taken upon ourselves, that we have even forgotten the purpose for which our work is done and have made the very people we had undertaken to serve a subject for our scientific and artistic activity.

We study and depict them for our own amusement and distraction, and have quite forgotten that we should not study and depict them-but should serve them.

To such an extent have we lost sight of the obligation we took upon ourselves, that we do not even notice that what we had undertaken to do in the sphere of science and art has been done not by us but by others, and that our place has been occupied. It turns out that while we were disputing-as the theologians disputed about the Immaculate Conception-now about the spontaneous generation of organisms, now about spiritualism, now about the form of atoms, now about pangenesis, and now about what there is in protoplasm, and so on-the people all the same required spiritual food, and men who were the failures and outcasts of science and art began, at the order of business men anxious solely for profit, to supply the masses with spiritual food, and have supplied it. For some forty years elsewhere in Europe, and for some ten years past in Russia, millions of books and pictures and song-books have been circulated, and shows have been opened, and the people look on, and sing, and receive their spiritual food, but not from us who had undertaken to supply it-while we who justify our idleness by the spiritual food we are supposed to supply, sit and gape. But we must not gape, for our last justification is slipping from under our feet.

We have specialized. We have our special functional activity. We are the brain of the people. They feed us, and we have undertaken to instruct them. Only on that account have we emancipated ourselves from labour. What have we taught the labourers and what are we teaching them? They have waited one year, ten years, hundreds of years. And still we discuss and teach and entertain one another, but have forgotten them. To such an extent have we forgotten them that others have started to teach and entertain them and we did not even notice it, so little was our talk of the division of labour serious, and so evident is it that what we say of the benefit we confer on the masses is merely a shameless pretence.

Chapter 33

THERE was a time when the Church guided the spiritual life of the people of our world; the Church promised people welfare and on that score excused itself from participation in humanity’s struggle for life. And as soon as it did that it went astray from its vocation and the people turned away from it. It was not the errors of the Church that ruined it but the abandonment of the law of labour by its servants, secured by the aid of the government in the time of Constantine; their privilege of idleness and luxury begot the errors of the Church. With that privilege began the Church’s care for the Church and not for the people whom it had undertaken to serve. And the servants of the Church abandoned themselves to idleness and depravity.

The State undertook to guide the lives of men. The State promised men justice, tranquility, security, order, the satisfaction of their general spiritual and material needs, and on this account the men who served the State emancipated themselves from participation in humanity’s struggle for life. And the servants of the State, as soon as ever it was possible for them to exploit the labour of others, did what the servants of the Church had done. Their aim became not the people but the State, and the servants of the State-from kings down to the lowest officials and employees-in Rome, France, England, Russia, and America, abandoned themselves to idleness and depravity.

And people ceased to believe in the State, and anarchy is already consciously presented as an ideal.

The State lost its fascination for people only because its servants considered that they had a right to exploit the people’s labour.

The same thing has been done by science and art with the help of the State authorities whom they have undertaken to support. They too stipulated for the right to idleness and to the use of other people’s labour, and have similarly been false to their vocation.

And they too ran into error only because the servants of science, having adopted the wrongly understood principle of division of labour, allowed themselves the right to appropriate other people’s labour and lost the meaning of their own vocation, taking for their aim not the benefit of the people but the mystic benefit of science and art; like their predecessors they yielded to idleness and depravity, not so much sensuous as intellectual.

It is said that science and art have given much to humanity. That is perfectly true.

The Church and the State gave much to humanity, not because they misused their power and their servants neglected the eternal obligation of man to labour for his livelihood-which applies to all men-but in spite of it.

So also science and art have given much to humanity, not because the scientists and artists on the plea of a division of labour live on the back of the working class but despite that fact. The Roman republic was strong not because its citizens were able to lead depraved lives, but because there were among them some worthy citizens. And it is the same with science and art.

Science and art have given much to humanity not because their servants sometimes formerly had, and now always have, opportunity to emancipate themselves from labour, but because there were men of genius who, not availing themselves of that opportunity, moved humanity forward.

The class of the learned and of artists who on the ground of a false division of labour demand the right to exploit the labour of others cannot contribute to the success of true science and true art, for falsehood cannot produce truth.

We are so accustomed to our pampered, fat, or enfeebled representatives of mental work, that it seems to us barbarous that a learned man or an artist should plough or cart manure. It seems to us as if all his wisdom would perish or be shaken to pieces on the cart, and the manure would soil the grand artistic images he carries in his breast; but we are so accustomed to it that it does not seem strange when a servant of science, that is a servant and teacher of truth, compelling others to do for him what he could do for himself, spends half his time in eating tasty food, in smoking, gossip, or liberal tittle-tattle, reading the papers and novels, and visiting the theatres. It does not surprise us to see our philosopher at a restaurant, a theatre, or a ball; nor does it seem strange to us to learn that those artists who delight and ennoble our souls spend their lives in drunkenness, card playing, or with wenches-if not doing something worse...

Science and art are beautiful things, but just because they are beautiful they should not be spoilt by joining depravity to them, that is, by freeing oneself from a man’s obligation to support his own and other people’s lives by labour.

Science and art have advanced humanity, yes! but not because the men of science and art, on the plea of a division of labour, by word and above all by deed have taught people to avail themselves of violence, and of the poverty and suffering of others, to free themselves from the first and most unquestionable human obligation of working with their own hands in the struggle with nature that is common to all humanity.

Chapter 34

‘BUT it is only the division of labour, and the emancipation of the men of science and art from the necessity of producing their own food, that has made possible the extraordinary progress of science that we see in our time,’ is what people. say to this.

‘If everyone had to plough, those enormous results could not have been attained that have been attained in our time; there would not have been the striking progress which has so increased man’s power over nature, nor those astronomical discoveries which have so impressed man’s mind and made navigation safer, nor those steamers, railroads, marvellous bridges, tunnels, steam engines, telegraphs, photographs, telephones, sewing-machines, phonographs, electricity, telescopes, spectroscopes, microscopes, chloroform, antiseptics, and carbolic acid.’

I cannot enumerate all the things our age so prides itself on. That enumeration, and the raptures over ourselves and over our achievements, can be found in almost any newspaper or popular book. Those raptures over ourselves are so often repeated, we are so overjoyed at ourselves, that we are seriously convinced, with Jules Verne, that science and art never made such progress as in our time.

And we owe all this wonderful success to the division of labour, so how can we fail to acknowledge it?

Let us grant that the successes achieved in our age are really striking, wonderful, and extraordinary. Let us admit that we are such peculiarly fortunate people as to live in such an extraordinary time. But let us try to value these successes not by our self-satisfaction but by that same principle of division of labour in defence of which they are quoted: that is by the mental work of the men of science for the benefit of the people, which is to pay for the scientists’ and artists’ emancipation from labour. All these successes are very wonderful, but by some unfortunate accident admitted by scientists themselves-up to now these successes have not improved the condition of the labourer but rather have made it worse.

If a workman instead of walking can go by train, on the other hand the railroad has consumed his forest, carried away the grain from under his nose, and brought him to a condition not far removed from slavery to those who own the railroad.

If, thanks to the steam-engines and machines, the labourer can buy wretched cotton prints, those steam-engines and machines have deprived him on the other hand of earnings at home, and have reduced him to a condition of complete slavery to the manufacturer.

If there are telegraph stations which he is not forbidden to use but which his means do not allow him to use, on the other hand his produce, as soon as the price is rising, thanks to

the telegraph system gets bought up from under his nose by capitalists before the labourer hears of the demand there is for it.

If there are telephones and telescopes, verses, novels, theatres, ballets, symphonies, operas, picture galleries, and so forth, the workman’s life is not improved by all this, for by the same unfortunate accident it is beyond his reach. So that in general up to now-as men of science admit-all these extraordinary inventions and productions of art, if they have not injured have quite failed to improve the labourer’s life.

So that if the question of the reality of the successes achieved by science and art is measured not by our raptures over ourselves, but by the same standard by which the division of labour is defended-namely that of advantage to the labouring people, we shall see that we have as yet no firm basis for the self-satisfaction to which we so willingly yield.

A peasant goes by rail, his wife buys cotton prints, they have a lamp in their hut instead of a wooden torch, and the man lights his pipe with a match-that is convenient; but what right have I to say that the railroad and factories have benefited the people?

If the peasant travels on the railroad and buys a lamp, cotton prints, and matches, this is only because it is impossible to forbid him to do so, but we all know that the railroads and the factories were not built for the benefit of the labouring people, so why bring forward accidental conveniences, of which the peasants chance to be able to avail themselves, as proofs of the utility of those institutions to the people?

For we all know that if the technicians and capitalists who built the railroads and the factories thought about the workers, it was only of how to squeeze the last bit of work out of them. And as we have seen, both among ourselves and in Europe and America, they have fully succeeded in doing this.

In all harmful things there is some good. After a conflagration we can warm ourselves and light our pipes with the glowing charcoal; but why say that the conflagration is useful?

Let us at least not deceive ourselves. We all know the motives which prompt the building of railroads and factories and the production of kerosene and matches.

The engineer builds the railroad either for the government for military purposes or for capitalists for financial purposes. He makes machinery for the factory-owner for his own profit and for that of the capitalist. All that he makes and devises he makes and devises for the purposes of the government or of the capitalist and the rich people. The most cunning of his inventions are directly aimed either at injuring the people-as with cannon, torpedoes, solitary confinement cells, apparatus for the spirit-monopoly, telegraphs, and so forth, or for producing things that not only are not useful but are quite beyond the reach of the people, such as electric light, telephones, and all the innumerable appliances for the increase of comfort-or, finally, for things by which people can be corrupted and induced to part with the last of their money-that is, their last labour-such as, first of all vodka, spirits, beer, opium, and tobacco, then cotton prints, kerchiefs, and all sorts of trifles.

If it happens that the inventions of men of science and the work of engineers sometimes is of use to the people, as with railroads, cotton prints, iron pots, and scythes, that only

proves that everything in the world is connected, and from any harmful activity some chance advantage may accrue even to those for whom the activity is generally harmful.

The scientists and artists could only say that their activity was useful to the people if they made it their aim to serve the labourers as they now make it their aim to serve the governments and the capitalists.

We could say it if scientists and artists set themselves the aim of serving the people’s needs, but there are none who do so.

All the learned people are absorbed with their priestly occupations, from which result the investigations of protoplasm, spectral analyses of the stars, and so forth. But with what kind of axe and what kind of axe-handle it is best to chop, what sort of saw works best, how best to knead bread, what flour to use, how to set it, how to make a fire, and how to build the stove, what food, what drink, and what dishes, to use, which mushrooms should be eaten and how best to prepare them-about these things science never reflects. Yet it is all matter for science to deal with.

I know that by its definition science should be useless, but that is an obvious and too impudent excuse. The business of science is to serve men. We have invented telegraphs, telephones, and phonographs; but in real life, in the people’s work, what progress have we made? We have enumerated two million insects! But have we domesticated a single new animal since Biblical times when the animals we now have, had already long been domesticated? The elk, the stag, the partridge, the quail, and the grouse, are all still wild. Our botanists have discovered the cell, and in the cell protoplasm, and in protoplasm something else, and in that again something else. These occupations will evidently not end for a long time-because there can be no end to them; and so they have no time to occupy themselves with what people need. And then again, since Egyptian and Jewish antiquity, when wheat and lentil were already cultivated, down to our own time, not a single plant has been added to the food of the people except potatoes, and it was not science that gave us them.

They have invented torpedoes, appliances for the use of the spirit-monopoly, and for privies, but our spinning-wheel, peasant-woman’s loom, village plough, hatchet, flail, rake, and the yoke and bucket, are still the same that they were in the times of Rurik,1 or if they have been altered it has not been done by scientists.

The same is true in regard to art. We have raised a multitude of men to the rank of great writers, have analysed them minutely, and written mountains of criticisms, and criticisms of those criticisms, and criticisms of the criticisms of the criticisms, and have collected galleries of pictures, and have studied all the schools of art acutely, and we have such symphonies and operas that it becomes hard for us ourselves to listen to them. But what have we added to the folk-tales and legends and stories and songs? What pictures have we given to the people and what music? In Nikolski-street2 books and pictures for the people are produced, and in Tula concertinas are made, but in neither have we taken any part.

1 The first Russian Prince (830 to 879 A.D.).-A. M.

2 A street in the centre of Moscow, where cheap chapbooks for the peasants were sold.-A. M.

Most striking and obvious is the false direction of our science and art in the very branches which, one would think, should by their very purpose be of use to the people, but which in consequence of the false direction appear harmful rather than useful.

The engineer, doctor, teacher, artist, author, by the very purpose of their calling, one would imagine, should serve the people-and what happens? Under the present tendency they can bring nothing but harm to the people.

An engineer, a mechanic, must work with capital. Without capital he is useless. All his knowledge is such that, to apply it, he needs capital and the exploitation of labour on a large scale, and not to mention that he is himself accustomed to spend at least fifteen hundred to two thousand rubles a year, and therefore cannot live in a village, where no one could give him such a remuneration, his occupation itself prevents his serving the people. He can by higher mathematics reckon the span of a bridge, calculate the power and efficiency of a motor, and so forth, but faced by the simple problems of peasant-toil he sticks fast. How to improve the village plough or cart, how to make the streams fordable-of all this, in the conditions in which the peasants live, he knows and understands less than the meanest peasant. Give him workshops, all the various kinds of people he needs, import machines for him from abroad, and then he will arrange matters. But in the existing conditions of labour of millions of people, he is quite unable to find ways of lightening their toil, and his own occupations, habits, and needs, render him unsuited for such an affair.

The doctor is in a still worse position. His pseudo-science is all so arranged that he can only cure those who do nothing and can command the labour of others. He needs an endless number of expensive appliances, instruments, medicaments, and hygienically arranged rooms, food, and water-closets, to enable him to act scientifically; besides his own salary he needs such expenses that to cure one patient he has to starve hundreds of others who bear those expenses. He has studied in the capitals under celebrities who only take patients who can be treated in hospitals, or who while being treated can purchase the apparatus needed for the treatment, and can even travel immediately from the north to the south, or to such and such watering-places.

Their science is of such a kind that every Zemstvo-1doctor, complains of not having the means to treat the labourers-that they are so poor that it is impossible to place the patients in hygienic conditions; and at the same time that doctor complains that there are no hospitals, that he cannot manage all the work, and that he needs more assistants, doctors, and trained helpers. What does this mean? It means that the chief calamity of the people, causing illnesses to arise and spread and remain untreated, is the insufficiency of their means of livelihood.

And science, under the banner of a division of labour, calls its combatants to help these people. Science has adapted itself entirely to the wealthy classes and accordingly has set itself to heal those who can afford everything, and it prescribes the same methods for those who have nothing to spare.

1 The Zemstvos resembled our County Councils, and had charge of the medical service in country districts.-A. M.

But the means are lacking, and therefore they must be taken from the peasants who fall ill and become infected and are not cured from lack of means.

The defenders of medicine for the people are always saying that, as yet, this business is but little developed.

Evidently it is little developed, for if-which God forbid-it should be developed, and on the people’s backs instead of two doctors, midwives and trained female assistants to a District, there were twenty such-as is proposed-there would soon be no one left to heal. Scientific assistance for the people, of which the defenders of science talk, should be of quite a different kind. And the kind of assistance that should be given has not yet been begun. It will begin when the man of science, the technician, or the doctor, will not consider permissible the division-which is to say, the seizure-of the labour of other people which now exists; will not consider himself to have a right to take from people, I will not say hundreds of thousands, but even a modest one thousand or five hundred rubles for the aid he renders them, but will live among the labouring people under the same conditions as they do and as they do, and will then apply his knowledge to the labouring people’s problems of mechanics, engineering, hygiene, and medicine. But now science, fed by the labour of the working folk, has completely forgotten the conditions of those people’s lives, ignores those conditions, and is seriously offended because its pseudo-knowledge finds no application among them.

The sphere of medicine, like that of engineering, lies as yet untouched. All the questions of how best to divide the work time, how best to nourish oneself, on what and in what form, when and how it is best to clothe oneself, to cover one’s feet, to resist dampness and cold, how best to wash and feed the children, swaddle them, and so forth, in the actual circumstances in which the working people live-all these questions have not yet been put. So it is, too, with the scientific, pedagogic, teachers’ activity. Science has, in just the same way, so managed that, in accord with pedagogic science, only rich people can be taught, and the teachers, like the engineers and doctors, involuntarily pay court to money and among us especially to the government

And this cannot be otherwise, for a school with model arrangements (as a general rule the more scientifically arranged a school the more expensive it is), with adjustable benches, globes and maps, and libraries, and methodics for teachers and for pupils, is such as would involve the doubling of the rates in each village. Such is the demand of science.

The people need their children for work, and the poorer the people the more they need them. The defenders of science say: pedagogy even now benefits the people, but when it is developed things will be still better. But if it develops and instead of twenty schools to a district there are a hundred and all of them scientific, and the people have to pay for those schools, they will be more and more impoverished and will be yet more in need of their children’s work.

What, then, is to be done? say people in reply to this.

The government will establish schools and make education compulsory as is done in Europe; but the money will again be taken from the people, who will be worked yet harder and will have yet less leisure, and compulsory education will not act. Again the

only salvation is for the teacher to live the life of a labourer and teach for such remuneration as may be freely and willingly given him.

Such is the false tendency of science, which deprives it of the possibility of fulfilling its duty, which is to serve the people. But this false tendency of our intellectuals is yet more evident in the activity of art, which by its very nature should be accessible to the people.

Science may fall back on its stupid excuse that science works for science, and that when it has been developed by the scientists it will become accessible to the people also; but art, if it be art, should be accessible to all, and particularly to those for whom it is produced. And the position of our art strikingly arraigns the producers of art for not wishing, not knowing how, and being unable, to serve the people.

For the preparation of his great works, an artist who is a painter must have a studio in which an association of at least forty carpenters or boot makers could work who now freeze or stifle in a slum. Nor is that enough; he needs nature, costumes, travel. The Academy of Arts has expended millions of rubles, collected from the people, on the encouragement of art, and the productions of this art are to be found in palaces and are not understood or wanted by the masses.

To express their great ideas musicians have to collect some two hundred men in white neckties or in costumes, and to expend hundreds of thousands of rubles on producing an opera. And the productions of this art could produce nothing but perplexity and weariness among the people, were they ever able to hear them.

Authors and writers of stories, one would think, do not need special surroundings, studios, nature, orchestras, and actors; but here, too, it appears that for the preparation of his great works a writer besides comfortable lodgings and all the pleasures of life, needs travel, palaces, studies, the pleasures of art, and visits to theatres, concerts, watering places, &c. If he does not himself earn money he is given a pension to enable him to write better. And again these writings, so much esteemed by us, remain rubbish for the people, who do not want them at all.

What if, as the men engaged on science and art desire, yet more of these producers of spiritual food are reared and it becomes necessary in each village to build a studio and introduce an orchestra and maintain an author in such conditions as artists consider essential?

I imagine that the working people would sooner pledge themselves never to see a picture, or hear a symphony, or read any poem or story, than be obliged to feed all those drones.

But why, one would ask, should artists not serve the people? In every hut there are icons and pictures; every peasant and every peasant woman sings; many of them have musical instruments, and they all tell stories and recite verses, while many of them read. How is it that these two things-made for one another like lock and key-have gone so far apart that there seems no possibility of bringing them together?

Tell a painter that without studios, nude models, and costumes, he should paint penny pictures, and he will tell you that this would be to abandon art as he understands it: tell a musician that he should play on a balalayka, a concertina, or a guitar, and should teach the peasant women to sing songs: tell a poet or an author that he should abandon his poems, his novels, his satires, and should compose songs, books, stories and fairy tales,

which unlettered folk could understand-and they will tell you that you are mad. But is it not a worse madness that people who have emancipated themselves from labour on the plea that they would provide spiritual food for those who have reared them and who feed and clothe them, should afterwards have so forgotten this obligation that they do not know how to prepare food fit for the people, and should consider this abandonment of their duty a merit?

‘But it is so everywhere,’ is what is said in reply. It is very irrational everywhere; and it will remain irrational as long as people, under the pretext of a division of labour and a promise to serve the people with spiritual food, continue merely to devour the people’s labour. Service of the people by sciences and arts will only exist when men live with the people and as the people live, and without presenting any claims will offer their scientific and artistic services, which the people will be free to accept or decline as they please.

Chapter 35

To say that the activity of science and art helps humanity’s progress, if by that activity we mean the activity which now calls itself by those names, is as though one said that the clumsy, obstructive splashing of oars in a boat moving down stream assists the boat’s progress. It only hinders it.

The so-called division of labour, that is, the seizure of the labour of others which in our time has become a usual condition of the activity of men of science and art, has been and still remains the chief cause of the slowness of humanity’s forward movement. The proof of this is seen in the confession made by men of science that the achievements of the arts and sciences are inaccessible to the labouring masses on account of the unequal distribution of wealth.

And the unfairness of this distribution is not diminished in proportion to the successes achieved by the sciences and arts, but is only increased. Nor is it surprising that this is so, for this unjust distribution of wealth results simply from the theory of the division of labour which is preached by the men of science and art for their personal selfish ends. Science defends the division of labour as an immutable law, sees that the division of wealth based on the division of labour is unjust and pernicious, and asserts that its activity, which accepts the division of labour, will result in benefit to mankind. It appears that some men make use of the labours of others, but that if they go on for a very long time and to a still greater extent making use of the labour of others, then this un-just distribution of wealth-that is, this exploitation of other people’s work-will come to an end.

Men are standing at an ever-increasing spring of water and are busy diverting it from thirsty people, but assert that it is they who produce the water and that very soon so much of it will be collected that there will be enough for everybody. But this water, which has flowed and flows unceasingly and supplies drink to all humanity, is not only not the result of the activity of these men who standing round the spring turn the water aside but on the contrary, flows and spreads despite their efforts to prevent its flowing.

There always was a true church, in the sense of people united in the highest truth accessible to man at any given period, and this has always been other than the church

which called itself so; and there have always been science and art, but they have not been the activities that called themselves by those names.

To those who regard themselves as the representatives of the science and art of a particular period, it always seems as though they had done and were doing, and above all were Just about to do wonderful miracles; and that apart from them no real science or art has existed or does exist. So it seemed to the Sophists, the Schoolmen, the Alchemists, the Cabalists, the Talmudists, and so it seems to our scientific scientists and art-for-art’s sakists.

Chapter 36

‘BUT science and art! You are denying science and art: that is you are denying that by which humanity lives.’ People constantly make this rejoinder to me, and they employ: this method in order to reject my arguments without examination.

‘He rejects science and art, he wishes man to revert to a state of savagery-why listen to him or discuss with him?’

But this is unjust. Not only do I not repudiate science, that is, the reasonable activity of humanity, and art-the expression of that reasonable activity-but it is just on behalf of that reasonable activity and its expression that I speak, only that It may be possible for mankind to escape from the savage state into which it is rapidly lapsing thanks to the false teaching of our time. It is only on that account that I speak as I do.

Science and art are as necessary to man as food and drink and clothing-even more necessary but they become so not because we decide that what we cal science and art are essential, but only because Science and art really are essential to humanity.

If people prepared hay for man’s bodily food, no conviction of mine that hay is human food would cause it to become so. I must not say: ‘Why do you not eat hay when it is your necessary food?’ Food is necessary, but perhaps what I am offering is not food.

And this is just what has happened with our Science and art. It seems to us that if we add the termination logy to some Greek word and call it a science, it will be a science; and if some nastiness, such as the dancing of naked women, is called by a Greek word, and we say it is an art, it will be art. But however much we may say this, the things we occupy ourselves with-counting up the beetles, investigating the chemical constituents of the Milky Way, painting water-nymphs and historical pictures, or composing stories and symphonies-will not become either science or art till it is willingly accepted by those for whom it is being done. And up to the present it is not so accepted.

If certain people had the exclusive right to produce food and all others were forbidden to do so, or it were made impossible for them to do so, I imagine that the quality of our food would deteriorate. If the people who had the monopoly of food production were Russian peasants, there would be no other food than rye-bread, kvas, potatoes, and onions-the food they are fond of, the food which pleases them. And this would happen to the highest human activity-science and art-if a single caste were to monopolize it,-but with this difference, that in bodily food there can be no great deviation from what is natural: both rye-bread and onion, though not very tasty foods are nevertheless wholesome; but in

mental food there may be very great deviations and some men may feed for a long time on mental food that is quite unnecessary for them, or is even harmful and poisonous. They may slowly kill themselves with opium and spirits and may offer this same food to the masses.

That is what has happened among us. And it has happened because scientists and artists occupy a privileged position, and because science and art in our world are not the whole reasonable activity of the whole of mankind without exception, devoting its best strength to the service of science and art, but are the activity of a small circle of people having a monopoly of these occupations and calling themselves scientists and artists, and who, therefore, having perverted the very conception of science and art, have lost the very meaning of their calling and are merely occupied in amusing a small circle of idle consumers and saving them from the ennui that oppresses them.

Since men first existed they have always had science in the plainest and widest sense of the word. Science, in the sense of all man’s knowledge, always has existed and does exist and life is inconceivable without it: it calls neither for attack nor for defence. But the point is that the domain of knowledge is so various, so much information of all kinds is included in it-from the knowledge of how to obtain iron, to the knowledge of the movements of the celestial bodies-that man loses himself amid these various kinds of knowledge unless he has a clue to enable him to decide which of them all is most important for him, and which is less so.

And therefore the highest aim of human wisdom has always been to find that clue, and to show the sequence in which our knowledge should rank: what of it is of the first and what is of lesser importance.

And just this knowledge, that guides all other knowledge, is what men have always spoken of as science in the strict sense. And right down to our own times such science has always existed in human societies after they have emerged from the primeval, savage conditions.

Since humanity existed always among all peoples teachers have appeared who have produced science in that strict sense-the knowledge of what it is most necessary for man to know.

That science has always dealt with the knowledge of what is the destiny, and therefore the true welfare, of each man and of mankind. And that science has served as the clue in determining the importance of all other knowledge, and of the activity which gives it expression, namely, art.

Those kinds of knowledge which aided and came nearest to the fundamental science of the destiny and welfare of all men, stood highest in general esteem, and those least useful stood lowest. Such was the science of Confucius, Buddha, Moses, Socrates, Christ, Mohammed: such is science, and so it has been and is understood by everybody, except by our circle of so-called educated people.

Such science has always not merely occupied the first place, but has alone determined the importance of all the other sciences.

And this occurred not at all, as is supposed by the so-called learned men of to-day, because deceivers-the priests and teachers of that science gave it that importance, but

because indeed, as everyone can learn by his inner experience, without a science of man’s destiny and welfare there can be no evaluation or choice of any science or art, and therefore there can be no study of science: for the subjects for science to deal with are innumerable; I underline the word ‘innumerable’, because I use it in its literal meaning.

Without knowledge of what constitutes the destiny and welfare of all men, all other science and art becomes, as they have become among us, an idle and pernicious amusement. Mankind has lived long, but never without a science to show wherein its destiny and welfare lie. It is true that the science of the welfare of man appears on superficial observation to differ among the Buddhists, Brahminists, Jews, Christians, Confucians, and the followers of Lao-Tsze (though it is only necessary to consider these teachings, to find one and the same essence), but wherever we know of men who have emerged from the state of savagery, we find this science, and now suddenly it seems that people to-day have decided that it is just this very science-which has hitherto guided all human knowledge-which hinders everything.

People build an edifice, and one architect draws up one set of plans, another-another, and a third-a third. The plans vary somewhat, but are correct in that everyone sees that if all is carried out according to the plan the edifice will get built.

Such architects were Confucius, Buddha, Moses, and Christ.

Suddenly people come and assure us that the chief thing is not to have any plans at all, but to build anyhow, by the look of the thing. And this ‘anyhow’ these people call the most exact scientific science, as the Pope terms himself the ‘Most Holy’. People deny every science, the very essence of science-the ascertaining of the destiny and welfare of man, and this denial of science they call ‘science’. Since men first appeared, great intellects have arisen among them who in struggle with the demands of their reason and conscience have asked themselves what our destiny and welfare consist in-not mine only but every man’s.

What does that Power which produced and guides us demand of me and of every man? What must I do to satisfy the craving implanted in me for my personal welfare and that of the world in general?

They have said to themselves: ‘I am a whole, and I am a particle of something immeasurable and unending. What are my relations to other particles similar to myself-to individuals and to that whole?’

And from the voice of conscience and reason, and from consideration of what has been said by predecessors and contemporaries who set themselves those same questions, these great teachers have deduced a doctrine-plain, clear, and intelligible to all men, and always such as could be practised. There have been such men of first-rate, second-rate, third-rate, and of quite minor greatness. The world is full of them.

All living men put to themselves the question: How reconcile our desires for personal welfare with the general welfare of mankind demanded by conscience and reason? And from this general travail, new forms of life nearer to the demands of reason and conscience are slowly but unceasingly evolved.

Suddenly a new caste of men appear who say: This is all rubbish, it must all be abandoned. This is the deductive method of thought (though what the difference is

between the deductive and the inductive methods, nobody has ever been able to understand), it is the method of the theological and metaphysical periods. All that men have discovered by inner experience, and communicate to one another, concerning consciousness of the law of their life (functional activity, in the new jargon), all that from the commencement of the world has been accomplished in that direction by the greatest intellects of mankind, is rubbish and of no importance.

According to this new teaching it seems that you are a cell of an organism, and the aim of your reasonable activity is to ascertain your functional activity; and in order to do that you need only observe things outside yourself. That you are a cell that thinks, suffers, speaks, understands, and that you can therefore ask another similar speaking cell whether, like you, it suffers, rejoices, and feels, and so can verify your own experience; that you can avail yourself of what cells that lived, suffered, thought, and spoke, before you did have written about the matter; that millions of other cells confirm your observations by their agreement with those who have: recorded their thoughts; and above all, that you yourselves are living cells always by direct experience recognizing the justice or injustice of your functional activities-all this means nothing at all, it is all a bad, false method. The true scientific method is this: if you wish to know what your functional activity consists in, that is to say, what is your vocation and welfare and those of humanity and of the whole world, you must first of all cease to listen to the voice and demands of the conscience and reason that manifest themselves within you and in your fellow-men; you must cease to believe what the great teachers of mankind have said about their reason and conscience, and must consider all these to be trifles, and begin all over again. And to begin from the beginning you must look through a microscope at the movements of amoebas and at the cells of tapeworms, or easier still, must believe everything that may be told you about them by people who have the diploma of infallibility. And observing the movements of these amoebas and cells, or reading what others have seen, you must attribute to these cells your own human feelings and calculations as to what they desire, what they strive for, their reflections and calculations, and what they are accustomed to; and from these observations (in which every word is an error in thought or expression) you must by analogy decide what you are, what your vocation is, and wherein lies your own welfare and that of other cells similar to yourself. To understand yourself you must not only study tapeworms which you can see, but also microscopic beings you can hardly see, and the transformations from one being into another which no one has ever seen and which you will certainly never see.

It is the same with art. Wherever there has been a true science, art has always been an expression of the knowledge of man’s vocation and welfare.

Since the time that men first existed, from amid the whole activity which presents various kinds of knowledge they have selected the principal kind, that which presented man’s vocation and welfare, and the expression of the results of that knowledge has been art in the restricted sense of the word. Since men first existed there have been persons specially sensitive and responsive to the teaching of man’s welfare and vocation, who on psaltery and cymbals, by imagery and by words, have expressed their human struggle against deceptions which drew them from their vocation, expressed their sufferings in this struggle, their hopes for the triumph of goodness, their despair at the triumph of evil, and their rapture at the expectation of approaching blessedness.

Since man existed, true art which was highly esteemed has had no other purpose than to express man’s vocation and welfare. Always till recent times, art has served the teaching of life which was afterwards called ‘religion’-and only such art has been held in high esteem. But simultaneously with the appearance, in place of a science of man’s vocation and welfare, of the science of whatever comes to hand-since science has lost its meaning and purpose, and true science has come to be contemptuously called ‘religion’ from that very time art as an important human activity has disappeared.

As long as the church existed as a teaching of our vocation and welfare, art served the church and was true art, but since art left the church and began to serve science, while science served anything that came to hand, art has lost its importance and, in spite of its traditional claims and the absurd assertion that ‘art serves art’ (which only shows that it has lost its purpose), it has become a trade supplying people with what is agreeable, and has inevitably mingled with the choreographic, culinary, tonsorial, and cosmetic arts, whose producers call themselves artists with the same right as do the poets, painters, and musicians of our day.

We look back and see that during thousands of years, out of milliards of people a few dozen stand out, such as Confucius, Buddha, Solon, Socrates, Solomon, Homer, Isaiah, and David. Evidently such men were seldom to be met with, though in those days they were drawn not from a single caste but from among the whole people; evidently such true scientific and artistic producers of spiritual food were rare. And it is not for nothing that humanity so highly esteemed and esteems them. But now it turns out that all these great moving spirits in science and art are no longer of any use to us. To-day producers of science and art can by the law of division of labour be produced on the factory system, and in a single decade we can turn out more great scientists and artists than had appeared among mankind from the commencement of the world.

There is now a guild of scientists and artists, and by a perfect method they prepare all the spiritual food needed by mankind.

And they have prepared so much of it that the old, the former, geniuses, both the ancients and those nearer to ourselves, need no longer be held in remembrance-that was all an activity of the theological and metaphysical period, it all has to be wiped out; but real reasonable activity began about fifty years ago. And in these fifty years we have produced so many great men that in a single German university there are now more of them than there had been in the whole world; and we have produced so many sciences-fortunately they are easy to produce (one has only to add logy to a Greek noun and classify it among the ready-made tables, and a science is ready)-that not only can no man know them all, but no one man can even remember the names of them all their names alone fill a stout dictionary and new Sciences are coming into existence everyday.

They have made many that remind one of the story of the Finnish tutor who taught a landowner’s children Finnish instead of French. They have taught it all beautifully; the only pity is that nobody, except themselves, understands any of it everyone else regards it as worthless rubbish.

But of this too there is an explanation: people do not understand all the utility of scientific science because they are still under the influence of the theological period of knowledge-

that stupid period when the whole people, both among the Hebrews, the Chinese, the Hindus and the Greeks, understood all that their great teachers said to them.

But however it happened, the fact is that both Science and art have always existed among men and when they were real they were wanted by and were comprehensible to the whole people.

We are busy with something we call science and art, but it turns out that what we are doing as no right to be called either science or art.

Chapter 37

‘BUT you are merely giving another, narrower definition of science and art-which science does not agree with,’ people say to me in reply. ‘But this does not exclude the rest, and there still remains the scientific and artistic activity of the Galileos, Brunos, Homers, Michael Angelos, Beethovens, Wagners, and all the scientists and artists of lesser magnitude who have devoted their whole lives to the service of science and art.’ This they usually say in order to establish a succession (which at other times they disavow) between the former scientists and artists and the present ones, trying also to forget that special new principle of the division of labour on the basis of which science and art now occupy their privileged position.

But first of all it is impossible to establish such a succession between the former workers and the present ones-as the holy life of the first Christians has nothing in common with the lives of the Popes, so the activity of men like Galileo, Shakespeare, and Beethoven has nothing in common with the activities of men like Tyndall, Victor Hugo, and Wagner. As the holy Fathers would have repudiated connexion with the Popes, so the former leaders in science would have repudiated connexion with those of to-day.

And secondly, thanks to the importance science and art now attribute to themselves, we have a very clear standard set by science itself, by which to determine whether or not they fulfil their purpose, and so to decide not arbitrarily but according to an accepted standard, whether the activity calling itself science and art has a right to do so.

When Egyptian and Grecian priests performed mysteries which were concealed from everybody, and said that these mysteries contained all science and all art-we could not on the score of benefits conferred by them on the people verify the validity of their science, for they alleged it to be super-natural; but now we all have a very clear and simple standard excluding everything supernatural: science and art undertake to perform the brain-work of humanity for the benefit of society or of mankind. And therefore we have a right to call only such activity ‘science and art’ as has that aim in view and attains it.

And therefore, however those learned men and artists call themselves who excogitate the theory of penal, civil, and international law, who invent new guns and explosives, who compose obscene operas and operettas or similarly obscene novels, we have no right to call such activity science and art; for that activity has not the welfare of society or of mankind in view, but is on the contrary directed to the injury of man. All this therefore is not science or art. In the same way, however learned men may call themselves who in their simplicity devote their whole lives to the study of microscopic animalculae and of telescopic and spectral phenomena, or those artists who after a laborious study of the

memorials of antiquity are busy writing historical novels, painting pictures, or composing symphonies and beautiful verses all these men, despite their zeal, cannot, on the basis of the scientific definition itself, be called men of science and art: first, because their activity of science for science’s sake and art for art’s sake has not human welfare in view; and secondly, because we do not see the results of their activity in the welfare of society and of humanity. The fact that from their activity something pleasant and profitable for certain people sometimes results, by no means allows us, according to their own scientific definition, to consider them scientists and artists.

Just in the same way, however people may call themselves who devise applications of electricity to lighting or heating or the transmission of power, or new chemical combinations yielding dynamite or fine colours, or play Beethoven’s symphonies correctly, or perform in theatres and paint good portraits, genre paintings, landscapes or other pictures, or write interesting novels-the aim of which is merely to relieve the dullness of the wealthy classes-these people’s activity cannot be called science and art, because it is not directed, like the brain-activity of an organism, to the welfare of the whole, but is guided merely by personal profit, privileges, and money, received for the inventions and productions of so-called art; and therefore this activity can in no way be separated from every other kind of interested personal activity adding to the pleasure of life, like the activity of restaurant-keepers, jockeys, milliners, prostitutes, and so forth; for the activity of the first, the second, and the third, of these does not come under the definition of science and art which promise on the basis of a division of labour to serve the welfare of mankind or of society.

The definition of science and art given by science is quite correct, but unfortunately the activity of present-day science and art does not come under it. Some of its representatives are doing what is directly harmful, others what is useless, and again others what is insignificant and available only for rich people.

They, are all perhaps very good people, but they do not do what by their own definition they have undertaken to do, and therefore they have as little right to consider themselves scientists and artists as the clergy of to-day, who do not fulfil the duties they have undertaken, have a right to claim to be the bearers and teachers of divine truth.

And it is not difficult to understand why those who are active in science and art to-day do not fulfil, and cannot fulfil, their calling. They do not fulfil it because they have converted their duties into rights.

Scientific and artistic activity in its real sense is only fruitful when it ignores rights and knows only duties. Only because it is always of that kind and its nature is to be self-sacrificing, does humanity value this activity so highly.

Men who are really called to serve others by mental labour will always suffer in performing that service, for only by sufferings as by birth pangs, is the spiritual world brought to birth.

Self-sacrifice and suffering will be the lot of a thinker and an artist because their aim is the welfare of man. People are unhappy, they suffer and perish. There is no time to wait and refresh oneself.

The thinker and artist will never sit on Olympian heights as we are apt to imagine; he will always be in a state of anxiety and agitation; he might discover and utter what would bring blessings to people, might save them from sufferings, but he has not discovered it and has not uttered it, and to-morrow it may be too late-he may have died.

Not that man will be a thinker and artist who is educated in an institution where they profess to produce learned men and artists (but really produce destroyers of science and art) and who obtains a diploma and a competence, but he who would be glad not to think and not to express what is implanted in his soul, but cannot help doing what he is impelled to by two irresistible forces-an inner necessity and the demands of men.

Plump self-satisfied thinkers and artists, enjoying themselves, do not exist.

Mental activity and its expression, of a kind really needed by others, is the hardest and most painful calling for a man-his cross, as the Gospel expresses it. And the sole and indubitable indication of a man’s vocation for it is self-denial, a sacrifice of himself for the manifestation of the power implanted in him for the benefit of others.

One can teach how many insects there are in the world and examine the spots on the sun and write novels and operas, without suffering; but to teach men their welfare, which lies in denying oneself and serving others, and to express this teaching powerfully, is impossible without suffering.

The church existed as long as its teachers endured and suffered, but as soon as they became fat their teaching activity ended.

‘There used to be golden priests and wooden chalices; but now the chalices are golden and priests wooden,’ as the peasants say.

There was reason for Christ to die on the cross: the sacrifice of suffering conquers all.

Our science and art are provided for and diplomaed and people are only concerned how to provide for them still better, that is, make it impossible for them to serve mankind.

True science and true art have two indubitable indications: the first internal-that a minister of science or art fulfils his calling not for gain but with self-sacrifice; and the second external-that his productions are intelligible to all men whose welfare he has in view.

Whatever it may be that men regard as representing their vocation and welfare, science will teach that vocation and welfare, and art will express that teaching. The laws of Solon and Confucius are science; the teachings of Moses and of Christ are science; buildings in Athens, the psalms of David, the church service, are art; but studying the fourth dimension of matter and tabulating chemical compounds and so forth-never has been and never will be science. The place of real science is occupied in our time by theology and jurisprudence, and the place of real art is occupied by church and state ceremonies, in neither of which do people believe and which no one regards seriously; but what among us is called science and art is a production of idle thought and feeling which aims at tickling similarly idle minds and feelings, and it is unintelligible and inarticulate to the people because it has not their welfare in view.

From the time we know anything of the life of man we everywhere and always find a dominant teaching falsely calling itself science, and not revealing to people, but

concealing from them, the meaning of life. So it was among the Egyptians, the Hindus, the Chinese, and to some extent among the Greeks (the sophists), and later among the mystics, gnostics, and cabalists, and in the Middle Ages among the schoolmen and alchemists, and so on, everywhere, down to our own day.

What peculiar luck is ours that we live just at the particular time when the mental activity calling itself science not only does not err, but is (as we are constantly assured) extraordinarily successful! Does not this peculiarly good fortune result from the fact that man cannot and will not recognize his own deformity? How is it that of those other sciences, theological and cabalistic, nothing but words remain, while we are so peculiarly lucky?

Notice that the indications are exactly the same: the same self-satisfaction and blind assurance that we, just we and only we, are on the real path and are the first to tread it: the self-same expectation that there-directly-we shall discover something extraordinary; and above all the same sign exposing us, namely, that all our wisdom remains with us while the mass of the people neither understand, nor accept, nor need it. Our position is a very sad one, but why not face it as it is?

It is time to come to our senses and look around us.

For we are indeed nothing but scribes and Pharisees who have seated ourselves in Moses’ seat and taken the keys of the kingdom of heaven, neither entering in ourselves nor allowing others to enter. We priests of science and art are the most worthless frauds, with far less right to our position than the most cunning and depraved Church priests. For we have absolutely no right to our privileged position, we obtained it by guile and keep it by fraud.

The pagan priests and the clergy of our own and of the Catholic Church, however depraved they may be, or have been, had this right to their position-that they at least proposed to teach life and salvation to the people. We have undermined them and proved that they deceived, and have taken their place, but we do not teach people how to live: we even admit that it is no use trying to learn this. Yet we suck the juice out of the people, and in return teach our children our Talmud of Greek and Latin grammar, that they in their turn may continue to lead the same parasitic life as we do.

We say, there used to be castes but we have none. But how is it that some people and their children work while other people and their children do not? Bring a Hindu who does not know our language and show him our life as it has gone on for generations, and he will recognize the same two chief, distinct castes of workers and non-workers as exist among his people. As with them so with us, the right not to work is given by a special initiation, which we call science and art and in general-education.

It is this education, and the whole perversion of reason attached to it, that has brought us to the amazing state of insanity which causes us not to see what is so clear and indubitable.

We consume the lives of our brother men, and continue to consider ourselves Christian, humane, educated, and perfectly justified.

Chapter 38: ‘What Then Must We Do? What Must We Do?’

This question-including an admission that our way of life is wrong and bad, together with a suggestion that all the same it is impossible to change it-this question I hear from all sides, and for that reason I chose it as the title of my work.

I have described my sufferings, my search, and my solution of this question. I am a man like everybody else, or if I am at all different from an ordinary man of our circle it is chiefly that I have served and connived at the false teaching of our world more than he, have been more praised by the men of the dominant school and have therefore been perverted and gone astray more than others.

And therefore I think the solution I have found for myself will be valid for all sincere men who set themselves the same question. First of all, to the question: What must we do? I replied to myself: I must not lie either to myself or to others, nor fear the truth wherever it may lead me. We all know what lying to other people means, and yet we lie unceasingly from morning to night: ‘Not at home,’ when I am at home; ‘Very pleased,’ when I am not at all pleased; ‘My respects,’ when I do not respect; ‘I have no money,’ when I have some, and so on. We consider lies to other people, especially certain kinds of lies, to be bad, but are not afraid of lying to ourselves; yet the very worst, most downright and deceptive lie to others, is as nothing in its consequences compared with that lie to ourselves on which we have built our whole life.

That is the lie we must not be guilty of, in order to be able to answer the question: What must we do?

How can the question be answered when all I do, my whole life, is based on a lie and I carefully give out this lie as truth to others and to myself? Not to lie, in that sense, means not to fear the truth, not to invent excuses to hide from myself the conclusions of reason and conscience, and not to accept such excuses when they are invented by others: not to fear to differ from all those around me or to be left alone with reason and conscience, and not to fear the position to which truth will lead me, believing firmly that what truth and conscience will lead me to, however strange it may be, cannot be worse than what is based on falsehood. Not to lie in our position as privileged mental workers, means not to fear to make up one’s accounts. Perhaps we already owe so much that we cannot meet our obligations, but however that may be it is better to face the facts than not to know how we stand. However far we may have gone along a false path, it is better to return than to continue to go along it. Falsehood to others is simply disadvantageous. Every affair is settled more directly and more quickly by truth than by falsehood. Falsehood to others only confuses the matter and hinders its solution, but falsehood to oneself presented as truth, entirely ruins man’s life.

If a man having started on a wrong road accepts it as the right one, every step he takes along that road takes him farther from his aim. If a man who has been going for a long time along a false road guesses, or is told, that that road is wrong, but being frightened at the thought that he has gone so far astray tries to assure himself that by following this road he may still come out on the right one, he will never reach the right road. If a man is

frightened of the truth, and on seeing it does not acknowledge it but accepts falsehood for truth, he will never know what he should do.

We, not only rich men but men in a privileged position, so-called educated men, have gone so far along a false road that we need either great resolution, or the experience of great suffering on our false path, to enable us to come to ourselves and acknowledge the lie in which we are living.

Thanks to the sufferings to which the false path led me, I saw the falsehood of our life, and having acknowledged it I had the courage (at first only in thought) to follow reason and conscience without considering what they would lead me to. And I was rewarded for that courage. All the complex, disjointed, confused, unmeaning phenomena of life around me became at once clear, and my position amid those phenomena, which had been a strange and burdensome one, suddenly became natural and easy. And in that new situation my activity determined itself quite exactly, and was nothing like what I had previously imagined it would be, but was a new activity much more tranquil, agreeable, and joyous. The very things that formerly frightened me now became attractive.

And therefore I think that a man who sincerely sets himself the question, What to do? and in answering it does not lie to himself but goes the way his reason leads him, will have already answered the question. If only he does not lie to himself he will find out what to do, where to go and how to act. The one thing which may hinder his finding the way is a false and too high estimate of himself and his position. So it was with me and therefore a second reply-which flows from the first-to the question: What to do? consisted for me in repenting, in the full significance of that word, that is, completely changing my estimate of my own position and activity. Instead of considering our position useful and important, we just acknowledge its harmfulness and triviality; instead of priding ourselves on our education we must .admit our ignorance; in place of pride in our kindness and morality we must acknowledge our immorality and cruelty, and instead of our importance admit our insignificance.

I say that apart from not lying to myself I had also to repent, because, though the one flows from the other, a false impression of my high importance had so grown upon me that until I sincerely repented and put aside that false estimate of myself, I did not see the greater part of the lie I had told myself. Only when I repented, that is, ceased to consider myself a special kind of man and began to look on myself as a man like all others-only then did my path become plain to me.

Before that, I could not answer the question: What to do? because I put the very question wrongly. Till I repented I put the question thus: What activity shall I-a man with the education I have acquired and the talents I possess-what activity shall I choose?

How am I-by means of this education and these talents-to repay what I have taken and still take from the peasants? That question was incorrect because it contained in itself a false conception that I was not like other men but was a special kind of man called to serve people by the talents and education I had acquired by forty years’ exercise. I put the question to myself, but in reality I had answered it in advance by fixing beforehand the kind of activity agreeable to myself by which I was called upon to serve men. I really asked myself: How am I, such an admirable writer, who have acquired so much knowledge and possess such talents, to utilize them in the service of mankind? The

question should have been put as it should be put to a learned Rabbi who has studied the whole Talmud and learned the number of letters in all the sacred books and all the subtleties of his science. The question, both for the Rabbi and for me, should have been this: What am I, who owing to my unfortunate position, during the best years for study have been learning the French language, the piano, grammar, geography, the science of jurisprudence, verses, stories and novels, philosophic theories, and military exercises, instead of learning to labour, what am I, who have passed the best years of my life in idle occupations depraving to the soul-what am I to do despite those unfortunate conditions of the past, in order to requite those who have all this time fed me and clothed me and who still continue to feed and clothe me? If the question had presented itself as it does to me now after I have repented: What must I do, who am such a perverted man?-the answer would have been easy: try, first of all, to feed yourself honestly, that is to say, learn not to live on the backs of others; and while learning that, and after learning it, take every opportunity to serve others with hands, feet, brain, heart, and all the powers you possess and on which people make demands.

And therefore I say that for a man of our circle-besides not lying to himself or to others-it is also necessary to repent, to scrape off the pride that has grown upon us; pride of education, of refinement, and of talents, and to acknowledge oneself to be not a benefactor of others and an advanced man who is willing to share his useful acquisitions with the people, but to acknowledge oneself guilty all round, a spoilt, quite good-for nothing man, who wishes not to be a benefactor to the people but to reform himself and cease to offend and wrong them.

I often hear questions from good young people who sympathize with the negative part of my writings, and ask: ‘Then what must I do? What am I to do, who have taken my degree at the university, or some other establishment-What am I to do to be of use?’

These young people ask that, but in the depth of their souls have already decided that in the education they have received they possess a great advantage, and that they wish to serve the people just by means of that advantage. And therefore the one thing they will on no account do is to examine what they call their education honestly and critically and ask themselves whether it is a good or bad thing? If they do that, they will inevitably be led to repudiate their education and be obliged to begin to learn afresh; and that is just what is necessary.

They are quite unable to decide the question, What to do? because they do not see the question in its true light.

The question should be put thus: How can I, a helpless, useless man, who owing to unfortunate circumstances have wasted the best years for learning on studying a scientific Talmud pernicious to soul and to body, how can I rectify this mistake and learn to be of service to men? But it presents itself to them thus: How am I, who have acquired such admirable knowledge, to be of use to people by means of my admirable knowledge? And therefore the man will never answer the question: What to do? until he ceases to deceive himself, and repents. And repentance is not dreadful, just as the truth is not dreadful, but is equally joyous and fruitful. We need only accept the truth completely and repent fully, to understand that no one possesses any rights or privileges or can possess them, but has only endless and unlimited duties and obligations; and man’s first and most

unquestionable duty is to participate in the struggle with nature to support his own life and that of others.

And this acknowledgement of a man’s duty forms the essence of the third answer to the question: What to do? .

I tried not to lie to myself. I tried to extirpate the false conception of the importance of my education and talents, and to repent; but on the road to the solution of the question, What to do? a new difficulty presented itself: there were so many things to be done that one needed an indication just what should be done in particular. And the reply to this question was given by sincere repentance of the evil in which I was living. What to do? Just what to do?-everyone asks, and I, too, asked it as long as, under the influence of a high opinion of my vocation, I did not see that my first and unquestionable business was to procure my own food, clothing, heating, and dwelling, and in doing this to serve others, because since the beginning of the world that has been the first and surest obligation of every man.

Only in that occupation does a man, if he participates in it, obtain full satisfaction for the physical and spiritual demands of his nature: to feed, clothe, and take care of himself and of those near to him, satisfies his physical needs, while to do the same for others satisfies his spiritual needs.

All man’s other activities become legitimate only when this prime demand is satisfied.

No matter wherein a man may see his vocation: whether in ruling men, in defending his compatriots, in performing Church services, in teaching, in devising means to increase the pleasures of life, in discovering the laws of nature, in embodying eternal truths in artistic images-for a rational man the duty of taking part in the struggle with nature for the maintenance of his own life and the lives of other people, will always be the first and most indubitable. This duty will always rank first, because what people most need is life, and therefore to defend people and to teach them and to make their lives more agreeable it is necessary to preserve life itself, and my neglect to take part in that struggle and my consumption of other people’s labour destroys people’s lives.

And therefore it is impossible and insane to try to serve men while destroying their lives.

Man’s duty to struggle with nature for the means of livelihood will always be the very first and most certain of all duties, because it is the law of life, neglect of which involves inevitable punishment by the destruction either of man’s physical or rational life. If a man living in solitude avoids the struggle with nature he is at once punished by the fact that his body perishes. And if in a community a man frees himself from his duty by making others do his work for him to the detriment of their lives, he is at once punished by the fact that his life becomes unreasonable and unjustifiable.

So perverted had I been by my past life, and so concealed in our society is that primary and unquestionable law of God or of nature, that it seemed to me strange, terrible, and even shameful, to obey that law, as though the fulfilment of an eternal and unquestionable law, and not its neglect, could be strange, terrible, or shameful.

At first it seemed to me that in order to do rough manual work some special arrangement or organization was necessary: a circle of like-minded men, the consent of my family, or residence in the country. Then I felt ashamed to appear to wish to show off by doing

something so unusual in our circle as physical work, and I did not know how to set about it.

But I had only to understand that it was not some exceptional activity that had to be devised and arranged, but that it was merely returning to a natural position from the false one in which I had been-merely rectifying the falsehood in which I had been living-I had only to admit this for all difficulties to vanish.

It was not at all necessary to arrange, to adapt, or to await the consent of others, because in whatever condition I might be there were always people who fed, clothed, and attended to the heating, not only for themselves but also for me, and I could do this for myself and for them everywhere, under any conditions, if I had sufficient time and strength.

Nor could I feel false shame in the unaccustomed work that seemed to surprise people, for while not doing it I already felt not false but real shame. And on arriving at this consciousness and at the practical deductions from it, I was fully rewarded for not having feared the conclusions of reason and for having gone where they led me.

On reaching that practical deduction I was surprised at the ease and simplicity with which all these questions which had seemed to me so difficult and complex solved themselves.

In reply to the question: What must I do? I saw that the most indubitable answer was: First, do all the things I myself most need-attend to my own room, heat my own stove, fetch my water, attend to my clothes, and do all I can for myself I thought this would seem strange to the servants, but it turned out that the strangeness only lasted for a week and afterwards it would have seemed strange had I resumed my former habits.

To the question whether this physical work had to be organized, and whether one should arrange a village community on the land-it turned out that all that was unnecessary, and that work-if its aim is to satisfy one’s needs, rather than to make idleness possible and utilize other people’s toil as is the case with people who are making money-draws one naturally from the town to the country, where such labour is most productive and most joyful.

It was unnecessary to arrange any community, because a man who works himself naturally joins up with the existing community of working people.

To the question: Would not this work absorb all my time and prevent my doing the mental work I love, to which I am accustomed, and which I sometimes consider useful? I received a most unexpected reply. The energy of my mental work increased-and increased in proportion to my bodily exertion and to my emancipation from all superfluity.

It turned out that after devoting eight hours to physical toil (the half of the day I had formerly passed in arduous efforts to avoid dullness) I still had eight hours left, of which I only needed five for mental work.

It turned out that if I-a very prolific writer who for forty years have done nothing but write, and have written some 5,000 pages,-if I had worked all those forty years at a peasant’s usual work, then, not reckoning winter evenings and workless days, if I had read and studied for five hours every day and had written only on holidays two pages a

day (and I have sometimes written as much as sixteen pages a day) I should have produced those 5,000 pages in fourteen years.1

I came upon a wonderful fact-a very simple arithmetical calculation a seven-year-old boy could have made, but which I had never made before. There are twenty-four hours in the day; we sleep eight, so sixteen remain. If a brainworker devotes five hours a day to his work he will get through an immense amount. What becomes of the remaining eleven hours?

It turned out that physical labour, far from rendering mental work impossible, improved and aided it.

To the question whether this physical work would not deprive me of many harmless pleasures natural to man, such as enjoyment of the arts, acquisition of knowledge, intercourse with people, and the happiness of life in general, the answer is that the opposite turned out to be true: the more intensive the labour and the nearer it approached to rough work on the land, the more enjoyment and information I obtained and the closer and more amiable was the intercourse I had with men, and the more happiness life brought me.

To the question (so often heard by me from people who are not quite sincere)-what result could come from such an insignificant drop in the ocean as my own physical work in the ocean of labour I consumed, again a very surprising and unexpected reply was obtained.

It turned out that I only needed to make physical labour the customary condition of my life, for most of the bad expensive habits and requirements that had accompanied a state of physical idleness to drop away of themselves without the least effort on my part. Not to speak of the habit of turning night into day and vice versa, and the kind of bedding, clothes, and conventional cleanliness, which are simply impossible and irksome when one is engaged on physical labour, the quality of food I wanted changed completely.

Instead of the sweet, rich, delicate, refined, and spicy foods that formerly attracted me, the simplest food: cabbage-soup, buckwheat porridge, black bread, and tea, now seemed pleasantest.

So that, not to mention the simple example of the plain peasants with whom I came in touch, who satisfied themselves with little, my needs themselves imperceptibly changed in consequence of my life of labour, so that in proportion as I accustomed myself to and assimilated habits of work, my drop of physical labour became more noticeable; and in proportion as my own work became more productive my demands on the labour of others became less and less and my life naturally, without effort or deprivation approximated to a simplicity of which I could not have dreamed had I not fulfilled the law of labour. It turned out that my most expensive demands on life, the demands of vanity and for distraction from ennui, were directly due to an idle life.

1 To get the sum right Tolstoy should, I think, have allowed himself 4 pages a day instead of 2. Taking 90 Sundays and Saints’ days in the peasants’ year, we get 90 days x 4 pages x 14 years = 5,040, or about what Tolstoy says he had actually written.-A.M.

With physical labour there was no room for vanity and no need for diversions, as my time was pleasantly occupied, and after becoming fatigued a simple rest at tea over a book, or in conversation with those near to me, was incomparably more agreeable than a theatre, cards a concert or grand society-all of them things that cost a great deal.

As to whether this unaccustomed labour would not injure the health necessary to enable me to be of use to men, it turned out that (despite the positive assertions of leading physicians that hard physical exertion, especially at my age, might injure my health, and that Swedish gymnastics, massage, and so forth-arrangements to replace the natural conditions of man’s life-would be preferable)-the harder I worked the stronger, fitter, happier, and kindler did I feel. So that it appeared. indubitable that just as all those cunning devices: newspapers, theatres, concerts, visits, balls, cards, periodicals, and novels, are nothing but means of maintaining man’s mental life without the natural condition of labour for others, so also are all the ingenious hygienic and medical devices for the preparation of food, drink, housing, ventilation, heating, clothing, medicines, mineral waters, massage, gymnastics, electrical and other cures-it turned out that all these cunning devices are nothing but means of supporting man’s physical life when cut off from its natural conditions of labour-that it all was like an arrangement by means of chemical apparatus in an hermetically closed chamber, to evaporate water and provide plants with the kind of air best suited to their breathing-when it is only necessary to open the window: only necessary to do what is natural not only for man but for animals, namely, to discharge and expend by muscular labour the supply of energy produced by swallowing food.

The profound complexities of medicine and hygiene for people of our class are such as a mechanician might devise in order, when he has heated a boiler and screwed down all the valves, to prevent the boiler from bursting.

And when I clearly understood all this, it seemed to me ludicrous. By a long series of doubts, searchings, and reflection, I have reached the extraordinary truth that man has eyes in order to see with them, ears in order to hear with them, legs in order to walk with them, and hands and a back to work with, and that if he does not use them for their natural purpose it will be the worse for him.

I came to the conclusion that with us privileged people the same thing happens as occurred with the stallions of an acquaintance of mine.

His steward, who did not care for horses and did not understand them, having received his master’s orders to take the best stallions to the horse-market, chose them out of the herd and put them in the stalls; he fed them on oats and watered them, but wishing to be careful with such expensive horses, he did not allow anyone to ride them or drive them or even exercise them. The horses all went wrong in the legs and became worthless.

The same has happened with us, only with this difference, that it is impossible in any way to cheat the horses, and in order that they should not get out they had to be kept tied up, whereas we are kept in a similarly unnatural and ruinous condition by the temptations which enmesh us and bind us as with chains. We have arranged for ourselves a life contrary both to man’s moral and physical nature, and we direct all the strength of our minds to persuading men that this is just what life should be. All that we call ‘culture’, our sciences and arts and the improvements of life’s comforts, are attempts to cheat man’s

moral and natural demands; all that we call hygiene and medicine is an attempt to cheat the natural physical demands of human nature. But these deceptions have their limits and we have nearly reached them.

If such is man’s true life it is better not to live at all, says the prevalent most fashionable philosophy of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. If such is life it is better not to live, say an increasing number of suicides among the privileged classes. If life is such, it is better for the coming generation not to live, says medical practice in collusion with science: and the devices invented by it for the destruction of woman’s fecundity.

In the Bible it is said that it is a law for human beings to eat bread in the sweat of their brow, and in sorrow to bring forth children.

A peasant, Bondarev, who wrote an article about this, lit up for me the wisdom of that saying. (In my whole life two Russian thinkers have had a great moral influence on me, enriched my thought, and cleared up my outlook on life. These men were not Russian poets, or learned men, or preachers-they were two remarkable men who are still living, both of them peasants: Sutaev and Bondarev.)

But nous avons change tout ca, as a character in Moliere said after having blundered on medical matters and said that the liver was on the left side. Nous avons change tout ca: men need not work to feed themselves, it will all be done by machines, and women need not bear children. Science will teach us various methods and there are too many people as it is.

In the Krapivenski district1 there is a ragged peasant who wanders about. During the war2 he was employed by a commissariat officer in the purchase of grain. Having attached himself to this official, the peasant, it seems, went out of his mind with the idea that he, like the gentlefolk, need not work but would receive the maintenance due to him from his Majesty the Emperor. He now calls himself the Most-Serene-Military Prince Blokhin, Contractor for military provisions of all ranks. He says he has ‘completed all grades of the service’, and having ‘finished the military profession’ he is to receive from the Emperor ‘an open Bank, clothes, uniforms, horses, carriages, tea, peas, servants, and all supplies’.

To the question: Does he not want some work? he always proudly replies: ‘Much obliged-that will all be performed by the peasants.’

If one tells him that the peasants also may not want to work, he replies: ‘For the peasants the performance of labour presents no difficulty’ (he always prefers grandiloquent language). ‘There is now the invention of machinery for the facilitation of the peasants,’ he says. ‘For them it is not irksome.’ When one asks him what he lives for, he replies: ‘To pass the time.’

I always look at this man as into a mirror. In him I see myself and our whole class.

To finish with a rank enabling one to live ‘to pass the time’, and to receive an ‘open Bank’, while the peasants, as the invention of machinery makes work no longer irksome for them, do all the labour, is a complete formulation of the insensate creed of our circle.

1 The district in which Yasnaya Polyana is situated.-A.M.

2 The Russo-Turkish war of 1887-8.-A. M.

When we ask: What then must we do?-we do not really ask anything, but merely affirm-only not with the frankness of the Most-Serene-Military-Prince Blokhin, who has completed all the grades and has lost his reason-that we do not want to do anything.

He who comes to his senses cannot put the question, because on the one side all that he uses has been made and is made by man’s hands and on the other side, as soon as a healthy man takes up and eats something he feels a need to work with his legs, hands, and brain. To find work and to do it he needs only not to hold himself back; only he who considers it a shame to work-like a lady who asks her guests not to trouble to open the door, but to wait till she calls a servant to do so-only he can put to himself the question, what he is to do.

What is necessary is, not to invent work to do-you can’t overtake all the work needed for yourself and for others-but what is needed is to get rid of the criminal view of life, that I eat and sleep for my pleasure, and to acquire the simple and true view which the peasants grow up with and hold, that man is primarily a machine which has to be stoked with food, and that it is therefore shameful and uncomfortable and impossible to go on eating and not to work; that to eat and not to work is a most dangerous condition, resembling a conflagration. If one only has that consciousness, plenty of work will always be at hand and it will be joyous and satisfying for the needs of one’s body and soul. The case presented itself to me like this: our food divides our day into four ‘spells’, as the peasants term it: (1) till breakfast, (2) from breakfast till dinner, (3) from dinner till evening meal, (4) and the evening. Man’s natural activity is also divided into four kinds: (1) muscular activity-work of hands, feet, shoulders, and back-heavy work which makes one sweat; (2) the activity of the fingers and wrists-that of craftsmanship; (3) activity of the mind and imagination; (4) and the activity of social intercourse. And the blessings men make use of can also be divided into four classes. First, the products of heavy labour-grain, cattle, buildings, & c.; secondly, the products of craftsmanship clothes, boots, utensils and so forth; thirdly, the products of mental activity-the sciences and arts; and fourthly, the arrangements for intercourse with people-acquaintanceships, &c. And it seemed to me that best of all would be so to vary the day’s occupations as to exercise all four human faculties and re-create all four kinds of produce we consume, in such a way that the four spells should be devoted: the first, to heavy labour; the second, to mental labour; the third, to craftsmanship; and the fourth, to intercourse with one’s fellows. It would be well if one could arrange one’s work so, but if not, the one important thing is to retain consciousness of one’s duty to work-of the duty of employing each spell usefully.

It seemed to me that only then would the false division of labour that exists in our society be abolished, and a just division established which would not infringe man’s happiness.

I, for instance, have occupied myself all my life long with mental work. I said to myself that I have so divided labour that writing, that is, mental work, was my special occupation, and the other necessary occupations I allowed (or compelled) others to do for me. That arrangement, apparently the most advantageous for mental labour, to say nothing of its injustice, was after all disadvantageous for mental labour.

All my life long I had arranged my food, sleep, and amusements with regard to those hours of specialized work, and besides that work I had done nothing.

The result was: first that I limited my circle of observation and knowledge and often lacked a subject of study, and often when setting myself the task of describing the lives of men (and the lives of men are the perpetual problem of all mental activity) I felt my ignorance and had to learn and inquire about things known to every man who is not occupied with specialized work; secondly, it happened that I sat down to write without any inner compulsion to write, and no one demanded of me writing for its own sake, that is to say for my thoughts, but only wanted my name for journalistic purposes. I tried to squeeze what I could out of myself: sometimes nothing could be squeezed out, sometimes only something very poor, and I felt dissatisfied and dull. So that very often days and weeks passed when I ate and drank, slept and warmed myself, without doing anything, or doing only what nobody needed; that is to say, I committed an unquestionable and nasty crime of a kind hardly ever committed by a man of the labouring classes. But now after having recognized the necessity of physical work, both rough work and handicraft, something quite different happened: my time was occupied, however humbly, in a way that was certainly useful and joyous and instructive for me. And so I tore myself away from that unquestionably useful and joyous occupation to my speciality only when I felt an inner need a saw a demand directly addressed to me for my work as a writer. And just these demands conditioned the quality, and therefore the value and joyousness of my specialized work.

So it turned out that occupation with the physical work necessary for me as for every man, not only did not hinder my specialized activity but was a necessary condition of the utility, quality, and pleasurability of that activity. . .

A bird is so made that it is necessary for it to fly, walk, peck, and consider, and when it does all that it is satisfied and happy, in a word, it is then really a bird. Just so is it with man: when he walks, turns about, lifts, draws things along, works with his fingers, eyes, ears, tongue, and brain-then and only then is he satisfied and really a man.

A man conscious that it is his vocation to labour will naturally aim at such a rotation of work as is natural for the satisfaction of his internal and external needs, and he will change this order only if he feels within him an irresistible vocation for some exceptional work and if other people require that work of him.

The nature of work is such that the satisfaction of all man’s needs requires just the change to different kinds of work that makes it not burdensome but gladsome. Only a false belief that work IS a .curse could bring people to such an emancipation of themselves from certain kinds of work-that is, to such a seizure of the work of others-as requires the compulsory engagement of others in special occupations, which is called ‘the division of labour’.

We are so accustomed to our false conception of the arrangement of work, that it seems to us that it will be better for a boot maker, a mechanic, a writer, or a musician, if he exempts himself from the labour natural to all men.

Where there is no violence exercised to seize other people’s work and no false faith in the pleasure of idleness, no one will free himself from the physical work necessary for the satisfaction of his needs, in order to occupy himself with specialized work; for specialized work is not an advantage, but a sacrifice a man makes to his special bent and to his fellow men.

A boot maker in a village tearing himself from his customary and joyous field labour and taking to that of mending or making boots for his neighbours, deprives himself of the very joyous and useful field-work only because he likes sewing, and knows that no one can do it as well as he and that people will be grateful to him for it. But he cannot desire to deprive himself for life of joyous change of work. And so it is with a village Elder, a mechanic, a writer, or a scholar. It is only we, with our perverted notions, who suppose that if a master dismisses a clerk from the counting-house and sends him back to work as a peasant, or if a minister is dismissed and deported, that he has been punished and placed in a worse position. In truth he has been benefited, that is to say his special oppressive and difficult work has been changed for a joyous alteration of labour.

In a natural society this is quite different. I know of a Commune in which the people grew their own food. One of the members of this Commune1 was more educated than the others, and he was required to give lectures, which he had to prepare during the day and deliver in the evening. He did this willingly, feeling that he was being of use to others and doing good work. But he grew tired of doing exclusively mental work and his health suffered, and the members of the Commune took pity on him and invited him to work on the land.

For people who look on labour as the essence and joy of life, the background and basis of life will always be the struggle with nature-work on the land, handicraft, mental work, and the establishment of intercourse among men.

A withdrawal from one or several of these kinds of work and a specialization of work will only occur when the specialist, loving such work and knowing that he does it better than other people, sacrifices his own advantage to satisfy direct demands made on him. Only by such an opinion about work and by the natural division of labour that results from it, is the curse lifted which in our imagination is laid on work; and all labour becomes joyful, because either a man does unquestionably useful and joyful work that is not burdensome, or he will be conscious of sacrificing himself in the performance of a more difficult and exceptional task done for the good of others.

‘But the subdivision of labour is more advantageous!’ For whom is it more advantageous?

It is advantageous for the production of more boots and cotton-prints. But who will have to make those boots and prints?

People such as those who for generations have made pin-heads and nothing else. Then how can it be more profitable for them?

If the chief thing were to make as many prints and pins as possible, it would be all right; but men and their welfare are the chief consideration. And the welfare of men lies in life, and their life is in their work. Then how can compulsion to do tormenting and degrading work be advantageous?

If the aim were the advantage of some men regardless of the welfare of all, then the most advantageous thing might be for some men to eat others; it is said that they taste nice. But

1 The Commune in question was the one founded by N. Chaikovsky, in Kansas State, in the eighteen seventies; and the man referred to in this passage was V. K. Heins, who changed his name to William Frey. He visited Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, and an account of him is given in Chap. VI, Vol. 2 of my Life of Tolstoy.-A. M.

what is most profitable for all is what I desire for myself: the greatest possible welfare and satisfaction of all the needs of body and soul and conscience and reason implanted within me. And personally I found that for my welfare and the satisfaction of these needs, I only had to be cured of the madness in which I-like the Krapivenski madman-lived, believing that gentlefolk ought not to work and that all should be done by others-and, without any subtleties, that I had to do only what is natural for a man to do when satisfying his needs. And when I found this out, I became convinced that this work for the satisfaction of one’s needs naturally divides itself into different kinds of work, each of which has its charm and not only is not burdensome but serves as a rest from the other kinds of labour.

Roughly (without at all insisting on the correctness of such a division) I divided that work, according to the demands I make on life, into four parts corresponding to the four spells of work which make up the day, and I endeavour to satisfy those demands.

So these are the replies I found to my question: What must we do?

First: not to lie to myself; and-however far my path of life may be from the true path disclosed by my reason-not to fear the truth.

Secondly: to reject the belief in my own righteousness and in privileges and peculiarities distinguishing me from others, and to acknowledge myself as being to blame.

Thirdly: to fulfil the eternal, indubitable law of man, and with the labour of my whole being to struggle with nature for the maintenance of my own and other people’s lives.

Chapter 39

I HAVE finished, having said all that relates to myself; but I cannot refrain from a desire to say what relates to everyone, and to verify the conclusions I have come to, by general considerations.

I wish to say why it seems to me that very many people of our circle must reach the same conclusion that I arrived at; and also what will come of it if even a few people do so.

I think many will come to the conclusion I came to, because if only men of our circle, of our caste, look seriously about them, the young people seeking personal happiness will be horrified at the ever-increasing misery of their lives, clearly drawing them towards perdition; the conscientious people will be horrified at the cruelty and injustice of their lives, and the timid people will be horrified at the danger of their lives.

The unhappiness of our life; patch up our false way of life as we will, propping it up by the aid of the sciences and arts-that life becomes feebler, sicklier, and more tormenting every year; every year the number of suicides and the avoidance of motherhood increases; every year the people of that class become feebler; every year we feel the increasing gloom of our lives.

Evidently salvation is not to be found by increasing the comforts and pleasures of life, medical treatments, artificial teeth and hair, breathing exercises, massage, and so forth; this truth has become so evident that in the newspapers advertisements of stomach-powders for the rich are printed under the heading, ‘Blessings for the poor’, in which it is

said that only the poor have good digestions but that the rich need aids, among which are these powders.

It is impossible to remedy this by any amusements, comforts, or powders-it can only be remedied by a change of life.

Discord of our life and our conscience; try as we may to justify to ourselves our betrayal of humanity, all our excuses crumble to dust in face of the obvious facts: people around us die from excessive work and from want, while we use up food, clothes and human labour, merely to find distraction and change. And therefore the conscience of a man of our circle, if he retains but a scrap of it, cannot rest, and poisons all the comforts and enjoyments of life supplied to us by the labour of our brothers, who suffer and perish at that labour.

And not only does every conscientious man feel this himself (he would be glad to forget it, but cannot do so in our age) but all the best part of science and art-that part which has not forgotten the purpose of its vocation-continually reminds us of our cruelty and of our unjustifiable position. The old firm justifications are all destroyed; the new ephemeral justifications of the progress of science for science’s sake and art for art’s sake do not stand the light of simple common sense.

Men’s consciences cannot be set at rest by new excuses, but only by a change of life which will make any justification of oneself unnecessary as there will be nothing needing justification.

The danger of our way of life: try as we may to hide from ourselves. the simple, most obvious, danger that the patience of those whom we are stifling may be exhausted; try as we may to counteract that danger by all sorts of deception, violence, and cajolery-that danger is growing every day and every hour and has long threatened us! but now has matured so that we hardly maintain ourselves in our little boat above the roaring sea which already washes over us and threatens angrily to swallow and devour us. The workers’ revolution with horrors of destruction and murder not merely threatens us, but we have been living over it for some thirty years already, and only for a while have somehow managed by various temporary devices to postpone its eruption. Such is the condition of Europe; such is the condition with us, and it is yet worse with us because it has no safety-valves. Except the Tsar, the classes that oppress the masses have now no justification in the people’s eyes; those masses are all held down in their position merely by violence, cunning, and opportunism, that is, by agility, but hatred among the worst representatives of the people and contempt for us among the best of them, increases hour by hour.

During the last three or four years a new significant word has come into general use among our people, which I never heard formerly; it is used opprobriously in the street, and defines us as ‘drones’.1

The hatred and contempt of the oppressed masses are growing and the physical and moral forces of the wealthy classes are weakening; the deception on which everything depends

1 Not finding a new English word with which to translate darmoedy, I have to use ‘drones’, which is an old one. Literally darmoedy means ‘people who eat giving nothing in return’.-A. M.

is wearing out, and the wealthy classes have nothing to console themselves with in this deadly peril.

To return to the old ways is impossible, to restore the ruined prestige is impossible; only one thing is left for those who do not wish to change their way of life, and that is to hope that ‘things will last my time’-after that let happen what may.

That is what the blind crowd of the rich are doing, but the danger is ever growing and the terrible catastrophe draws nearer.

Three reasons indicate to people of the wealthy classes the necessity of altering their way of life: the need of well-being for themselves and for those near to them, which is not met on the path they are following; the need of satisfying the voice of conscience, to do which is evidently impossible on the present path; and the menace and ever-growing danger of their life, which is not to be avoided by any external means. All three reasons together should move men of the wealthy classes to change their lives-to a change satisfying their welfare and their conscience, and averting the danger.

And there is only one such change: to cease to deceive, to repent, and to recognize toil to be not a curse but the joyful business of life.

But of what avail will it be that I do ten, eight, or five hours’ physical work which thousands of peasants would gladly do for the money I have?-people say in reply to this.

In the first place the simplest and most certain result will be that you will be merrier, healthier, fitter, and kindlier, and will learn what real life is, from which you have been hiding yourself or which has been hidden from you.

In the second place, if you have a conscience, it not only will not suffer as it does now, seeing people’s labour (the hardship of which from ignorance we always either exaggerate or underrate), but you will experience all the time the joyous consciousness that every day you satisfy the demands of your conscience more and more, and get away from the terrible position of having such an. accumulation of evil in your life as makes it impossible to do good to people; you will feel the joy of living freely, with the possibility of doing good; you will pierce a window, letting in a chink of light from the sphere of the moral world which has hitherto been closed to you. Instead of the constant fear of revenge for the evil you do, you will feel that you are saving others from that revenge, and above all that you are saving the oppressed from the grievous sensation of hatred and vengeance.

‘But really it is ridiculous’, people usually say, ‘for us, people of our society, with the profound problems that confront us-philosophic, scientific, political, artistic, ecclesiastical, and social-for us, ministers, senators, academicians, professors, artists, and singers; for us, a quarter of an hour of whose time is so highly valued-for us to spend our time on what? On cleaning our boots, washing our shirts, digging, planting potatoes, or feeding our chickens, our cows, and so forth, on affairs which are gladly done for us not only by our own porters and cooks but by thousands of people who appreciate the value of our time. But why do we dress ourselves, wash ourselves, scratch ourselves (excuse the details), hold the po for ourselves, why do we walk, hand chairs to ladies and to guests, open and shut doors, help people into carriages, and do hundreds of similar things that used to be done for us by slaves?

Because we consider that so it ought to be, that it accords with human dignity, that it is a man’s duty and obligation.

Sq it is with physical labour. It is man’s dignity, his sacred duty and obligation, to use the hands and feet given him for the purpose for which they were given, and to expend the food he consumes on labour to produce food, and not to let them atrophy, nor to wash them and clean them and use them only to put food, drink, and cigarettes into his own mouth.

That is a significance physical labour has for every man in any society, but in our society where the evasion of this law of nature has become the misfortune of a w hole circle of people, occupation with physical labour acquires yet another significance-that of a sermon and an activity preventing terrible calamities that threaten humanity. To say that for an educated man physical labour is an insignificant occupation is the same as to ask, when a temple is being built: what importance is there in setting one stone evenly in its place?

All the most important things are done unnoticed, modestly, simply; neither ploughing, nor building, nor grazing cattle, nor even thinking, can be done in uniforms amid illuminations and the roar of cannon. The illuminations, the roar of cannon, music, uniforms, cleanliness, and glitter, with which we are accustomed to connect the idea of the importance of an occupation, always serve on the contrary as signs that the matter lacks importance.

Great and real affairs are always simple and modest.

And so it is with the most important affair before us: the solution of the terrible contradictions amid which we live.

And the things that solve those contradictions are these modest, imperceptible, apparently ridiculous acts: serving oneself, doing physical labour for ourselves and if possible for others-which we rich people have to do if we understand the misfortune, wrongfulness, and danger of the position into which we have fallen.

What will result if I, and a dozen or two others, do not despise physical work but consider it essential for our happiness, tranquillity of conscience, and security? The result will be, that one or two or three dozen people, without conflict with anyone and without governmental or revolutionary violence, will solve for themselves the apparently insoluble question that presents itself to the whole world, and will solve it in such a way that they will live better, their consciences will be more at ease, and the evil of oppression will no longer terrify them: the result will be that other people will see that the good they seek everywhere is close at hand, that the apparently insoluble contradictions between their conscience and the arrangements of the world solve themselves in the easiest and most joyous manner, and that instead of being afraid of the people around us we should draw near to them and love them.

The apparently insoluble economic and social question is the question of Krylov’s box.1 It opens simply. But it will not open until people do the first and simplest thing, and just open it.

The apparently insoluble question is the old one of the. exploitation by some men of the labour of others, and in our time that question is expressed by property.

Formerly men took the labour of others simply by violence-slavery. To-day we do it by property.

Property to-day is the root of all evils: of the sufferings of those who possess it or are deprived of it, the reproaches of conscience of those who misuse it, and the danger of collision between those who have a superfluity and those who are in need. Property is the root of the evil, and at the same time is the very thing to gain which all the activity of our society to-day is directed. It guides the activity of our whole world.

States and Governments intrigue and go to war for property: for the banks of the Rhine and territories in Africa, China, or the Balkan Peninsula. Bankers, traders, manufacturers, and landowners work, scheme, and torment themselves and others for property; officials and artisans struggle, cheat, oppress and suffer for the sake of property; our Law Courts and police defend property; our penal settlements and prisons and all the horrors of our so-called repression of crime, exist on account of property.

Property is the root of all evil, and the division and safeguarding of property occupies the whole world.

What then is property?

People are accustomed to think that property is something really belonging to a man. That is why they call it ‘property’. We say of a house and of one’s hand alike, that it is ‘my own’ hand, ‘my own’ house.

But evidently this is an error and a superstition.

We know, or if we do not know it is easy to perceive, that property is merely a means of appropriating other men’s work. And the work of others can certainly not be my own. It has even nothing in common with the conception of property (that which is one’s own)-a conception which is very exact and definite. Man always has called, and always will call, ‘his own’ that which is subject to his will and attached to his consciousness, namely, his own body. As soon as a man calls something his ‘property’ that is not his own body but something that he wishes to make subject to his will as his body is-he makes a mistake, acquires for himself disillusionment and suffering, and finds himself obliged to cause others to suffer.

A man speaks of his wife, his children, his slaves, and his things, as being his own; but reality always shows him his mistake, and he has to renounce that superstition or to suffer and make others suffer.

1 Krylov’s fable tells of a box which several people failed to unlock. It turned out that it was not locked at all; one had only to raise the lid.-A. M.

In our days, nominally renouncing ownership of men, thanks to money and its collection by Government, we proclaim our right to the ownership of money, that is to say, to the ownership of other people’s labour.

But as the right of ownership in a wife, a son, a slave, or a horse, is a fiction which is upset by reality and only causes him who believes in it to suffer-since my wife or son will never submit to my will as my body does, and only my own body will still be my real property-in the same way monetary property will never be my own, but only a deceiving of myself and a source of suffering, while my real property will still be only my own body-that which always submits to me and is bound up with my consciousness.

Only to us who are so accustomed to call other things than our own body our ‘property’, can it seem that such a wild superstition may be useful, and can remain without consequences harmful to us; but it is only necessary to reflect on the reality of the matter to see that this superstition, like every other, entails terrible consequences.

Let us take the most simple example.

I consider myself to be my own property and another man to be my property also.

I want to be able to prepare a dinner. If I did not suffer from a superstitious belief in my ownership of the other man, I should teach that art, like any other that I needed, to my own property, that is to my own body; but as it is, I teach it to my imaginary property, and the result is that when my cook does not obey me or wish to please me, or even runs away from me or dies, I am left with the unsatisfied necessity of providing for myself, but unaccustomed to learning, and with a consciousness that I have spent as much time worrying over that cook as would have sufficed me to learn cooking myself. So it is with property in buildings, clothes, utensils, landed property, and property in money. All imaginary property evokes in me unsuitable requirements that cannot always be satisfied, and deprives me of the possibility of acquiring for my true and unquestionable property-my own body-that knowledge, that skill, those habits, and that perfection, which I might acquire.

The result always is that with no benefit to myself-to my true property-I have expended strength, sometimes my whole life, on what was not and could not be my property.

I arrange what I imagine to be my own library, my own picture-gallery, my own apartments and clothes, and acquire my ‘own’ money in order to buy what I want, and it ends with this, that busy with this imaginary property, as though it were really mine, I quite lose consciousness of the difference between what is my property, on which I really can labour, which can serve me and will always remain under my control, and that which is not and cannot be my own, whatever I may call it, and cannot be the object of my activity.

Words always have a clear meaning until we intentionally give them a false one.

What then does property mean? Property is that which belongs to me alone and exclusively, that with which I can always do just what I like, that which no one can take from me, which remains mine to the end of my life and which I must use, increase, and improve.

Each man can own only himself as such property.

And yet it is just in this very sense that people’s imaginary property is understood-the very property for the sake of which (in a vain effort to do the impossible: to try to possess things external to oneself, which cannot be one’s own) all the terrible evil of the world takes place: wars, executions, courts of law, prisons, luxury, vice, murder, and people’s ruin.

So what will come of it if a dozen people plough, split logs, and make boots, not from necessity but because they recognize that man must work and that the more he works the better it will be for him? The result will be that a dozen men, or were it but one man, both by his consciousness and by actions will show men that the terrible evil from which they suffer is not a law off ate, the will of God, or some historic necessity, but is a superstition, neither strong nor terrible but weak and insignificant, which need only be no longer believed in (as people believe in idols) for us to be free from it and destroy it like a flimsy cobweb.

Men who work to fulfil the joyous law of their life, that is, who work to fulfil the law of labour, will free themselves from the superstition of personal property so pregnant with calamities, and all the world’s institutions which exist to maintain that supposed property outside one’s own body will become for them not merely unnecessary but irksome; and it will become clear to all that these institutions are not indispensable, but are harmful, artificial, and false conditions of life.

For a man who regards work not as a curse but as a joy, property outside his own body, that is, the right or power to use another man’s labour, will be not merely useless but irksome.

If I like to prepare my dinner and am accustomed to doing so, the fact of another man doing it for me deprives me of an accustomed occupation and does not give me the satisfaction I gave myself: besides which the acquisition of imaginary property will be useless to a man who regards labour as life itself, fills his life with it, and so is less and less in need of the labour of others, that is, less and less in need of property to fill his idle time-for pleasure and for the adornment of his life.

If a man’s life is filled with labour he does not need apartments, furniture, and a variety of handsome clothes: he needs less expensive food and does not need conveyances and distractions.

Above all, a man who regards labour as the business and joy of his life will not seek to lessen his labour at the cost of other people’s work.

A man who regards his life as work, will make it his aim, in proportion as he acquires skill and endurance, to accomplish more and more work and so fill his life ever more and more completely.

For such a man, placing the meaning of his life in labour and not in its results, not in acquiring property, that is, the labour of others, there can never be any question about implements of labour.

Though such a man will always choose the most productive implement, he will get the same satisfaction from work even if he has to use the least productive.

If there is a steam-plough he will plough with it, if there is none he will plough with a horse plough, and if that also is lacking he will use a wooden peasant-plough, or for lack of that will dig with a spade, and under all conditions equally he will attain his aim of spending his life in work useful for others, and so will obtain full satisfaction.

And the condition of such a man, both in external and internal respects, will be happier than that of one who makes the acquisition of property the aim of his life.

Externally such a man will never be in want, for people seeing his desire to work will always try to make his work as productive as possible-as they do with the water power that turns a mill-wheel-and that it should be as productive as possible they will make his material existence secure, which they do not do for one who strives after property. And security of material conditions is all that a man needs.

Inwardly such a man will always be happier than one who seeks property, because the latter will never obtain what he strives for, while the former will always do so to the measure of his strength: feeble, old, dying as the proverb has it ‘with a tool in his hand’, he will obtain full satisfaction, and the love and sympathy of other people.

So that is what will come of it if a few mad cranks plough, make boots, and so forth, instead of smoking cigarettes, playing bridge, and driving about everywhere carrying their ennui with them during the ten hours a day that all mental workers have to spare.

The result will be that these crazy people will show in practice that the imaginary property on account of which people suffer and. make others suffer, is not necessary for happiness, but is hampering and nothing more than a superstition; that property, real property, exists only m one’s own head, hands, and feet, and that actually to exploit that real property usefully and joyfully, it is necessary to reject the false conception of property outside one’s own body, in the service of which we expend the best forces of our life. It will result that these people will show that a man will only cease to believe in imaginary property when he has developed his real property-his capacities, his body-so that it yields him fruit a hundredfold, and happiness of which we have no conception, and becomes such a useful, strong, kindly man that wherever he may be thrown he will always fall on his feet, will everywhere be brother to everyone, and will be understood and needed and prized by all. And people, seeing this one or that dozen lunatics, will understand what they all should do to untie the terrible knot in which the superstition of property has involved them, and to free themselves from the unfortunate position about which they now all groan, not knowing how to escape from it.

But what can one man do amid a crowd who do not agree with him?

No reflection shows the insincerity of those who employ it more obviously than this.

Bargees tow a barge up-stream. Can one find a single bargee stupid enough to refuse to haul at his tow-rope because by himself he is not strong enough to pull the barge upstream?

He who recognizes that beside his rights to an animal life, to food and sleep, he has some human duties, knows very well wherein his duty lies, just as the bargee does who shoulders the tow-rope. The bargee knows very well that he has only to haul and pull upstream. He will only look for something to do and ask how to do it when he has dropped the tow-rope. And as with the bargees and with all men engaged on a common task, so

with all humanity: each man has not to unhitch the tow-rope but to haul at it in the direction up-stream shown by the master. And that the direction may always be the same we have been endowed with reason.

And that direction has been given so clearly and indubitably in the life of all men about us and in the conscience of each man, and in all the expressions of human wisdom, that only he who does not wish to work can say that he does not see it.

So what will come of this?

This, that one or two men will haul, and seeing them a third, and so the best people will join up until the matter moves and goes along as of itself, pushing and inviting even those to join up who do not understand what is done or why.

At first those who consciously work to fulfil the law of God will be joined by others who accept it semi-consciously and half on trust; afterwards a large number will join them merely from faith in those advanced men who acknowledge it, and finally the majority will acknowledge it, and then men will cease to destroy themselves and will find happiness. That would happen very soon if the people of our circle, and following them the whole great majority of the workers, no longer considered it shameful to clean out privies and cart away the contents, but not shameful to fill them for others, their brothers to cleanse’ no longer considered it shameful to call on their neighbours in boots they have made themselves, while not considering it shameful to walk in boots and goloshes past people who have nothing to put on their feet; no longer felt it shameful not to know French or the latest news, but not shameful to eat bread without knowing how to make it-or shameful not to wear a starched shirt and clean clothes, but not shameful to go about in clean clothes which show one’s idleness, and shameful to have dirty hands, but not shameful to have hands unhardened by toil.

All this will happen when public opinion demands it. And public opinion will demand it when those delusions in people’s minds have been destroyed which hide the truth from them. Within my own recollection great changes have been accomplished in this sense. And those changes were only accomplished because public opinion changed. I can remember the time when rich people were ashamed to drive out with less than four horses and two lackeys; were ashamed not to have a lackey or a chambermaid to dress them, put their boots on for them, wash them, hold the po for them, and so on; and now people have suddenly become ashamed not to dress themselves, not to put on their own boots, and to drive out with lackeys. All these changes were caused by public opinion.

Are not the changes obvious that are now being prepared in public consciousness? It was only necessary twenty-five years ago to destroy the sophistry which justified serfdom, and public opinion as to what was praiseworthy and what was shameful changed, and life changed. It is now only necessary to destroy the sophistry which justifies the power money has over men, and public opinion as to what is praiseworthy and what is shameful will change and life will change with it.

And the destruction of the sophistry justifying the monetary power, and the change of public opinion in that respect, is already rapidly taking place. That sophistry is already becoming transparent and barely hides the truth. It is only necessary to look closely in order to see clearly that change in public opinion which not only ought to take place but

has already taken place, and is merely unacknowledged and not yet put into words. It is only necessary for a man of our time of some little education to reflect on what flows from the views of the world he professes, to convince himself that the valuation of what is good and what is bad, what is praiseworthy and what is shameful, which by inertia still guides him in life, is in direct contradiction to his whole world-conception.

It is only necessary for a man of our time to detach himself for a moment from life as he lives it by inertia, and to regard it from aside and weigh it in accordance with his whole world conception, and he will be horrified at the definition of his life dictated by his world-conception.

Let us take as an example a young man (among the young the energy of life is stronger and self-consciousness more hazy) of the wealthy classes of whatever tendency. Every decent young man considers it a shame not to help an old man, a child, or a woman; he considers that in a common undertaking it is a shame to expose another man’s health or life to danger while avoiding it himself. Everyone considers it a shame and barbarous to do what Schuyler1 tells us the Kirghiz do during a storm: they send out their wives and old women to hold down the corners of the tent, while they themselves remain sitting in the tent drinking their kumys. Everybody considers it a shame to compel a feeble man to work for him, and an even greater shame at a moment of danger, on a burning ship for instance, for the stronger to shove aside the weaker and to climb first into the life-boat while leaving them in danger, and so forth. All this they consider shameful, and in certain exceptional conditions would on no account do it; but in ordinary life just such deeds, and much worse ones, are hidden from them by temptations and they constantly commit them.

They need only reflect, to see and be horrified. A young man puts on a clean shirt every day.

Who washes them at the river?2 A woman, whatever condition she may be in, very often an old woman who might be the young man’s grandmother or mother, and who sometimes is ill. What would that young man himself call anyone who for a whim changed his shirt which was still clean, and sent a woman old enough to be his mother to wash it for him?

A young man keeps horses to show off, and they are broken in at danger to life by a man old enough to be his father or grandfather, while the young man himself mounts the horse only when the danger is passed. What does that young man call one who, avoiding it himself, puts another in danger and avails himself of the danger for his own pleasure?

And the whole life of the wealthy classes is made up of a series of such actions. The excessive work of old men, of children, and of women, and things done by others at risk to their lives not that we may be able to work, but for our whims, fill our whole life. A fisherman is drowned catching fish for us; washerwomen catch cold and die’ blacksmiths go blind; factory hands fall ill, and are mutilated by machines; wood-fellers are crushed

1 Eugene Schuyler (1840-90) was U.S.A. Secretary of Legation at Petersburg, 1873-6, and travelled in Central Asia in 1873.-A. M.

2 It is usual in Russia for a washerwoman when washing linen to take it to a river, stream, or pond, to rinse it.-A.M.

by falling trees; workmen fall from a roof, and seamstresses become consumptive. All real work is done with loss and peril of life. To hide this and not to see it is impossible. The one salvation in this situation, the one exit from it that a man of our time, shifting on to others the labour and peril of life, may not have, in accord with his own outlook on life, to call himself a scoundrel and a coward-is to take from others only what is essential for life, and himself to do real work at expense and risk to his own life.

A time will soon come, is already coming, when it will be a shame and a disgrace not only to eat a dinner of five courses served by footmen but to eat a dinner that has not been cooked by the hosts themselves; it will be a shame not only to drive out with fast trotters but even in a common cab when one can use one’s own legs; on work-days to wear clothes, boots, or gloves in which one cannot work, or to play on a piano costing £120 or even £5, while others, strangers, are having to work for one; or to feed a dog on milk and white bread while there are people who have no milk and bread; and to burn lights except to work by, or to heat a stove in which food is not cooked, while there are people who lack fire or light. To such a view we are inevitably and rapidly advancing. We already stand on the brink of that new life, and to establish that new view of life is the task of public opinion, and public opinion of that kind is rapidly forming itself it is women who form public opinion, and in our day women are particularly powerful.

Chapter 40

As is said in the Bible, to man is given the law of labour, to woman the law of child-bearing. Although with our science nous avons change tout ca, the law of the man as of the woman remains unaltered, as the liver remains in its place,-and the breach of it is still inevitably punished by death.

The only difference is that the general evasion of their duty by all men would be punished by death in such a near future as may be called the present, but the evasion of the law by all women would be punished in a more distant future. The general infringement of the law by all men destroys men at once, its infringement by all women destroys the next generation; but the evasion of the law by some men and some women does not destroy the human race, but deprives the offenders of their reasonable nature as human beings.

The neglect of the law by men began long ago in those classes which could coerce others and, ever widening, it has continued to the present time and has now reached to insanity-to an ideal of neglect of the law, to the ideal expressed by Prince Blokhin and shared by Renan and the whole educated world: machines are to do the work, while people will become bundles of nerves enjoying themselves. Evasion of her duty by woman used to be almost unknown. It manifested itself only in prostitution and isolated crimes of abortion. Women of the wealthy classes continued to fulfil their law when the men had ceased to perform theirs, and consequently women’s influence became stronger and they continue to govern, and ought to govern, men who have infringed the law and consequently lost their reason.

It is often said that women (Parisian women, especially those who are childless) have become so bewitching, utilizing all the arts of civilization, that they have mastered man by their fascinations. This is not only wrong, but is just the reverse of the case. It is not

the childless woman who has mastered man, but the mother, the one who has fulfilled the law of her nature while man has neglected his.

The woman who artificially makes herself barren and bewitches man by her shoulders and curls, is not a woman mastering man but a woman who, depraved by man, has descended to his level, like him has abandoned her duty, and like him has lost every reasonable perception of life.

From this mistake has arisen that wonderful nonsense called ‘women’s rights’.

The formula of those rights is this: ‘Ah! You, man,’ says the woman, ‘have violated your law of real work, and want us to bear the burden of ours. No! If that is so, then we, as well as you, can make a pretence of labour as you do, in banks, ministries, universities, academies, and studios; and like you we also wish to avail ourselves of other people’s work and to live only to satisfy our lusts under pretext of a division of labour.’

They say this and show in practice that they can make a pretence of work not at all worse, but even better, than men.

The so-called feminist question arose, and could only arise, among men who had infringed the law of real labour.

One has only to return to that law and the feminist question cannot exist.

A woman having her special, unquestionable, and unavoidable labour, will never demand the right to share also in man’s work in mines or in the ploughing field. She could demand only to share the sham labour of the wealthy classes.

The woman of our class was stronger than the man and still is stronger, not on account of her charms, not by her adroitness in making the same pharisaic pretence of work as man, but because she did not evade the law; because she bore that true labour at risk of life and with utmost effort-true labour from which the man of the wealthy classes had freed himself.

But within my own memory woman’s fall her infringement of her duty-has begun, and within my memory it has spread more and more widely.

Woman, having forgotten her law, has believed that her strength lies in the fascination of her allurements, or in her dexterity in the imitation of the sham work done by men.

But children are a hindrance to both of these.

And so with the help of science (science is always ready to do anything nasty) within my memory it has come about that among the wealthy classes dozens of methods of preventing pregnancy have appeared, and appliances for preventing childbirth have become common accessories of the toilet; and so the women-mothers of the wealthy classes who held power in their hands are letting it slip in order to compete with street-women and not be outdone by them.

That evil has spread far and spreads farther every day, and soon it will have reached all the women of the wealthy classes; and then they will be on a level with the men and like them will lose every reasonable sense of life. And then for that class there will be no recovery: but there is yet time.

For all that, more women than men still fulfil their law, and so there are reasonable beings among them, and therefore some women of our class still hold in their hands the possibility of saving it.

Ah!-if those women understood their worth, their power, and used these in the work of saving their husbands, brothers, and children-saving mankind!

Women-mothers of the wealthy classes, in your hands alone is the salvation of the men of our world from the evils from which they suffer! Not those women who are occupied with their figures, bustles, coiffures, and their attractiveness for men, and who against their will, by inadvertence and in despair, bear children, and hand them over to wet-nurses;1 nor yet those who attend various university lectures and talk about the psychomotor centres and differentials, and who also try to avoid child-bearing in order not to hinder the stupefaction they call their ‘development’,-but those women and mothers who, having the power to avoid child-birth, simply and consciously submit to that eternal, immutable law, knowing that the hardship and labour of that submission is their vocation. Those are the women and mothers of our wealthy classes in whose hands, more than in any others, lies the salvation of the men of our world from the evils that oppress them. You, women and mothers, who consciously submit to the law of God, you alone in our unhappy perverted circle which has lost the semblance of being human, you alone know the whole true meaning of life according to the law of God. And you alone can by your example show men that happiness of life in submission to God’s will, of which they deprive themselves. You alone know those raptures and joys, seizing your whole being, and that bliss which is ordained for man when he does not evade God’s law. You know the joy of love of your husband, a joy not ending, not broken-off like all others, but forming the beginning of a new joy of love for your child. You alone, when you: are simple and submissive to God’s will, know, not that farcical pretence of labour in uniforms and in illuminated halls which the men of our circle call labour, but the labour imposed on us by God, and you know the true rewards for it, the bliss it brings.

You know this when after the joys of love you await with agitation, terror, and hope, that torture of pregnancy which makes you ill for nine months, brings you to the verge of death and to unbearable sufferings and pains; you know the conditions of true labour when with joy you await the approach and increase of most dreadful sufferings, after which comes the bliss known to you alone.

You know it when, directly after these sufferings, without rest, without interruption, you undertake another series of labours and sufferings-those of nursing, in which you at once forgo, and subject to your duty and your feeling the strongest human demand-that of sleep (which the proverb says is ‘dearer than father or mother’), and for months and years do not have an undisturbed night’s sleep, but sometimes, and often, do not sleep for whole nights together, but walk up and down with numbed arms rocking the sick child who is tearing your heart.

And when you do all this, not be lauded by anyone, not noticed by anyone, not expecting praise or reward from anyone, when you do this not as an achievement but as the labourer in the Gospel parable who came from the field, considering that you are only doing your

1 The employment of wet-nurses was very much more usual in Russia than in England.-A. M.

duty-then you know what is sham fictitious labour for the praise of men, and what is real labour to fulfil God’s will-the indication of which you feel in your heart.

You know that if you are a real mother it is not enough that no one sees your labour or praises you for it-people merely consider that so it ought to be-but that even those for whom you have toiled will not only not thank you but will often torment and reproach you-and with the next child you will do the same: you will again suffer, again endure the unseen terrible labour, and again not expect reward from anyone, and will again feel the same satisfaction. In your hands, if you are such women, should be the influence over men, and in your hands lies their salvation. Every day your number diminishes: some occupy themselves with their fascination for men and become street-women, others are engaged in competing with men in their artificial, trifling occupations, others again who have not yet been false to their vocation, already repudiate it in their minds: they perform all the achievements of women and mothers, but accidentally, repiningly, with envy of the free, sterile women, and deprive themselves of their sole reward-the inner consciousness of the fulfilment of God’s will-and instead of satisfaction, suffer from what should be their happiness.

We are so confused by our false way of life, we men of our circle have all so utterly lost the sense of life that there is no longer any distinction between us. Having shifted the whole burden and danger of life on to the backs of others, we are unable to give ourselves the true name deserved by those who compel others to perish in providing life for them,-scoundrels and cowards.

But among women there is still a difference.

There are women-human beings-women presenting the highest manifestation of a human being; and there are women-whores. And this distinction will be made by future generations, and we too cannot help making it.

Every woman, however she may dress herself and however she may call herself and however refined she may be, who refrains from child-birth without refraining from sexual relations, is a whore. And however fallen a woman may be, if she intentionally devotes herself to bearing children, she performs the best and highest service in life-fulfils the will of God-and no one ranks above her.

If you are such a woman, you will not, either after two or after twenty children, say that you have borne enough, any more than a fifty-year old workman will say he has worked enough, while he still eats and sleeps and has muscles demanding work. If you are such a woman you will not shift the nursing and tending of your children on to another mother any more than a workman will let another man finish the work he has begun and nearly completed, because you put your life in that work and therefore your life is fuller and happier the more of that work you have.

And if you are such a one-and happily for men there still are such women-then that law of the fulfilment of God’s will by which you guide your own life, you will apply also to your husband’s life and to that of your children and of those near to you.

If you are such a one and know by your own experience that only self-sacrificing, unseen, unrewarded labour done with danger of life and uttermost effort for the life of others, is the mission of man which gives satisfaction and strength, then you will apply those same

demands to others, will incite your husband to such labour, and by such labour will value and estimate people’s worth, and for such labour will prepare your children.

Only a mother who considers child-bearing an unpleasant accident and thinks that the meaning of life lies in the pleasures of love, the comforts of life, education, and sociability, will bring up her children so that they shall have as many pleasures and enjoy them as much as possible, will feed them daintily, dress them up, give them artificial amusements, and teach them not what will make them capable of self-sacrificing labour (male or female) done with risk to life and to the last extremity of effort, but what will secure them diplomas1 and the opportunity not to labour. Only such a woman, having lost the significance of her life, will sympathize with that deceptive, false, male work by which her husband, freeing himself from man’s duty, finds it possible, together with her, to avail himself of other people’s labour. Only a woman of that kind will choose such a husband for her daughter, and will esteem people not by what they themselves are, but for what is attached to them-position, money, and the power to take other people’s labour. A real mother, who knows the will of God by experience, will prepare her children also to fulfil it. Such a mother will suffer if she sees her child overfed, effeminate, and dressed-up, for she knows that these things will make it difficult for it to fulfil the will of God which she recognizes.

Such a mother will teach not what will expose her son or daughter to the temptations presented by being able to escape labour, but whatever will enable them to bear the labour of life. She will not need to ask what she should teach her children or for what she should prepare them: she knows what man’s vocation is, and what to teach and what to prepare them for. Such a woman will not only not incite her husband to sham, false work which aims only at making use of other people’s labour, but will regard with aversion and horror an activity which serves as a double temptation to her children. Such a woman will not choose a husband for her daughter by the whiteness of his hands and the refinement of his manners, but knowing well what real labour is and what is deceit, she will always and everywhere, beginning with her own husband, respect and value in men and demand of them, real labour with expenditure and danger of life, and will despise that false, showy labour which aims at emancipating oneself from real work.

And let not those women who while renouncing woman’s vocation wish to profit by its rights, say that such a view of life is impossible for a mother, she being too intimately bound by love to her children to refuse them dainties, amusements, and fine clothes, and not to fear to leave them unprovided for if her. husband has no fortune or assured position, and not to fear for the future of her marrying daughters, and for her sons who have not received an ‘education’.

All that is a lie, a most glaring lie!

A true mother will never say it. You cannot refrain from the desire to give them sweets and toys and to take them to the circus?

1 The diplomas of the higher educational establishments in Russia were essential for entry to various branches of Government service and to various professions.-A. M.

But you do not give them poisonous berries to eat, do not let them out alone in a boat, and do not take them to a cafe chantant! How is it you can refrain in the one case, but not in the other?

Because you are saying what is untrue.

You say you love your children so that you fear for their lives, fear hunger and cold, and therefore value the security given you by your husband’s position which you admit to be unjustifiable.

You so fear those future possible misfortunes for your children-very distant and doubtful ones-that you encourage your husband in things you yourself regard as unjustifiable; but what are you doing now in the present conditions of your life to secure your children from the unfortunate occurrences of present-day life?

Do you spend much of the day with your children? It is much if you spend one-tenth of it!

The rest of the time they are in the hands of strangers, hired people often taken from the street, or they are in institutions, exposed to physical and moral infection.

Your children eat, are nourished. Who prepares their dinner, and of what? For the most part you do not know. Who instils moral perceptions into them? You do not know that either. So do not say that you put up with evil for your children’s good-it is not true. You do evil because you like it.

A true mother, one who sees in the bearing and bringing up of children her self-sacrificing vocation and the fulfilment of God’s will, will not speak so.

She will not speak so, because she knows that her business lies not in making of her children what suits her or suits the prevailing tendency of the times. She knows that children-the coming generation-are the greatest and most sacred thing it is given to man actually to see, and that to serve this holy thing with her whole being is her life.

She herself knows, being constantly between life and death and safeguarding a barely dawning life, that life and death are not her business, her business is to serve life, and therefore she will not seek distant paths for that service but will only not neglect those near at hand.

Such a mother will bear children and will nurse them herself, will first of all feed another before herself, will prepare food for the children, will sew and wash for them, will teach them and will sleep and talk with them, because she sees therein her life-work. She knows that the security of every life lies in labour and the capacity to labour, and therefore she will not seek external security in her husband’s money or in her children’s diplomas, but will develop in them the same capacity for a self-sacrificing fulfilment of God’s will which she has felt in herself, a capacity to endure toil with expenditure and danger of life. Such a mother will not ask others what she is to do, she will know it all and will fear nothing, and will always be at peace, for she will know that she has done what she had to do.

If there may be doubts for men and for a childless woman as to the way to, fulfil the will of God, for a mother that path is firmly and clearly defined, and if she fulfils it humbly with a simple heart she stands on the highest point of perfection a human being can

attain, and becomes for all a model of that complete performance of God’s will which all desire.

Only a mother can before her death tranquilly say to Him who sent her into this world, and Whom she has served by bearing and bringing up children whom she has loved more than herself-only she having served Him in the way appointed to her can say with tranquillity, ‘Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace.’ And that is the highest perfection to which, as to the highest good, men aspire.

Such women who fulfil their mission reign over men, and serve as a guiding star to mankind; such women form public opinion and prepare the coming generation; and therefore in their hands lies the highest power, the power to save men from the existing and threatening evils of our time.

Yes, women, mothers, in your hands more than in those of anyone else lies the salvation of the world.

February 14, 1886

ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SCIENCE AND ART

Translated by Isabel F. Hapgood 1887

Chapter 1

The justification of all persons who have freed themselves from toil is now founded on experimental, positive science. The scientific theory is as follows: —

“For the study of the laws of life of human societies, there exists but one indubitable method, — the positive, experimental, critical method

“Only sociology, founded on biology, founded on all the positive sciences, can give us the laws of humanity. Humanity, or human communities, are the organisms already prepared, or still in process of formation, and which are subservient to all the laws of the evolution of organisms.

“One of the chief of these laws is the variation of destination among the portions of the organs. Some people command, others obey. If some have in superabundance, and others in want, this arises not from the will of God, not because the empire is a form of manifestation of personality, but because in societies, as in organisms, division of labor becomes indispensable for life as a whole. Some people perform the muscular labor in societies; others, the mental labor.”

Upon this doctrine is founded the prevailing justification of our time.

Not long ago, their reigned in the learned, cultivated world, a moral philosophy, according to which it appeared that every thing which exists is reasonable; that there is no such thing as evil or good; and that it is unnecessary for man to war against evil, but that it is only necessary for him to display intelligence, — one man in the military service, another in the judicial, another on the violin. There have been many and varied expressions of human wisdom, and these phenomena were known to the men of the nineteenth century. The wisdom of Rousseau and of Lessing, and Spinoza and Bruno, and all the wisdom of antiquity; but no one man’s wisdom overrode the crowd. It was impossible to say even this, — that Hegel’s success was the result of the symmetry of this theory. There were other equally symmetrical theories, — those of Descartes, Leibnitz, Fichte, Schopenhauer. There was but one reason why this doctrine won for itself, for a season, the belief of the whole world; and this reason was, that the deductions of that philosophy winked at people’s weaknesses. These deductions were summed up in this, — that every thing was reasonable, every thing good; and that no one was to blame.

When I began my career, Hegelianism was the foundation of every thing. It was floating in the air; it was expressed in newspaper and periodical articles, in historical and judicial lectures, in novels, in treatises, in art, in sermons, in conversation. The man who was not acquainted with Hegal had no right to speak. Any one who desired to understand the truth studied Hegel. Every thing rested on him. And all at once the forties passed, and there was nothing left of him. There was not even a hint of him, any more than if he had never existed. And the most amazing thing of all was, that Hegelianism did not fall because some one overthrew it or destroyed it. No! It was the same then as now, but all at once it appeared that it was of no use whatever to the learned and cultivated world.

There was a time when the Hegelian wise men triumphantly instructed the masses; and the crowd, understanding nothing, blindly believed in every thing, finding confirmation in the fact that it was on hand; and they believed that what seemed to them muddy and contradictory there on the heights of philosophy was all as clear as the day. But that time has gone by. That theory is worn out: a new theory has presented itself in its stead. The old one has become useless; and the crowd has looked into the secret sanctuaries of the high priests, and has seen that there is nothing there, and that there has been nothing there, save very obscure and senseless words. This has taken place within my memory.

“But this arises,” people of the present science will say, “from the fact that all that was the raving of the theological and metaphysical period; but now there exists positive, critical science, which does not deceive, since it is all founded on induction and experiment. Now our erections are not shaky, as they formerly were, and only in our path lies the solution of all the problems of humanity.”

But the old teachers said precisely the same, and they were no fools; and we know that there were people of great intelligence among them. And precisely thus, within my memory, and with no less confidence, with no less recognition on the part of the crowd of so-called cultivated people, spoke the Hegelians. And neither were our Herzens, our Stankevitches, or our Byelinskys fools. But whence arose that marvellous manifestation, that sensible people should preach with the greatest assurance, and that the crowd should accept with devotion, such unfounded and unsupportable teachings? There is but one reason, — that the teachings thus inculcated justified people in their evil life.

A very poor English writer, whose works are all forgotten, and recognized as the most insignificant of the insignificant, writes a treatise on population, in which he devises a fictitious law concerning the increase of population disproportionate to the means of subsistence. This fictitious law, this writer encompasses with mathematical formulæ founded on nothing whatever; and then he launches it on the world. From the frivolity and the stupidity of this hypothesis, one would suppose that it would not attract the attention of any one, and that it would sink into oblivion, like all the works of the same author which followed it; but it turned out quite otherwise. The hack-writer who penned this treatise instantly becomes a scientific authority, and maintains himself upon that height for nearly half a century. Malthus! The Malthusian theory, — the law of the increase of the population in geometrical, and of the means of subsistence in arithmetical proportion, and the wise and natural means of restricting the population, — all these have become scientific, indubitable truths, which have not been confirmed, but which have been employed as axioms, for the erection of false theories. In this manner have learned and cultivated people proceeded; and among the herd of idle persons, there sprung up a pious trust in the great laws expounded by Malthus. How did this come to pass? It would seem as though they were scientific deductions, which had nothing in common with the instincts of the masses. But this can only appear so for the man who believes that science, like the Church, is something self-contained, liable to no errors, and not simply the imaginings of weak and erring folk, who merely substitute the imposing word “science,” in place of the thoughts and words of the people, for the sake of impressiveness.

All that was necessary was to make practical deductions from the theory of Malthus, in order to perceive that this theory was of the most human sort, with the best defined of objects. The deductions directly arising from this theory were the following: The wretched condition of the laboring classes was such in accordance with an unalterable law, which does not depend upon men; and, if any one is to blame in this matter, it is the hungry laboring classes themselves. Why are they such fools as to give birth to children, when they know that there will be nothing for the children to eat? And so this deduction, which is valuable for the herd of idle people, has had this result: that all learned men overlooked the incorrectness, the utter arbitrariness of these deductions, and their insusceptibility to proof; and the throng of cultivated, i.e., of idle people, knowing instinctively to what these deductions lead, saluted this theory with enthusiasm, conferred upon it the stamp of truth, i.e., of science, and dragged it about with them for half a century.

Is not this same thing the cause of the confidence of men in positive critical-experimental science, and of the devout attitude of the crowd towards that which it preaches? At first it seems strange, that the theory of evolution can in any manner justify people in their evil ways; and it seems as though the scientific theory of evolution has to deal only with facts, and that it does nothing else but observe facts.

But this only appears to be the case.

Exactly the same thing appeared to be the case with the Hegelian doctrine, in a greater degree, and also in the special instance of the Malthusian doctrine. Hegelianism was, apparently, occupied only with its logical constructions, and bore no relation to the life of mankind. Precisely this seemed to be the case with the Malthusian theory. It appeared to be busy itself only with statistical data. But this was only in appearance.

Contemporary science is also occupied with facts alone: it investigates facts. But what facts? Why precisely these facts, and no others?

The men of contemporary science are very fond of saying, triumphantly and confidently, “We investigate only facts,” imagining that these words contain some meaning. It is impossible to investigate facts alone, because the facts which are subject to our investigation are innumerable (in the definite sense of that word), — innumerable. Before we proceed to investigate facts, we must have a theory on the foundation of which these or those facts can be inquired into, i.e., selected from the incalculable quantity.

And this theory exists, and is even very definitely expressed, although many of the workers in contemporary science do not know it, or often pretend that they do not know it. Exactly thus has it always been with all prevailing and guiding doctrines. The foundations of every doctrine are always stated in a theory, and the so-called learned men merely invent further deductions from the foundations once stated. Thus contemporary science is selecting its facts on the foundation of a very definite theory, which it sometimes knows, sometimes refuses to know, and sometimes really does not know; but the theory exists.

The theory is as follows: All mankind is an undying organism; men are the particles of that organism, and each one of them has his own special task for the service of others. In the same manner, the cells united in an organism share among them the labor of fight for existence of the whole organism; they magnify the power of one capacity, and weaken another, and unite in one organ, in order the better to supply the requirements of the whole organism. And exactly in the same manner as with gregarious animals, — ants or bees, — the separate individuals divide the labor among them. The queen lays the egg, the drone fructifies it; the bee works his whole life long. And precisely this thing takes place in mankind and in human societies. And therefore, in order to find the law of life for man, it is necessary to study the laws of the life and the development of organisms.

In the life and development of organisms, we find the following laws: the law of differentiation and integration, the law that every phenomenon is accompanied not by direct consequences alone, another law regarding the instability of type, and so on. All this seems very innocent; but it is only necessary to draw the deductions from all these laws, in order to immediately perceive that these laws incline in the same direction as the law of Malthus. These laws all point to one thing; namely, to the recognition of that division of labor which exists in human communities, as organic, that is to say, as indispensable. And therefore, the unjust position in which we, the people who have freed ourselves from labor, find ourselves, must be regarded not from the point of view of common-sense and justice, but merely as an undoubted fact, confirming the universal law.

Moral philosophy also justified every sort of cruelty and harshness; but this resulted in a philosophical manner, and therefore wrongly. But with science, all this results scientifically, and therefore in a manner not to be doubted.

How can we fail to accept so very beautiful a theory? It is merely necessary to look upon human society as an object of contemplation; and I can console myself with the thought that my activity, whatever may be its nature, is a functional activity of the organism of humanity, and that therefore there cannot arise any question as to whether it is just that I, in employing the labor of others, am doing only that which is agreeable to me, as there can arise no question as to the division of labor between the brain cells and the muscular cells. How is it possible not to admit so very beautiful a theory, in order that one may be able, ever after, to pocket one’s conscience, and have a perfectly unbridled animal existence, feeling beneath one’s self that support of science which is not to be shaken nowadays!

And it is on this new doctrine that the justification for men’s idleness and cruelty is now founded.

Chapter 2

This doctrine had its rise not so very long — fifty years — ago. Its principal founder was the French savant Comte. There occurred to Comte, — a systematist, and a religious man to boot, — under the influence of the then novel physiological investigations of Biche, the old idea already set forth by Menenius Agrippa, — the idea that human society, all humanity even, might be regarded as one whole, as an organism; and men as living parts of the separate organs, having each his own definite appointment to serve the entire organism.

This idea so pleased Comte, that upon it he began to erect a philosophical theory; and this theory so carried him away, that he utterly forgot that the point of departure for his theory was nothing more than a very pretty comparison, which was suitable for a fable, but which could by no means serve as the foundation for science. He, as frequently happens, mistook his pet hypothesis for an axiom, and imagined that his whole theory was erected on the very firmest of foundations. According to his theory, it seemed that since humanity is an organism, the knowledge of what man is, and of what should be his relations to the world, was possible only through a knowledge of the features of this organism. For the knowledge of these qualities, man is enabled to take observations on other and lower organisms, and to draw conclusions from their life. Therefore, in the fist place, the true and only method, according to Comte, is the inductive, and all science is only such when it has experiment as its basis; in the second place, the goal and crown of sciences is formed by that new science dealing with the imaginary organism of humanity, or the super-organic being, — humanity, — and this newly devised science is sociology.

And from this view of science it appears, that all previous knowledge was deceitful, and that the whole story of humanity, in the sense of self-knowledge, has been divided into three, actually into two, periods: the theological and metaphysical period, extending from the beginning of the world to Comte, and the present period, — that of the only true science, positive science, — beginning with Comte.

All this was very well. There was but one error, and that was this, — that the whole edifice was erected on the sand, on the arbitrary and false assertion that humanity is an organism. This assertion was arbitrary, because we have just as much right to admit the existence of a human organism, not subject to observation, as we have to admit the existence of any other invisible, fantastic being. This assertion was erroneous, because for the understanding of humanity, i.e., of men, the definition of an organism was incorrectly constructed, while in humanity itself all actual signs of organism, — the centre of feeling or consciousness, are lacking.

But, in spite of the arbitrariness and incorrectness of the fundamental assumption of positive philosophy, it was accepted by the so-called cultivated world with the greatest sympathy. In this connection, one thing is worthy of note: that out of the works of Comte, consisting of two parts, of positive philosophy and of positive politics, only the first was adopted by the learned world, — that part which justifieth, on new promises, the existent evil of human societies; but the second part, treating of the moral obligations of altruism, arising from the recognition of mankind as an organism, was regarded as not only of no importance, but as trivial and unscientific. It was a repetition of the same thing that had happened in the case of Kant’s works. The “Critique of Pure Reason” was adopted by the scientific crowd; but the “Critique of Applied Reason,” that part which contains the gist of moral doctrine, was repudiated. In Kant’s doctrine, that was accepted as scientific which subserved the existent evil. But the positive philosophy, which was accepted by the crowd, was founded on an arbitrary and erroneous basis, was in itself too unfounded, and therefore unsteady, and could not support itself alone. And so, amid all the multitude of the idle plays of thought of the men professing the so-called science, there presents itself an assertion equally devoid of novelty, and equally arbitrary and erroneous, to the effect that living beings, i.e., organisms, have had their rise in each other, — not only one organism from another, but one from many; i.e., that in a very long interval of time (in a million of years, for instance), not only could a duck and a fish proceed from one ancestor, but that one animal might result from a whole hive of bees. And this arbitrary and erroneous assumption was accepted by the learned world with still greater and more universal sympathy. This assumption was arbitrary, because no one has ever seen how one organism is made from another, and therefore the hypothesis as to the origin of species will always remain an hypothesis, and not an experimental fact. And this hypothesis was also erroneous, because the decision of the question as to the origin of species — that they have originated, in consequence of the law of heredity and fitness, in the course of an interminably long time — is no solution at all, but merely a re-statement of the problem in a new form.

According to Moses’ solution of the question (in the dispute with whom the entire significance of this theory lies), it appears that the diversity of the species of living creatures proceeded according to the will of God, and according to His almighty power; but according to the theory of evolution, it appears that the difference between living creatures arose by chance, and on account of varying conditions of heredity and surroundings, through an endless period of time. The theory of evolution, to speak in simple language, merely asserts, that by chance, in an incalculably long period of time, out of any thing you like, any thing else that you like may develop.

This is no answer to the problem. And the same problem is differently expressed: instead of will, chance is offered, and the co-efficient of the eternal is transposed from the power to the time. But this fresh assertion strengthened Comte’s assertion. And, moreover, according to the ingenuous confession of the founder of Darwin’s theory himself, his idea was aroused in him by the law of Malthus; and he therefore propounded the theory of the struggle of living creatures and people for existence, as the fundamental law of every living thing. And lo! only this was needed by the throng of idle people for their justification.

Two insecure theories, incapable of sustaining themselves on their feet, upheld each other, and acquired the semblance of stability. Both theories bore with them that idea which is precious to the crowd, that in the existent evil of human societies, men are not to blame, and that the existing order of things is that which should prevail; and the new theory was adopted by the throng with entire faith and unheard-of enthusiasm. And behold, on the strength of these two arbitrary and erroneous hypotheses, accepted as dogmas of belief, the new scientific doctrine was ratified.

Spencer, for example, in one of his first works, expresses this doctrine thus: —

“Societies and organisms,” he says, “are alike in the following points: —

“1. In that, beginning as tiny aggregates, they imperceptibly grow in mass, so that some of them attain to the size of ten thousand times their original bulk.

“2. In that while they were, in the beginning, of such simple structure, that they can be regarded as destitute of all structure, they acquire during the period of their growth a constantly increasing complication of structure.

“3. In that although in their early, undeveloped period, there exists between them hardly any interdependence of parts, their parts gradually acquire an interdependence, which eventually becomes so strong, that the life and activity of each part becomes possible only on condition of the life and activity of the remaining parts.

“4. In that life and the development of society are independent, and more protracted than the life and development of any one of the units constituting it, which are born, grow, act, reproduce themselves, and die separately; while the political body formed from them, continues to live generation after generation, developing in mass in perfection and functional activity.”

The points of difference between organisms and society go farther; and it is proved that these differences are merely apparent, but that organisms and societies are absolutely similar.

For the uninitiated man the question immediately presents itself: “What are you talking about? Why is mankind an organism, or similar to an organism?”

You say that societies resemble organisms in these four features; but it is nothing of the sort. You only take a few features of the organism, and beneath them you range human communities. You bring forward four features of resemblance, then you take four features of dissimilarity, which are, however, only apparent (according to you); and you thence conclude that human societies can be regarded as organisms. But surely, this is an empty game of dialectics, and nothing more. On the same foundation, under the features of an organism, you may range whatever you please. I will take the fist thing that comes into my head. Let us suppose it to be a forest, — the manner in which it sows itself in the plain, and spreads abroad. 1. Beginning with a small aggregate, it increases imperceptibly in mass, and so forth. Exactly the same thing takes place in the fields, when they gradually seed themselves down, and bring forth a forest. 2. In the beginning the structure is simple: afterwards it increases in complication, and so forth. Exactly the same thing happens with the forest, — in the first place, there were only bitch-trees, then came brush-wood and hazel-bushes; at first all grow erect, then they interlace their branches. 3. The interdependence of the parts is so augmented, that the life of each part depends on the life and activity of the remaining parts. It is precisely so with the forest, — the hazel-bush warms the tree-boles (cut it down, and the other trees will freeze), the hazel-bush protects from the wind, the seed-bearing trees carry on reproduction, the tall and leafy trees afford shade, and the life of one tree depends on the life of another. 4. The separate parts may die, but the whole lives. Exactly the case with the forest. The forest does not mourn one tree.

Having proved that, in accordance with this theory, you may regard the forest as an organism, you fancy that you have proved to the disciples of the organic doctrine the error of their definition. Nothing of the sort. The definition which they give to the organism is so inaccurate and so elastic that under this definition they may include what they will. “Yes,” they say; “and the forest may also be regarded as an organism. The forest is mutual re-action of individuals, which do not annihilate each other, — an aggregate; its parts may also enter into a more intimate union, as the hive of bees constitutes itself an organism.” Then you will say, “If that is so, then the birds and the insects and the grass of this forest, which re-act upon each other, and do not destroy each other, may also be regarded as one organism, in company with the trees.” And to this also they will agree. Every collection of living individuals, which re-act upon each other, and do not destroy each other, may be regarded as organisms, according to their theory. You may affirm a connection and interaction between whatever you choose, and, according to evolution, you may affirm, that, out of whatever you please, any other thing that you please may proceed, in a very long period of time.

And the most remarkable thing of all is, that this same identical positive science recognizes the scientific method as the sign of true knowledge, and has itself defined what it designates as the scientific method.

By the scientific method it means common-sense.

And common-sense convicts it at every step. As soon as the Popes felt that nothing holy remained in them, they called themselves most holy.

As soon as science felt that no common-sense was left in her she called herself sensible, that is to say, scientific science.

Chapter 3

Division of labor is the law of all existing things, and, therefore, it should be present in human societies. It is very possible that this is so; but still the question remains, Of what nature is that division of labor which I behold in my human society? is it that division of labor which should exist? And if people regard a certain division of labor as unreasonable and unjust, then no science whatever can convince men that that should exist which they regard as unreasonable and unjust.

Division of labor is the condition of existence of organisms, and of human societies; but what, in these human societies, is to be regarded as an organic division of labor? And, to whatever extent science may have investigated the division of labor in the cells of worms, all these observations do not compel a man to acknowledge that division of labor to be correct which his own sense and conscience do not recognize as correct. No matter how convincing may be the proofs of the division of labor of the cells in the organisms studied, man, if he has not parted with his judgment, will say, nevertheless, that a man should not weave calico all his life, and that this is not division of labor, but persecution of the people. Spencer and others say that there is a whole community of weavers, and that the profession of weaving is an organic division of labor. There are weavers; so, of course, there is such a division of labor. It would be well enough to speak thus if the colony of weavers had arisen by the free will of its member’s; but we know that it is not thus formed of their initiative, but that we make it. Hence it is necessary to find out whether we have made these weavers in accordance with an organic law, or with some other.

Men live. They support themselves by agriculture, as is natural to all men. One man has set up a blacksmith’s forge, and repaired his plough; his neighbor comes to him, and asks him to mend his also, and promises him in return either work or money. A third comes, and a fourth; and in the community formed by these men, there arises the following division of labor, — a blacksmith is created. Another man has instructed his children well; his neighbor brings his children to him, and requests him to teach them also, and a teacher is created. But both blacksmith and teacher have been created, and continue to be such, merely because they have been asked; and they remain such as long as they are requested to be blacksmith and teacher. If it should come to pass that many blacksmiths and teachers should set themselves up, or that their work is not requited, they will immediately, as common-sense demands and as always happens when there is no occasion for disturbing the regular course of division of labor, — they will immediately abandon their trade, and betake themselves once more to agriculture.

Men who behave thus are guided by their sense, their conscience; and hence we, the men endowed with sense and conscience, all assert that such a division of labor is right. But if it should chance that the blacksmiths were able to compel other people to work for them, and should continue to make horse-shoes when they were not wanted, and if the teachers should go on teaching when there was no one to teach, then it is obvious to every sane man, as a man, i.e., as a being endowed with reason and conscience, that this would not be division, but appropriation, of labor. And yet precisely that sort of activity is what is called division of labor by scientific science. People do that which others do not think of requiring, and demand that they shall be supported for so doing, and say that this is just because it is division of labor.

That which constitutes the cause of the economical poverty of our age is what the English call over-production (which means that a mass of things are made which are of no use to anybody, and with which nothing can be done).

It would be odd to see a shoemaker, who should consider that people were bound to feed him because he incessantly made boots which had been of no use to any one for a long time; but what shall we say of those men who make nothing, — who not only produce nothing that is visible, but nothing that is of use for people at large, — for whose wares there are no customers, and who yet demand, with the same boldness, on the ground of division of labor, that they shall be supplied with fine food and drink, and that they shall be dressed well? There may be, and there are, sorcerers for whose services a demand makes itself felt, and for this purpose there are brought to them pancakes and flasks; but it is difficult to imagine the existence of sorcerers whose spells are useless to every one, and who boldly demand that they shall be luxuriously supported because they exercise sorcery. And it is the same in our world. And all this comes about on the basis of that false conception of the division of labor, which is defined not by reason and conscience, but by observation, which men of science avow with such unanimity.

Division of labor has, in reality, always existed, and still exists; but it is right only when man decides with his reason and his conscience that it should be so, and not when he merely investigates it. And reason and conscience decide the question for all men very simply, unanimously, and in a manner not to be doubted. They always decide it thus: that division of labor is right only when a special branch of man’s activity is so needful to men, that they, entreating him to serve them, voluntarily propose to support him in requital for that which he shall do for them. But, when a man can live from infancy to the age of thirty years on the necks of others, promising to do, when he shall have been taught, something extremely useful, for which no one asks him; and when, from the age of thirty until his death, he can live in the same manner, still merely on the promise to do something, for which there has been no request, this will not be division of labor (and, as a matter of fact, there is no such thing in our society), but it will be what it already is, — merely the appropriation, by force, of the toil of others; that same appropriation by force of the toil of others which the philosophers formerly designated by various names, — for instance, as indispensable forms of life, — but which scientific science now calls the organic division of labor.

The whole significance of scientific science lies in this alone. It has now become a distributer of diplomas for idleness; for it alone, in its sanctuaries, selects and determines what is parasitical, and what is organic activity, in the social organism. Just as though every man could not find this out for himself much more accurately and more speedily, by taking counsel of his reason and his conscience. It seems to men of scientific science, that there can be no doubt of this, and that their activity is also indubitably organic; they, the scientific and artistic workers, are the brain cells, and the most precious cells in the whole organism.

Ever since men — reasoning beings — have existed, they have distinguished good from evil, and have profited by the fact that men have made this distinction before them; they have warred against evil, and have sought the good, and have slowly but uninterruptedly advanced in that path. And divers delusions have always stood before men, hemming in this path, and having for their object to demonstrate to them, that it was not necessary to do this, and that it was not necessary to live as they were living. With fearful conflict and difficulty, men have freed themselves from many delusions. And behold, a new and a still more evil delusion has sprung up in the path of mankind, — the scientific delusion.

This new delusion is precisely the same in nature as the old ones; its gist lies in secretly leading astray the activity of our reason and conscience, and of those who have lived before us, by something external. In scientific science, this external thing is — investigation.

The cunning of this science consists in this, — that, after pointing out to men the coarsest false interpretations of the activity of the reason and conscience of man, it destroys in them faith in their own reason and conscience, and assures them that every thing which their reason and conscience say to them, that all that these have said to the loftiest representatives of man heretofore, ever since the world has existed, — that all this is conventional and subjective. “All this must be abandoned,” they say; “it is impossible to understand the truth by the reason, for we may be mistaken. But there exists another unerring and almost mechanical path: it is necessary to investigate facts.”

But facts must be investigated on the foundation of scientific science, i.e., of the two hypotheses of positivism and evolution, which are not borne out by any thing, and which give themselves out as undoubted truths. And the reigning science announces, with delusive solemnity, that the solution of all problems of life is possible only through the study of facts, of nature, and, in particular, of organisms. The credulous mass of young people, overwhelmed by the novelty of this authority, which has not yet been overthrown or even touched by criticism, flings itself into the study of natural sciences, into that sole path, which, according to the assertion of the reigning science, can lead to the elucidation of the problems of life.

But the farther the disciples proceed in this study, the farther and farther does not only the possibility, but even the very idea, of the solution of the problems of life withdraw from them, and the more and more do they become accustomed, not so much to investigate, as to believe in the assertions of other investigators (to believe in cells, in protoplasm, in the fourth condition of bodies, and so forth); the more and more does the form veil the contents from them; the more and more do they lose the consciousness of good and evil, and the capacity of understanding those expressions and definitions of good and evil which have been elaborated through the whole foregoing life of mankind; and the more and more do they appropriate to themselves the special scientific jargon of conventional expressions, which possesses no universally human significance; and the deeper and deeper do they plunge into the débris of utterly unilluminated investigations; the more and more do they lose the power, not only of independent thought, but even of understanding the fresh human thought of others, which lies beyond the bounds of their Talmud. But the principal thing is, that they pass their best years in getting disused to life; they grow accustomed to consider their position as justifiable; and they convert themselves physically into utterly useless parasites, and mentally they dislocate their brains and become mental eunuchs. And in precisely the same manner, according to the measure of their folly, do they acquire self-conceit, which deprives them forever of all possibility of return to a simple life of toil, to a simple, clear, and universally human train of reasoning.

Division of labor always has existed in human communities, and will probably always exist; but the question for us lies not in the fact that it has existed, and that it will exist, but in this, — how are we to govern ourselves so that this division shall be right? But if we take investigation as our rule of action, we by this very act repudiate all rule; then in that case we shall regard as right every division of labor which we shall descry among men, and which appears to us to be right — to which conclusion the prevailing scientific science also leads.

Division of labor!

Some are busied in mental or moral, others in muscular or physical, labor. With what confidence people enunciate this! They wish to think so, and it seems to them that, in point of fact, a perfectly regular exchange of services does take place.

But we, in our blindness, have so completely lost sight of the responsibility which we have assumed, that we have even forgotten in whose name our labor is prosecuted; and the very people whom we have undertaken to serve have become the objects of our scientific and artistic activity. We study and depict them for our amusement and diversion. We have totally forgotten that what we need to do is not to study and depict them, but to serve them. To such a degree have we lost sight of this duty which we have taken upon us, that we have not even noticed that what we have undertaken to perform in the realm of science and art has been accomplished not by us, but by others, and that our place has turned out to be occupied.

It proves that while we have been disputing, one about the spontaneous origin of organisms, another as to what else there is in protoplasm, and so on, the common people have been in need of spiritual food; and the unsuccessful and rejected of art and science, in obedience to the mandate of adventurers who have in view the sole aim of profit, have begun to furnish the people with this spiritual food, and still so furnish them. For the last forty years in Europe, and for the last ten years with us here in Russia, millions of books and pictures and song-books have been distributed, and stalls have been opened, and the people gaze and sing and receive spiritual nourishment, but not from us who have undertaken to provide it; while we, justifying our idleness by that spiritual food which we are supposed to furnish, sit by and wink at it.

But it is impossible for us to wink at it, for our last justification is slipping from beneath our feet. We have become specialized. We have our particular functional activity. We are the brains of the people. They support us, and we have undertaken to teach them. It is only under this pretence that we have excused ourselves from work. But what have we taught them, and what are we now teaching them? They have waited for years — for tens, for hundreds of years. And we keep on diverting our minds with chatter, and we instruct each other, and we console ourselves, and we have utterly forgotten them. We have so entirely forgotten them, that others have undertaken to instruct them, and we have not even perceived it. We have spoken of the division of labor with such lack of seriousness, that it is obvious that what we have said about the benefits which we have conferred on the people was simply a shameless evasion.

Chapter 4

Science and art have arrogated to themselves the right of idleness, and of the enjoyment of the labor of others, and have betrayed their calling. And their errors have arisen merely because their servants, having set forth a falsely conceived principle of the division of labor, have recognized their own right to make use of the labor of others, and have lost the significance of their vocation; having taken for their aim, not the profit of the people, but the mysterious profit of science and art, and delivered themselves over to idleness and vice — not so much of the senses as of the mind.

They say, “Science and art have bestowed a great deal on mankind.”

Science and art have bestowed a great deal on mankind, not because the men of art and science, under the pretext of a division of labor, live on other people, but in spite of this.

The Roman Republic was powerful, not because her citizens had the power to live a vicious life, but because among their number there were heroic citizens. It is the same with art and science. Art and science have bestowed much on mankind, but not because their followers formerly possessed on rare occasions (and now possess on every occasion) the possibility of getting rid of labor; but because there have been men of genius, who, without making use of these rights, have led mankind forward.

The class of learned men and artists, which has advanced, on the fictitious basis of a division of labor, its demands to the right of using the labors of others, cannot co-operate in the success of true science and true art, because a lie cannot bring forth the truth.

We have become so accustomed to these, our tenderly reared or weakened representatives of mental labor, that it seems to us horrible that a man of science or an artist should plough or cart manure. It seems to us that every thing would go to destruction, and that all his wisdom would be rattled out of him in the cart, and that all those grand picturesque images which he bears about in his breast would be soiled in the manure; but we have become so inured to this, that it does not strike us as strange that our servitor of science — that is to say, the servant and teacher of the truth — by making other people do for him that which he might do for himself, passes half his time in dainty eating, in smoking, in talking, in free and easy gossip, in reading the newspapers and romances, and in visiting the theatres. It is not strange to us to see our philosopher in the tavern, in the theatre, and at the ball. It is not strange in our eyes to learn that those artists who sweeten and ennoble our souls have passed their lives in drunkenness, cards, and women, if not in something worse.

Art and science are very beautiful things; but just because they are so beautiful they should not be spoiled by the compulsory combination with them of vice: that is to say, a man should not get rid of his obligation to serve his own life and that of other people by his own labor. Art and science have caused mankind to progress. Yes; but not because men of art and science, under the guise of division of labor, have rid themselves of the very first and most indisputable of human obligations, — to labor with their hands in the universal struggle of mankind with nature.

“But only the division of labor, the freedom of men of science and of art from the necessity of earning them living, has rendered possible that remarkable success of science which we behold in our day,” is the answer to this. “If all were forced to till the soil, those vast results would not have been attained which have been attained in our day; there would have been none of those striking successes which have so greatly augmented man’s power over nature, were it not for these astronomical discoveries which are so astounding to the mind of man, and which have added to the security of navigation; there would be no steamers, no railways, none of those wonderful bridges, tunnels, steam-engines and telegraphs, photography, telephones, sewing-machines, phonographs, electricity, telescopes, spectroscopes, microscopes, chloroform, Lister’s bandages, and carbolic acid.”

I will not enumerate every thing on which our age thus prides itself. This enumeration and pride of enthusiasm over ourselves and our exploits can be found in almost any newspaper and popular pamphlet. This enthusiasm over ourselves is often repeated to such a degree that none of us can sufficiently rejoice over ourselves, that we are seriously convinced that art and science have never made such progress as in our own time. And, as we are indebted for all this marvellous progress to the division of labor, why not acknowledge it?

Let us admit that the progress made in our day is noteworthy, marvellous, unusual; let us admit that we are fortunate mortals to live in such a remarkable epoch: but let us endeavor to appraise this progress, not on the basis of our self-satisfaction, but of that principle which defends itself with this progress, — the division of labor. All this progress is very amazing; but by a peculiarly unlucky chance, admitted even by the men of science, this progress has not so far improved, but it has rather rendered worse, the position of the majority, that is to say, of the workingman.

If the workingman can travel on the railway, instead of walking, still that same railway has burned down his forest, has carried off his grain under his very nose, and has brought his condition very near to slavery — to the capitalist. If, thanks to steam-engines and machines, the workingman can purchase inferior calico at a cheap rate, on the other hand these engines and machines have deprived him of work at home, and have brought him into a state of abject slavery to the manufacturer. If there are telephones and telescopes, poems, romances, theatres, ballets, symphonies, operas, picture-galleries, and so forth, on the other hand the life of the workingman has not been bettered by all this; for all of them, by the same unlucky chance, are inaccessible to him.

So that, on the whole (and even men of science admit this), up to the present time, all these remarkable discoveries and products of science and art have certainly not ameliorated the condition of the workingman, if, indeed, they have not made it worse. So that, if we set against the question as to the reality of the progress attained by the arts and sciences, not our own rapture, but that standard upon the basis of which the division of labor is defended, — the good of the laboring man, — we shall see that we have no firm foundations for that self-satisfaction in which we are so fond of indulging.

The peasant travels on the railway, the woman buys calico, in the isbá (cottage) there will be a lamp instead of a pine-knot, and the peasant will light his pipe with a match, — this is convenient; but what right have I to say that the railway and the factory have proved advantageous to the people?

If the peasant rides on the railway, and buys calico, a lamp, and matches, it is only because it is impossible to forbid the peasant’s buying them; but surely we are all aware that the construction of railways and factories has never been carried out for the benefit of the lower classes: so why should a casual convenience which the workingman enjoys lead to a proof of the utility of all these institutions for the people?

There is something useful in every injurious thing. After a conflagration, one can warm one’s self, and light one’s pipe with a firebrand; but why declare that the conflagration is beneficial?

Men of art and science might say that their pursuits are beneficial to the people, only when men of art and science have assigned to themselves the object of serving the people, as they now assign themselves the object of serving the authorities and the capitalists. We might say this if men of art and science had taken as their aim the needs of the people; but there are none such. All scientists are busy with their priestly avocations, out of which proceed investigations into protoplasm, the spectral analyses of stars, and so on. But science has never once thought of what axe or what hatchet is the most profitable to chop with, what saw is the most handy, what is the best way to mix bread, from what flour, how to set it, how to build and heat an oven, what food and drink, and what utensils, are the most convenient and advantageous under certain conditions, what mushrooms may be eaten, how to propagate them, and how to prepare them in the most suitable manner. And yet all this is the province of science.

I am aware, that, according to its own definition, science ought to be useless, i.e., science for the sake of science; but surely this is an obvious evasion. The province of science is to serve the people. We have invented telegraphs, telephones, phonographs; but what advances have we effected in the life, in the labor, of the people? We have reckoned up two millions of beetles! And we have not tamed a single animal since biblical times, when all our animals were already domesticated; but the reindeer, the stag, the partridge, the heath-cock, all remain wild.

Our botanists have discovered the cell, and in the cell protoplasm, and in that protoplasm still something more, and in that atom yet another thing. It is evident that these occupations will not end for a long time to come, because it is obvious that there can be no end to them, and therefore the scientist has no time to devote to those things which are necessary to the people. And therefore, again, from the time of Egyptian and Hebrew antiquity, when wheat and lentils had already been cultivated, down to our own times, not a single plant has been added to the food of the people, with the exception of the potato, and that was not obtained by science.

Torpedoes have been invented, and apparatus for taxation, and so forth. But the spinning-whined, the woman’s weaving-loom, the plough, the hatchet, the chain, the rake, the bucket, the well-sweep, are exactly the same as they were in the days of Rurik; and if there has been any change, then that change has not been effected by scientific people.

And it is the same with the arts. We have elevated a lot of people to the rank of great writers; we have picked these writers to pieces, and have written mountains of criticism, and criticism on the critics, and criticism on the critics of the critics. And we have collected picture-galleries, and have studied different schools of art in detail; and we have so many symphonies and orchestras and operas, that it is becoming difficult even for us to listen to them. But what have we added to the popular bylini [the epic songs], legends, tales, songs? What music, what pictures, have we given to the people?

On the Nikolskaya books are manufactured for the people, and harmonicas in Tula; and in neither have we taken any part. The falsity of the whole direction of our arts and sciences is more striking and more apparent in precisely those very branches, which, it would seem, should, from their very nature, be of use to the people, and which, in consequence of their false attitude, seem rather injurious than useful. The technologist, the physician, the teacher, the artist, the author, should, in virtue of their very callings, it would seem, serve the people. And, what then? Under the present règime, they can do nothing but harm to the people.

The technologist or the mechanic has to work with capital. Without capital he is good for nothing. All his acquirements are such that for their display he requires capital, and the exploitation of the laboring-man on the largest scale; and — not to mention that he is trained to live, at the lowest, on from fifteen hundred to two thousand a year, and that, therefore, he cannot go to the country, where no one can give him such wages, — he is, by virtue of his very occupation, unfitted for serving the people. He knows how to calculate the highest mathematical arch of a bridge, how to calculate the force and transfer of the motive power, and so on; but he is confounded by the simplest questions of a peasant: how to improve a plough or a cart, or how to make irrigating canals. All this in the conditions of life in which the laboring man finds himself. Of this, he neither knows nor understands any thing, — less, indeed, than the very stupidest peasant. Give him workshops, all sorts of workmen at his desire, an order for a machine from abroad, and he will get along. But how to devise means of lightening toil, under the conditions of labor of millions of men, — this is what he does not and can not know; and because of his knowledge, his habits, and his demands on life, he is unfitted for this business.

In a still worse predicament is the physician. His fancied science is all so arranged, that he only knows how to heal those persons who do nothing. He requires an incalculable quantity of expensive preparations, instruments, drugs, and hygienic apparatus.

He has studied with celebrities in the capitals, who only retain patients who can be cured in the hospital, or who, in the course of their cure, can purchase the appliances requisite for healing, and even go at once from the North to the South, to some baths or other. Science is of such a nature, that every rural physic-man laments because there are no means of curing working-men, because he is so poor that he has not the means to place the sick man in the proper hygienic conditions; and at the same time this physician complains that there are no hospitals, and that he cannot get through with his work, that he needs assistants, more doctors and practitioners.

What is the inference? This: that the people’s principal lack, from which diseases arise, and spread abroad, and refuse to be healed, is the lack of means of subsistence. And here Science, under the banner of the division of labor, summons her warriors to the aid of the people. Science is entirely arranged for the wealthy classes, and it has adopted for its task the healing of the people who can obtain every thing for themselves; and it attempts to heal those who possess no superfluity, by the same means.

But there are no means, and therefore it is necessary to take them from the people who are ailing, and pest-stricken, and who cannot recover for lack of means. And now the defenders of medicine for the people say that this matter has been, as yet, but little developed. Evidently it has been but little developed, because if (which God forbid!) it had been developed, and that through oppressing the people, — instead of two doctors, midwives, and practitioners in a district, twenty would have settled down, since they desire this, and half the people would have died through the difficulty of supporting this medical staff, and soon there would be no one to heal.

Scientific co-operation with the people, of which the defenders of science talk, must be something quite different. And this co-operation which should exist has not yet begun. It will begin when the man of science, technologist or physician, will not consider it legal to take from people — I will not say a hundred thousand, but even a modest ten thousand, or five hundred rubles for assisting them; but when he will live among the toiling people, under the same conditions, and exactly as they do, then he will be able to apply his knowledge to the questions of mechanics, technics, hygiene, and the healing of the laboring people. But now science, supporting itself at the expense of the working-people, has entirely forgotten the conditions of life among these people, ignores (as it puts it) these conditions, and takes very grave offence because its fancied knowledge finds no adherents among the people.

The domain of medicine, like the domain of technical science, still lies untouched. All questions as to how the time of labor is best divided, what is the best method of nourishment, with what, in what shape, and when it is best to clothe one’s self, to shoe one’s self, to counteract dampness and cold, how best to wash one’s self, to feed the children, to swaddle them, and so on, in just those conditions in which the working-people find themselves, — all these questions have not yet been propounded.

The same is the case with the activity of the teachers of science, — pedagogical teachers. Exactly in the same manner science has so arranged this matter, that only wealthy people are able to study science, and teachers, like technologists and physicians, cling to money.

And this cannot be otherwise, because a school built on a model plan (as a general rule, the more scientifically built the school, the more costly it is), with pivot chains, and globes, and maps, and library, and petty text-books for teachers and scholars and pedagogues, is a sort of thing for which it would be necessary to double the taxes in every village. This science demands. The people need money for their work; and the more there is needed, the poorer they are.

Defenders of science say: “Pedagogy is even now proving of advantage to the people, but give it a chance to develop, and then it will do still better.” Yes, if it does develop, and instead of twenty schools in a district there are a hundred, and all scientific, and if the people support these schools, they will grow poorer than ever, and they will more than ever need work for their children’s sake. “What is to be done?” they say to this. The government will build the schools, and will make education obligatory, as it is in Europe; but again, surely, the money is taken from the people just the same, and it will be harder to work, and they will have less leisure for work, and there will be no education even by compulsion. Again the sole salvation is this: that the teacher should live under the conditions of the working-men, and should teach for that compensation which they give him freely and voluntarily.

Such is the false course of science, which deprives it of the power of fulfilling its obligation, which is, to serve the people.

But in nothing is this false course of science so obviously apparent, as in the vocation of art, which, from its very significance, ought to be accessible to the people. Science may fall back on its stupid excuse, that science acts for science, and that when it turns out learned men it is laboring for the people; but art, if it is art, should be accessible to all the people, and in particular to those in whose name it is executed. And our definition of art, in a striking manner, convicts those who busy themselves with art, of their lack of desire, lack of knowledge, and lack of power, to be useful to the people.

The painter, for the production of his great works, must have a studio of at least such dimensions that a whole association of carpenters (forty in number) or shoemakers, now sickening or stifling in lairs, would be able to work in it. But this is not all; he must have a model, costumes, travels. Millions are expended on the encouragement of art, and the products of this art are both incomprehensible and useless to the people. Musicians, in order to express their grand ideas, must assemble two hundred men in white neckties, or in costumes, and spend hundreds of thousands of rubles for the equipment of an opera. And the products of this art cannot evoke from the people — even if the latter could at any time enjoy it — any thing except amazement and ennui.

Writers — authors — it appears, do not require surroundings, studios, models, orchestras, and actors; but it then appears that the author needs (not to mention comfort in his quarters) all the dainties of life for the preparation of his great works, travels, palaces, cabinets, libraries, the pleasures of art, visits to theatres, concerts, the baths, and so on. If he does not earn a fortune for himself, he is granted a pension, in order that he may compose the better. And again, these compositions, so prized by us, remain useless lumber for the people, and utterly unserviceable to them.

And if still more of these dealers in spiritual nourishment are developed further, as men of science desire, and a studio is erected in every village; if an orchestra is set up, and authors are supported in those conditions which artistic people regard as indispensable for themselves, — I imagine that the working-classes will sooner take an oath never to look at any pictures, never to listen to a symphony, never to read poetry or novels, than to feed all these persons.

And why, apparently, should art not be of service to the people? In every cottage there are images and pictures; every peasant man and woman sings; many own harmonicas; and all recite stories and verses, and many read. It is as if those two things which are made for each other — the lock and the key — had parted company; they have sprung so far apart, that not even the possibility of uniting them presents itself. Tell the artist that he should paint without a studio, model, or costumes, and that he should paint five-kopek pictures, and he will say that that is tantamount to abandoning his art, as he understands it. Tell the musician that he should play on the harmonica, and teach the women to sing songs; say to the poet, to the author, that he ought to cast aside his poems and romances, and compose song-books, tales, and stories, comprehensible to the uneducated people, — they will say that you are mad.

The service of the people by science and art will only be performed when people, dwelling in the midst of the common folk, and, like the common folk, putting forward no demands, claiming no rights, shall offer to the common folk their scientific and artistic services; the acceptance or rejection of which shall depend wholly on the will of the common folk.

It is said that the activity of science and art has aided in the forward march of mankind, — meaning by this activity, that which is now called by that name; which is the same as saying that an unskilled banging of oars on a vessel that is floating with the tide, which merely hinders the progress of the vessel, is assisting the movement of the ship. It only retards it. The so-called division of labor, which has become in our day the condition of activity of men of science and art, was, and has remained, the chief cause of the tardy forward movement of mankind.

The proofs of this lie in that confession of all men of science, that the gains of science and art are inaccessible to the laboring masses, in consequence of the faulty distribution of riches. The irregularity of this distribution does not decrease in proportion to the progress of science and art, but only increases. Men of art and science assume an air of deep pity for this unfortunate circumstance which does not depend upon them. But this unfortunate circumstance is produced by themselves; for this irregular distribution of wealth flows solely from the theory of the division of labor.

Science maintains the division of labor as a unalterable law; it sees that the distribution of wealth, founded on the division of labor, is wrong and ruinous; and it affirms that its activity, which recognizes the division of labor, will lead people to bliss. The result is, that some people make use of the labor of others; but that, if they shall make use of the labor of others for a very long period of time, and in still larger measure, then this wrongful distribution of wealth, i.e., the use of the labor of others, will come to an end.

Men stand beside a constantly swelling spring of water, and are occupied with the problem of diverting it to one side, away from the thirsty people, and they assert that they are producing this water, and that soon enough will be collected for all. But this water which has flowed, and which still flows unceasingly, and nourishes all mankind, not only is not the result of the activity of the men who, standing at its source, turn it aside, but this water flows and gushes out, in spite of the efforts of these men to obstruct its flow.

There have always existed a true science, and a true art; but true science and art are not such because they called themselves by that name. It always seems to those who claim at any given period to be the representatives of science and art, that they have performed, and are performing, and — most of all — that they will presently perform, the most amazing marvels, and that beside them there never has been and there is not any science or any art. Thus it seemed to the sophists, the scholastics, the alchemists, the cabalists, the talmudists; and thus it seems to our own scientific science, and to our art for the sake of art.

Chapter 5

“But art, — science! You repudiate art and science; that is, you repudiate that by which mankind lives!” People are constantly making this — it is not a reply — to me, and they employ this mode of reception in order to reject my deductions without examining into them. “He repudiates science and art, he wants to send people back again into a savage state; so what is the use of listening to him and of talking to him?” But this is unjust. I not only do not repudiate art and science, but, in the name of that which is true art and true science, I say that which I do say; merely in order that mankind may emerge from that savage state into which it will speedily fall, thanks to the erroneous teaching of our time, — only for this purpose do I say that which I say.

Art and science are as indispensable as food and drink and clothing, — more indispensable even; but they become so, not because we decide that what we designate as art and science are indispensable, but simply because they really are indispensable to people.

Surely, if hay is prepared for the bodily nourishment of men, the fact that we are convinced that hay is the proper food for man will not make hay the food of man. Surely I cannot say, “Why do not you eat hay, when it is the indispensable food?” Food is indispensable, but it may happen that that which I offer is not food at all. This same thing has occurred with our art and science. It seems to us, that if we add to a Greek word the word “logy,” and call that a science, it will be a science; and, if we call any abominable thing — like the dancing of nude females — by a Greek word, choreography, that that is art, and that it will be art. But no matter how much we may say this, the business with which we occupy ourselves when we count beetles, and investigate the chemical constituents of the stars in the Milky Way, when we paint nymphs and compose novels and symphonies, — our business will not become either art or science until such time as it is accepted by those people for whom it is wrought.

If it were decided that only certain people should produce food, and if all the rest were forbidden to do this, or if they were rendered incapable of producing food, I suppose that the quality of food would be lowered. If the people who enjoyed the monopoly of producing food were Russian peasants, there would be no other food than black bread and cabbage-soup, and so on, and kvas, — nothing except what they like, and what is agreeable to them. The same thing would happen in the case of that loftiest human pursuit, of arts and sciences, if one caste were to arrogate to itself a monopoly of them: but with this sole difference, that, in the matter of bodily food, there can be no great departure from nature, and bread and cabbage-soup, although not very savory viands, are fit for consumption; but in spiritual food, there may exist the very greatest departures from nature, and some people may feed themselves for a long time on poisonous spiritual nourishment, which is directly unsuitable for, or injurious to, them; they may slowly kill themselves with spiritual opium or liquors, and they may offer this same food to the masses.

It is this very thing that is going on among us. And it has come about because the position of men of science and art is a privileged one, because art and science (in our day), in our world, are not at all a rational occupation of all mankind without exception, exerting their best powers for the service of art and science, but an occupation of a restricted circle of people holding a monopoly of these industries, and entitling themselves men of art and science, and who have, therefore, perverted the very idea of art and science, and have lost all the meaning of their vocation, and who are only concerned in amusing and rescuing from crushing ennui their tiny circle of idle mouths.

Ever since men have existed, they have always had science and art in the simplest and broadest sense of the term. Science, in the sense of the whole of knowledge acquired by mankind, exists and always has existed, and life without it is not conceivable; and there is no possibility of either attacking or defending science, taken in this sense.

But the point lies here, — that the scope of the knowledge of all mankind as a whole is so multifarious, ranging from the knowledge of how to extract iron to the knowledge of the movements of the planets, that man loses himself in this multitude of existing knowledge, — knowledge capable of endless possibilities, if he have no guiding thread, by the aid of which he can classify this knowledge, and arrange the branches according to the degrees of their significance and importance.

Before a man undertakes to learn any thing whatever, he must make up his mind that that branch of knowledge is of weight to him, and of more weight and importance than the countless other objects of study with which he is surrounded. Before undertaking the study of any thing, a man decides for what purpose he is studying this subject, and not the others. But to study every thing, as the men of scientific science in our day preach, without any idea of what is to come out of such study, is downright impossible, because the number of subjects of study is endless; and hence, no matter how many branches we may acquire, their acquisition can possess no significance or reason. And, therefore, in ancient times, down to even a very recent date, until the appearance of scientific science, man’s highest wisdom consisted in finding that guiding thread, according to which the knowledge of men should be classified as being of primary or of secondary importance. And this knowledge, which forms the guide to all other branches of knowledge, men have always called science in the strictest acceptation of the word. And such science there has always been, even down to our own day, in all human communities which have emerged from their primal state of savagery.

Ever since mankind has existed, teachers have always arisen among peoples, who have enunciated science in this restricted sense, — the science of what it is most useful for man to know. This science has always had for its object the knowledge of what is the true ground of the well-being of each individual man, and of all men, and why. Such was the science of Confucius, of Buddha, of Socrates, of Mahomet, and of others; such is this science as they understood it, and as all men — with the exception of our little circle of so-called cultured people — understand it. This science has not only always occupied the highest place, but has been the only and sole science, from which the standing of the rest has been determined. And this was the case, not in the least because, as the so-called scientific people of our day think, cunning priestly teachers of this science attributed to it such significance, but because in reality, as every one knows, both by personal experience and by reflection, there can be no science except the science of that in which the destiny and welfare of man consist. For the objects of science are incalculable in number, — I undermine the word “incalculable” in the exact sense in which I understand it, — and without the knowledge of that in which the destiny and welfare of all men consist, there is no possibility of making a choice amid this interminable multitude of subjects; and therefore, without this knowledge, all other arts and branches of learning will become, as they have become among us, an idle and hurtful diversion.

Mankind has existed and existed, and never has it existed without the science of that in which the destiny and the welfare of men consist. It is true that the science of the welfare of men appears different on superficial observation, among the Buddhists, the Brahmins, the Hebrews, the Confucians, the Tauists; but nevertheless, wherever we hear of men who have emerged from a state of savagery, we find this science. And all of a sudden it appears that the men of our day have decided that this same science, which has hitherto served as the guiding thread of all human knowledge, is the very thing which hinders every thing. Men erect buildings; and one architect has made one estimate of cost, a second has made another, and a third yet another. The estimates differ somewhat; but they are correct, so that any one can see, that, if the whole is carried out in accordance with the calculations, the building will be erected. Along come people, and assert that the chief point lies in having no estimates, and that it should be built thus — by the eye. And this “thus,” men call the most accurate of scientific science. Men repudiate every science, the very substance of science, — the definition of the destiny and the welfare of men, — and this repudiation they designate as science.

Ever since men have existed, great minds have been born into their midst, which, in the conflict with reason and conscience, have put to themselves questions as to “what constitutes welfare, — the destiny and welfare, not of myself alone, but of every man?” What does that power which has created and which leads me, demand of me and of every man? And what is it necessary for me to do, in order to comply with the requirements imposed upon me by the demands of individual and universal welfare? They have asked themselves: “I am a whole, and also a part of something infinite, eternal; what, then, are my relations to other parts similar to myself, to men and to the whole — to the world?”

And from the voices of conscience and of reason, and from a comparison of what their contemporaries and men who had lived before them, and who had propounded to themselves the same questions, had said, these great teachers have deduced their doctrines, which were simple, clear, intelligible to all men, and always such as were susceptible of fulfilment. Such men have existed of the first, second, third, and lowest ranks. The world is full of such men. Every living man propounds the question to himself, how to reconcile the demands of welfare, and of his personal existence, with conscience and reason; and from this universal labor, slowly but uninterruptedly, new forms of life, which are more in accord with the requirements of reason and of conscience, are worked out.

All at once, a new caste of people makes its appearance, and they say, “All this is nonsense; all this must be abandoned.” This is the deductive method of ratiocination (wherein lies the difference between the deductive and the inductive method, no one can understand); these are the dogmas of the technological and metaphysical period. Every thing that these men discover by inward experience, and which they communicate to one another, concerning their knowledge of the law of their existence (of their functional activity, according to their own jargon), every thing that the grandest minds of mankind have accomplished in this direction, since the beginning of the world, — all this is nonsense, and has no weight whatever. According to this new doctrine, it appears that you are cells: and that you, as a cell, have a very definite functional activity, which you not only fulfil, but which you infallibly feel within you; and that you are a thinking, talking, understanding cell, and that you, for this reason, can ask another similar talking cell whether it is just the same, and in this way verify your own experience; that you can take advantage of the fact that speaking cells, which have lived before you, have written on the same subject, and that you have millions of cells which confirm your observations by their agreement with the cells which have written down their thoughts, — all this signifies nothing; all this is an evil and an erroneous method.

The true scientific method is this: If you wish to know in what the destiny and the welfare of all mankind and of all the world consists, you must, first of all, cease to listen to the voices of your conscience and of your reason, which present themselves in you and in others like you; you must cease to believe all that the great teachers of mankind have said with regard to your conscience and reason, and you must consider all this as nonsense, and begin all over again. And, in order to understand every thing from the beginning, you must look through microscopes at the movements of amœbæ, and cells in worms, or, with still greater composure, believe in every thing that men with a diploma of infallibility shall say to you about them. And as you gaze at the movements of these cells, or read about what others have seen, you must attribute to these cells your own human sensations and calculations as to what they desire, whither they are directing themselves, how they compare and discuss, and to what they have become accustomed; and from these observations (in which there is not a word about an error of thought or of expression) you must deduce a conclusion by analogy as to what you are, what is your destiny, wherein lies the welfare of yourself and of other cells like you. In order to understand yourself, you must study not only the worms which you see, but microscopic creatures which you can barely see, and transformations from one set of creatures into others, which no one has ever beheld, and which you, most assuredly, will never behold. And the same with art. Where there has been true science, art has always been its exponent.

Ever since men have been in existence, they have been in the habit of deducing, from all pursuits, the expressions of various branches of learning concerning the destiny and the welfare of man, and the expression of this knowledge has been art in the strict sense of the word.

Ever since men have existed, there have been those who were peculiarly sensitive and responsive to the doctrine regarding the destiny and welfare of man; who have given expression to their own and the popular conflict, to the delusions which lead them astray from their destinies, their sufferings in this conflict, their hopes in the triumph of good, them despair over the triumph of evil, and their raptures in the consciousness of the approaching bliss of man, on viol and tabret, in images and words. Always, down to the most recent times, art has served science and life, — only then was it what has been so highly esteemed of men. But art, in its capacity of an important human activity, disappeared simultaneously with the substitution for the genuine science of destiny and welfare, of the science of any thing you choose to fancy. Art has existed among all peoples, and will exist until that which among us is scornfully called religion has come to be considered the only science.

In our European world, so long as there existed a Church, as the doctrine of destiny and welfare, and so long as the Church was regarded as the only true science, art served the Church, and remained true art: but as soon as art abandoned the Church, and began to serve science, while science served whatever came to hand, art lost its significance. And notwithstanding the rights claimed on the score of ancient memories, and of the clumsy assertion which only proves its loss of its calling, that art serves art, it has become a trade, providing men with something agreeable; and as such, it inevitably comes into the category of choreographic, culinary, hair-dressing, and cosmetic arts, whose practitioners designate themselves as artists, with the same right as the poets, printers, and musicians of our day.

Glance backward into the past, and you will see that in the course of thousands of years, out of milliards of people, only half a score of Confucius’, Buddhas, Solomons, Socrates, Solons, and Homers have been produced. Evidently, they are rarely met with among men, in spite of the fact that these men have not been selected from a single caste, but from mankind at large. Evidently, these true teachers and artists and learned men, the purveyors of spiritual nourishment, are rare. And it is not without reason that mankind has valued and still values them so highly.

But it now appears, that all these great factors in the science and art of the past are no longer of use to us. Nowadays, scientific and artistic authorities can, in accordance with the law of division of labor, be turned out by factory methods; and, in one decade, more great men have been manufactured in art and science, than have ever been born of such among all nations, since the foundation of the world. Nowadays there is a guild of learned men and artists, and they prepare, by perfected methods, all that spiritual food which man requires. And they have prepared so much of it, that it is no longer necessary to refer to the elder authorities, who have preceded them, — not only to the ancients, but to those much nearer to us. All that was the activity of the theological and metaphysical period, — all that must be wiped out: but the true, the rational activity began, say, fifty years ago, and in the course of those fifty years we have made so many great men, that there are about ten great men to every branch of science. And there have come to be so many sciences, that, fortunately, it is easy to make them. All that is required is to add the Greek word “logy” to the name, and force them to conform to a set rubric, and the science is all complete. They have created so many sciences, that not only can no one man know them all, but not a single individual can remember all the titles of all the existing sciences; the titles alone form a thick lexicon, and new sciences are manufactured every day. They have been manufactured on the pattern of that Finnish teacher who taught the landed proprietor’s children Finnish instead of French. Every thing has been excellently inculcated; but there is one objection, — that no one except ourselves can understand any thing of it, and all this is reckoned as utterly useless nonsense. However, there is an explanation even for this. People do not appreciate the full value of scientific science, because they are under the influence of the theological period, that profound period when all the people, both among the Hebrews, and the Chinese, and the Indians, and the Greeks, understood every thing that their great teachers said to them.

But, from whatever cause this has come about, the fact remains, that sciences and arts have always existed among mankind, and, when they really did exist, they were useful and intelligible to all the people. But we practise something which we call science and art, but it appears that what we do is unnecessary and unintelligible to man. And hence, however beautiful may be the things that we accomplish, we have no right to call them arts and sciences.

Chapter 6

“But you only furnish a different definition of arts and sciences, which is stricter, and is incompatible with science,” I shall be told in answer to this; “nevertheless, scientific and artistic activity does still exist. There are the Galileos, Brunos, Homers, Michael Angelos, Beethovens, and all the lesser learned men and artists, who have consecrated their entire lives to the service of science and art, and who were, and will remain, the benefactors of mankind.”

Generally this is what people say, striving to forget that new principle of the division of labor, on the basis of which science and art now occupy their privileged position, and on whose basis we are now enabled to decide without grounds, but by a given standard: Is there, or is there not, any foundation for that activity which calls itself science and art, to so magnify itself?

When the Egyptian or the Grecian priests produced their mysteries, which were unintelligible to any one, and stated concerning these mysteries that all science and all art were contained in them, I could not verify the reality of their science on the basis of the benefit procured by them to the people, because science, according to their assertions, was supernatural. But now we all possess a very simple and clear definition of the activity of art and science, which excludes every thing supernatural: science and art promise to carry out the mental activity of mankind, for the welfare of society, or of all the human race.

The definition of scientific science and art is entirely correct; but, unfortunately, the activity of the present arts and sciences does not come under this head. Some of them are directly injurious, others are useless, others still are worthless, — good only for the wealthy. They do not fulfil that which, by their own definition, they have undertaken to accomplish; and hence they have as little right to regard themselves as men of art and science, as a corrupt priesthood, which does not fulfil the obligations which it has assumed, has the right to regard itself as the bearer of divine truth.

And it can be understood why the makers of the present arts and sciences have not fulfilled, and cannot fulfil, their vocation. They do not fulfil it, because out of their obligations they have erected a right.

Scientific and artistic activity, in its real sense, is only fruitful when it knows no rights, but recognizes only obligations. Only because it is its property to be always thus, does mankind so highly prize this activity. If men really were called to the service of others through artistic work, they would see in that work only obligation, and they would fulfil it with toil, with privations, and with self-abnegation.

The thinker or the artist will never sit calmly on Olympian heights, as we have become accustomed to represent them to ourselves. The thinker or the artist should suffer in company with the people, in order that he may find salvation or consolation. Besides this, he will suffer because he is always and eternally in turmoil and agitation: he might decide and say that that which would confer welfare on men, would free them from suffering, would afford them consolation; but he has not said so, and has not presented it as he should have done; he has not decided, and he has not spoken; and to-morrow, possibly, it will be too late, — he will die. And therefore suffering and self-sacrifice will always be the lot of the thinker and the artist.

Not of this description will be the thinker and artist who is reared in an establishment where, apparently, they manufacture the learned man or the artist (but in point of fact, they manufacture destroyers of science and of art), who receives a diploma and a certificate, who would be glad not to think and not to express that which is imposed on his soul, but who cannot avoid doing that to which two irresistible forces draw him, — an inward prompting, and the demand of men.

There will be no sleek, plump, self-satisfied thinkers and artists. Spiritual activity, and its expression, which are actually necessary to others, are the most burdensome of all man’s avocations; a cross, as the Gospels phrase it. And the sole indubitable sign of the presence of a vocation is self-devotion, the sacrifice of self for the manifestation of the power that is imposed upon man for the benefit of others.

It is possible to study out how many beetles there are in the world, to view the spots on the sun, to write romances and operas, without suffering; but it is impossible, without self-sacrifice, to instruct people in their true happiness, which consists solely in renunciation of self and the service of others, and to give strong expression to this doctrine, without self-sacrifice.

Christ did not die on the cross in vain; not in vain does the sacrifice of suffering conquer all things.

But our art and science are provided with certificates and diplomas; and the only anxiety of all men is, how to still better guarantee them, i.e., how to render the service of the people impracticable for them.

True art and true science possess two unmistakable marks: the first, an inward mark, which is this, that the servitor of art and science will fulfil his vocation, not for profit but with self-sacrifice; and the second, an external sign, — his productions will be intelligible to all the people whose welfare he has in view.

No matter what people have fixed upon as their vocation and their welfare, science will be the doctrine of this vocation and welfare, and art will be the expression of that doctrine. That which is called science and art, among us, is the product of idle minds and feelings, which have for their object to tickle similar idle minds and feelings. Our arts and sciences are incomprehensible, and say nothing to the people, for they have not the welfare of the common people in view.

Ever since the life of men has been known to us, we find, always and everywhere, the reigning doctrine falsely designating itself as science, not manifesting itself to the common people, but obscuring for them the meaning of life. Thus it was among the Greeks the sophists, then among the Christians the mystics, gnostics, scholastics, among the Hebrews the Talmudists and Cabalists, and so on everywhere, down to our own times.

How fortunate it is for us that we live in so peculiar an age, when that mental activity which calls itself science, not only does not err, but finds itself, as we are assured, in a remarkably flourishing condition! Does not this peculiar good fortune arise from the fact that man can not and will not see his own hideousness? Why is there nothing left of those sciences, and sophists, and Cabalists, and Talmudists, but words, while we are so exceptionally happy? Surely the signs are identical. There is the same self-satisfaction and blind confidence that we, precisely we, and only we, are on the right path, and that the real thing is only beginning with us. There is the same expectation that we shall discover something remarkable; and that chief sign which leads us astray convicts us of our error: all our wisdom remains with us, and the common people do not understand, and do not accept, and do not need it.

Our position is a very difficult one, but why not look at it squarely?

It is time to recover our senses, and to scrutinize ourselves. Surely we are nothing else than the scribes and Pharisees, who sit in Moses’ seat, and who have taken the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and will neither go in ourselves, nor permit others to go in. Surely we, the high priests of science and art, are ourselves worthless deceivers, possessing much less right to our position than the most crafty and depraved priests. Surely we have no justification for our privileged position. The priests had a right to their position: they declared that they taught the people life and salvation. But we have taken their place, and we do not instruct the people in life, — we even admit that such instruction is unnecessary, — but we educate our children in the same Talmudic-Greek and Latin grammar, in order that they may be able to pursue the same life of parasites which we lead ourselves. We say, “There used to be castes, but there are none among us.” But what does it mean, that some people and their children toil, while other people and their children do not toil?

Bring hither an Indian ignorant of our language, and show him European life, and our life, for several generations, and he will recognize the same leading, well-defined castes — of laborers and non-laborers — as there are in his own country. And as in his land, so in ours, the right of refusing to labor is conferred by a peculiar consecration, which we call science and art, or, in general terms, culture. It is this culture, and all the distortions of sense connected with it, which have brought us to that marvellous madness, in consequence of which we do not see that which is so clear and indubitable.

Chapter 7

Then, what is to be done? What are we to do?

This question, which includes within itself both an admission that our life is evil and wrong, and in connection with this, — as though it were an exercise for it, — that it is impossible, nevertheless, to change it, this question I have heard, and I continue to hear, on all sides. I have described my own sufferings, my own gropings, and my own solution of this question. I am the same kind of a man as everybody else; and if I am in any wise distinguished from the average man of our circle, it is chiefly in this respect, that I, more than the average man, have served and winked at the false doctrine of our world; I have received more approbation from men professing the prevailing doctrine: and therefore, more than others, have I become depraved, and wandered from the path. And therefore I think that the solution of the problem, which I have found in my own case, will be applicable to all sincere people who are propounding the same question to themselves.

First of all, in answer to the question, “What is to be done?” I told myself: “I must lie neither to other people nor to myself. I must not fear the truth, whithersoever it may lead me.”

We all know what it means to lie to other people, but we are not afraid to lie to ourselves; yet the very worst downright lie, to other people, is not to be compared in its consequences with the lie to ourselves, upon which we base our whole life.

This is the lie of which we must not be guilty if we are to be in a position to answer the question: “What is to be done?” And, in fact, how am I to answer the question, “What is to be done?” when every thing that I do, when my whole life, is founded on a lie, and when I carefully parade this lie as the truth before others and before myself? Not to lie, in this sense, means not to fear the truth, not to devise subterfuges, and not to accept the subterfuges devised by others for the purpose of hiding from myself the deductions of my reason and my conscience; not to fear to part company with all those who surround me, and to remain alone in company with reason and conscience; not to fear that position to which the truth shall lead me, being firmly convinced that that position to which truth and conscience shall conduct me, however singular it may be, cannot be worse than the one which is founded on a lie. Not to lie, in our position of privileged persons of mental labor, means, not to be afraid to reckon one’s self up wrongly. It is possible that you are already so deeply indebted that you cannot take stock of yourself; but to whatever extent this may be the case, however long may be the account, however far you have strayed from the path, it is still better than to continue therein. A lie to other people is not alone unprofitable; every matter is settled more directly and more speedily by the truth than by a lie. A lie to others only entangles matters, and delays the settlement; but a lie to one’s self, set forth as the truth, ruins a man’s whole life. If a man, having entered on the wrong path, assumes that it is the true one, then every step that he takes on that path removes him farther from his goal. If a man who has long been travelling on this false path divines for himself, or is informed by some one, that his course is a mistaken one, but grows alarmed at the idea that he has wandered very far astray and tries to convince himself that he may, possibly, still strike into the right road, then he never will get into it. If a man quails before the truth, and, on perceiving it, does not accept it, but does accept a lie for the truth, then he never will learn what he ought to do. We, the not only wealthy, but privileged and so-called cultivated persons, have advanced so far on the wrong road, that a great deal of determination, or a very great deal of suffering on the wrong road, is required, in order to bring us to our senses and to the acknowledgment of the lie in which we are living. I have perceived the lie of our lives, thanks to the sufferings which the false path entailed upon me, and, having recognized the falseness of this path on which I stood, I have had the boldness to go at first in thought only — whither reason and conscience led me, without reflecting where they would bring me out. And I have been rewarded for this boldness.

All the complicated, broken, tangled, and incoherent phenomena of life surrounding me, have suddenly become clear; and my position in the midst of these phenomena, which was formerly strange and burdensome, has become, all at once, natural, and easy to bear.

In this new position, my activity was defined with perfect accuracy; not at all as it had previously presented itself to me, but as a new and much more peaceful, loving, and joyous activity. The very thing which had formerly terrified me, now began to attract me. Hence I think, that the man who will honestly put to himself the question, “What is to be done?” and, replying to this query, will not lie to himself, but will go whither his reason leads, has already solved the problem.

There is only one thing that can hinder him in his search for an issue, — an erroneously lofty idea of himself and of his position. This was the case with me; and then another, arising from the first answer to the question: “What is to be done?” consisted for me in this, that it was necessary for me to repent, in the full sense of that word, — i.e., to entirely alter my conception of my position and my activity; to confess the hurtfulness and emptiness of my activity, instead of its utility and gravity; to confess my own ignorance instead of culture; to confess my immorality and harshness in the place of my kindness and morality; instead of my elevation, to acknowledge my lowliness. I say, that in addition to not lying to myself, I had to repent, because, although the one flows from the other, a false conception of my lofty importance had so grown up with me, that, until I sincerely repented and cut myself free from that false estimate which I had formed of myself, I did not perceive the greater part of the lie of which I had been guilty to myself. Only when I had repented, that is to say, when I had ceased to look upon myself as a regular man, and had begun to regard myself as a man exactly like every one else, — only then did my path become clear before me. Before that time I had not been able to answer the question: “What is to be done?” because I had stated the question itself wrongly.

As long as I did not repent, I put the question thus: “What sphere of activity should I choose, I, the man who has received the education and the talents which have fallen to my shame? How, in this fashion, make recompense with that education and those talents, for what I have taken, and for what I still take, from the people?” This question was wrong, because it contained a false representation, to the effect that I was not a man just like them, but a peculiar man called to serve the people with those talents and with that education which I had won by the efforts of forty years.

I propounded the query to myself; but, in reality, I had answered it in advance, in that I had in advance defined the sort of activity which was agreeable to me, and by which I was called upon to serve the people. I had, in fact, asked myself: “In what manner could I, so very fine a writer, who had acquired so much learning and talents, make use of them for the benefit of the people?”

But the question should have been put as it would have stood for a learned rabbi who had gone through the course of the Talmud, and had learned by heart the number of letters in all the holy books, and all the fine points of his art. The question for me, as for the rabbi, should stand thus: “What am I, who have spent, owing to the misfortune of my surroundings, the year’s best fitted for study in the acquisition of grammar, geography, judicial science, poetry, novels and romances, the French language, pianoforte playing, philosophical theories, and military exercises, instead of inuring myself to labor; what am I, who have passed the best years of my life in idle occupations which are corrupting to the soul, — what am I to do in defiance of these unfortunate conditions of the past, in order that I may requite those people who during the whole time have fed and clothed, yes, and who even now continue to feed and clothe me?” Had the question then stood as it stands before me now, after I have repented,— “What am I, so corrupt a man, to do?” the answer would have been easy: “To strive, first of all, to support myself honestly; that is, to learn not to live upon others; and while I am learning, and when I have learned this, to render aid on all possible occasions to the people, with my hands, and my feet, and my brain, and my heart, and with every thing to which the people should present a claim.”

And therefore I say, that for the man of our circle, in addition to not lying to himself or to others, repentance is also necessary, and that he should scrape from himself that pride which has sprung up in us, in our culture, in our refinements, in our talents; and that he should confess that he is not a benefactor of the people and a distinguished man, who does not refuse to share with the people his useful acquirements, but that he should confess himself to be a thoroughly guilty, corrupt, and good-for-nothing man, who desires to reform himself and not to behave benevolently towards the people, but simply to cease wounding and insulting them.

I often hear the questions of good young men who sympathize with the renunciatory part of my writings, and who ask, “Well, and what then shall I do? What am I to do, now that I have finished my course in the university, or in some other institution, in order that I may be of use?” Young men ask this, and in the depths of their soul it is already decided that the education which they have received constitutes their privilege and that they desire to serve the people precisely by means of thus superiority. And hence, one thing which they will in no wise do, is to bear themselves honestly and critically towards that which they call their culture, and ask themselves, are those qualities which they call their culture good or bad? If they will do this, they will infallibly be led to see the necessity of renouncing their culture, and the necessity of beginning to learn all over again; and this is the one indispensable thing. They can in no wise solve the problem, “What to do?” because this question does not stand before them as it should stand. The question must stand thus: “In what manner am I, a helpless, useless man, who, owing to the misfortune of my conditions, have wasted my best years of study in conning the scientific Talmud which corrupts soul and body, to correct this mistake, and learn to serve the people?” But it presents itself to them thus: “How am I, a man who has acquired so much very fine learning, to turn this very fine learning to the use of the people?” And such a man will never answer the question, “What is to be done?” until he repents. And repentance is not terrible, just as truth is not terrible, and it is equally joyful and fruitful. It is only necessary to accept the truth wholly, and to repent wholly, in order to understand that no one possesses any rights, privileges, or peculiarities in the matter of this life of ours, but that there are no ends or bounds to obligation, and that a man’s first and most indubitable duty is to take part in the struggle with nature for his own life and for the lives of others.

And this confession of a man’s obligation constitutes the gist of the third answer to the question, “What is to be done?”

I tried not to lie to myself: I tried to cast out from myself the remains of my false conceptions of the importance of my education and talents, and to repent; but on the way to a decision of the question, “What to do?” a fresh difficulty arose. There are so many different occupations, that an indication was necessary as to the precise one which was to be adopted. And the answer to this question was furnished me by sincere repentance for the evil in which I had lived.

“What to do? Precisely what to do?” all ask, and that is what I also asked so long as, under the influence of my exalted idea of any own importance, I did not perceive that my first and unquestionable duty was to feed myself, to clothe myself, to furnish my own fuel, to do my own building, and, by so doing, to serve others, because, ever since the would has existed, the first and indubitable duty of every man has consisted and does consist in this.

In fact, no matter what a man may have assumed to be his vocation, — whether it be to govern people, to defend his fellow-countrymen, to divine service, to instruct others, to invent means to heighten the pleasures of life, to discover the laws of the world, to incorporate eternal truths in artistic representations, — the duty of a reasonable man is to take part in the struggle with nature, for the sustenance of his own life and of that of others. This obligation is the first of all, because what people need most of all is their life; and therefore, in order to defend and instruct the people, and render their lives more agreeable, it is requisite to preserve that life itself, while my refusal to share in the struggle, my monopoly of the labors of others, is equivalent to annihilation of the lives of others. And, therefore, it is not rational to serve the lives of men by annihilating the lives of men; and it is impossible to say that I am serving men, when, by my life, I am obviously injuring them.

A man’s obligation to struggle with nature for the acquisition of the means of livelihood will always be the first and most unquestionable of all obligations, because this obligation is a law of life, departure from which entails the inevitable punishment of either bodily or mental annihilation of the life of man. If a man living alone excuses himself from the obligation of struggling with nature, he is immediately punished, in that his body perishes. But if a man excuses himself from this obligation by making other people fulfil it for him, then also he is immediately punished by the annihilation of his mental life; that is to say, of the life which possesses rational thought.

In this one act, man receives — if the two things are to be separated — full satisfaction of the bodily and spiritual demands of his nature. The feeding, clothing, and taking care of himself and his family, constitute the satisfaction of the bodily demands and requirements; and doing the same for other people, constitutes the satisfaction of his spiritual requirements. Every other employment of man is only legal when it is directed to the satisfaction of this very first duty of man; for the fulfilment of this duty constitutes the whole life of man.

I had been so turned about by my previous life, this first and indubitable law of God or of nature is so concealed in our sphere of society, that the fulfilment of this law seemed to me strange, terrible, even shameful; as though the fulfilment of an eternal, unquestionable law, and not the departure from it, can be terrible, strange, and shameful.

At first it seemed to me that the fulfilment of this matter required some preparation, arrangement or community of men, holding similar views, — the consent of one’s family, life in the country; it seemed to me disgraceful to make a show of myself before people, to undertake a thing so improper in our conditions of existence, as bodily toil, and I did not know how to set about it. But it was only necessary for me to understand that this is no exclusive occupation which requires to be invented and arranged for, but that this employment was merely a return from the false position in which I found myself, to a natural one; was only a rectification of that lie in which I was living. I had only to recognize this fact, and all these difficulties vanished. It was not in the least necessary to make preparations and arrangements, and to await the consent of others, for, no matter in what position I had found myself, there had always been people who had fed, clothed and warmed me, in addition to themselves; and everywhere, under all conditions, I could do the same for myself and for them, if I had the time and the strength. Neither could I experience false shame in an unwonted occupation, no matter how surprising it might be to people, because, through not doing it, I had already experienced not false but real shame.

And when I had reached this confession and the practical deduction from it, I was fully rewarded for not having quailed before the deductions of reason, and for following whither they led me. On arriving at this practical deduction, I was amazed at the ease and simplicity with which all the problems which had previously seemed to me so difficult and so complicated, were solved.

To the question, “What is it necessary to do?” the most indubitable answer presented itself: first of all, that which it was necessary for me to do was, to attend to my own samovar, my own stove, my own water, my own clothing; to every thing that I could do for myself. To the question, “Will it not seem strange to people if you do this?” it appeared that this strangeness lasted only a week, and after the lapse of that week, it would have seemed strange had I returned to my former conditions of life. With regard to the question, “Is it necessary to organize this physical labor, to institute an association in the country, on my land?” it appeared that nothing of the sort was necessary; that labor, if it does not aim at the acquisition of all possible leisure, and the enjoyment of the labor of others, — like the labor of people bent on accumulating money, — but if it have for its object the satisfaction of requirements, will itself be drawn from the city to the country, to the land, where this labor is the most fruitful and cheerful. But it is not requisite to institute any association, because the man who labors, naturally and of himself, attaches himself to the existing association of laboring men.

To the question, whether this labor would not monopolize all my time, and deprive me of those intellectual pursuits which I love, to which I am accustomed, and which, in my moments of self-conceit, I regard as not useless to others? I received a most unexpected reply. The energy of my intellectual activity increased, and increased in exact proportion with bodily application, while freeing itself from every thing superfluous. It appeared that by dedicating to physical toil eight hours, that half of the day which I had formerly passed in the oppressive state of a struggle with ennui, eight hours remained to me, of which only five of intellectual activity, according to my terms, were necessary to me. For it appeared, that if I, a very voluminous writer, who had done nothing for nearly forty years except write, and who had written three hundred printed sheets; — if I had worked during all those forty years at ordinary labor with the working-people, then, not reckoning winter evenings and leisure days, if I had read and studied for five hours every day, and had written a couple of pages only on holidays (and I have been in the habit of writing at the rate of one printed sheet a day), then I should have written those three hundred sheets in fourteen years. The fact seemed startling: yet it is the most simple arithmetical calculation, which can be made by a seven-year-old boy, but which I had not been able to make up to this time. There are twenty-four hours in the day; if we take away eight hours, sixteen remain. If any man engaged in intellectual occupations devote five hours every day to his occupation, he will accomplish a fearful amount. And what is to be done with the remaining eleven hours?

It proved that physical labor not only does not exclude the possibility of mental activity, but that it improves its quality, and encourages it.

In answer to the question, whether this physical toil does not deprive me of many innocent pleasures peculiar to man, such as the enjoyment of the arts, the acquisition of learning, intercourse with people, and the delights of life in general, it turned out exactly the reverse: the more intense the labor, the more nearly it approached what is considered the coarsest agricultural toil, the more enjoyment and knowledge did I gain, and the more did I come into close and loving communion with men, and the more happiness did I derive from life.

In answer to the question (which I have so often heard from persons not thoroughly sincere), as to what result could flow from so insignificant a drop in the sea of sympathy as my individual physical labor in the sea of labor ingulfing me, I received also the most satisfactory and unexpected of answers. It appeared that all I had to do was to make physical labor the habitual condition of my life, and the majority of my false, but precious, habits and my demands, when physically idle, fell away from me at once of their own accord, without the slightest exertion on my part. Not to mention the habit of turning day into night and vice versa, my habits connected with my bed, with my clothing, with conventional cleanliness, — which are downright impossible and oppressive with physical labor, — and my demands as to the quality of my food, were entirely changed. In place of the dainty, rich, refined, complicated, highly-spiced food, to which I had formerly inclined, the most simple viands became needful and most pleasing of all to me, — cabbage-soup, porridge, black bread, and tea v prikusku. So that, not to mention the influence upon me of the example of the simple working-people, who are content with little, with whom I came in contact in the course of my bodily toil, my very requirements underwent a change in consequence of my toilsome life; so that my drop of physical labor in the sea of universal labor became larger and larger, in proportion as I accustomed myself to, and appropriated, the habits of the laboring classes; in proportion, also, to the success of my labor, my demands for labor from others grew less and less, and my life naturally, without exertion or privations, approached that simple existence of which I could not even dream without fulfilling the law of labor.

It proved that my dearest demands from life, namely, my demands for vanity, and diversion from ennui, arose directly from my idle life. There was no place for vanity, in connection with physical labor; and no diversions were needed, since my time was pleasantly occupied, and, after my fatigue, simple rest at tea over a book, or in conversation with my fellows, was incomparably more agreeable than theatres, cards, conceits, or a large company, — all which things are needed in physical idleness, and which cost a great deal.

In answer to the question, Would not this unaccustomed toil ruin that health which is indispensable in order to render service to the people possible? it appeared, in spite of the positive assertions of noted physicians, that physical exertion, especially at my age, might have the most injurious consequences (but that Swedish gymnastics, the massage treatment, and so on, and other expedients intended to take the place of the natural conditions of man’s life, were better), that the more intense the toil, the stronger, more alert, more cheerful, and more kindly did I feel. Thus it undoubtedly appeared, that, just as all those cunning devices of the human mind, newspapers, theatres, concerts, visits, balls, cards, journals, romances, are nothing else than expedients for maintaining the spiritual life of man outside his natural conditions of labor for others, — just so all the hygienic and medical devices of the human mind for the preparation of food, drink, lodging, ventilation, heating, clothing, medicine, water, massage, gymnastics, electric, and other means of healing, — all these clever devices are merely an expedient to sustain the bodily life of man removed from its natural conditions of labor. It turned out that all these devices of the human mind for the agreeable arrangement of the physical existence of idle persons are precisely analogous to those artful contrivances which people might invent for the production in vessels hermetically sealed, by means of mechanical arrangements, of evaporation, and plants, of the air best fitted for breathing, when all that is needed is to open the window. All the inventions of medicine and hygiene for persons of our sphere are much the same as though a mechanic should hit upon the idea of heating a steam-boiler which was not working, and should shut all the valves so that the boiler should not burst. Only one thing is needed, instead of all these extremely complicated devices for pleasure, for comfort, and for medical and hygienic preparations, intended to save people from their spiritual and bodily ailments, which swallow up so much labor, — to fulfil the law of life; to do that which is proper not only to man, but to the animal; to fire off the charge of energy taken win in the shape of food, by muscular exertion; to speak in plain language, to earn one’s bread. Those who do not work should not eat, or they should earn as much as they have eaten.

And when I clearly comprehended all this, it struck me as ridiculous. Through a whole series of doubts and searchings, I had arrived, by a long course of thought, at this remarkable truth: if a man has eyes, it is that he may see with them; if he has ears, that he may hear; and feet, that he may walk; and hands and back, that he may labor; and that if a man will not employ those members for that purpose for which they are intended, it will be the worse for him.

I came to this conclusion, that, with us privileged people, the same thing has happened which happened with the horses of a friend of mine. His steward, who was not a lover of horses, nor well versed in them, on receiving his master’s orders to place the best horses in the stable, selected them from the stud, placed them in stalls, and fed and watered them; but fearing for the valuable steeds, he could not bring himself to trust them to any one, and he neither rode nor drove them, nor did he even take them out. The horses stood there until they were good for nothing. The same thing has happened with us, but with this difference: that it was impossible to deceive the horses in any way, and they were kept in bonds to prevent their getting out; but we are kept in an unnatural position that is equally injurious to us, by deceits which have entangled us, and which hold us like chains.

We have arranged for ourselves a life that is repugnant both to the moral and the physical nature of man, and all the powers of our intelligence we concentrate upon assuring man that this is the most natural life possible. Every thing which we call culture, — our sciences, art, and the perfection of the pleasant thing’s of life, — all these are attempts to deceive the moral requirements of man; every thing that is called hygiene and medicine, is an attempt to deceive the natural physical demands of human nature. But these deceits have their bounds, and we advance to them. “If such be the real human life, then it is better not to live at all,” says the reigning and extremely fashionable philosophy of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. If such is life, ’tis better for the coming generation not to live,” say corrupt medical science and its newly devised means to that end.

In the Bible, it is laid down as the law of man: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, and in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children;” but “nous avons changé tout ca,” as Molière’s character says, when expressing himself with regard to medicine, and asserting that the liver was on the left side. We have changed all that. Men need not work in order to eat, and women need not bear children.

A ragged peasant roams the Krapivensky district. During the war he was an agent for the purchase of grain, under an official of the commissary department. On being brought in contact with the official, and seeing his luxurious life, the peasant lost his mind, and thought that he might get along without work, like gentlemen, and receive proper support from the Emperor. This peasant now calls himself “the Most Serene Warrior, Prince Blokhin, purveyor of war supplies of all descriptions.” He says of himself that he has “passed through all the ranks,” and that when he shall have served out his term in the army, he is to receive from the Emperor an unlimited bank account, clothes, uniforms, horses, equipages, tea, pease and servants, and all sorts of luxuries. This man is ridiculous in the eyes of many, but to me the significance of his madness is terrible. To the question, whether he does not wish to work, he always replies proudly: “I am much obliged. The peasants will attend to all that.” When you tell him that the peasants do not wish to work, either, he answers: “It is not difficult for the peasant.”

He generally talks in a high-flown style, and is fond of verbal substantives. “Now there is an invention of machinery for the alleviation of the peasants,” he says; “there is no difficulty for them in that.” When he is asked what he lives for, he replies, “To pass the time.” I always look on this man as on a mirror. I behold in him myself and all my class. To pass through all the ranks (tchini) in order to live for the purpose of passing the time, and to receive an unlimited bank account, while the peasants, for whom this is not difficult, because of the invention of machinery, do the whole business, — this is the complete formula of the idiotic creed of the people of our sphere in society.

When we inquire precisely what we are to do, surely, we ask nothing, but merely assert — only not in such good faith as the Most Serene Prince Blokhin, who has been promoted through all ranks, and lost his mind — that we do not wish to do any thing.

He who will reflect for a moment cannot ask thus, because, on the one hand, every thing that he uses has been made, and is made, by the hands of men; and, on the other side, as soon as a healthy man has awakened and eaten, the necessity of working with feet and hands and brain makes itself felt. In order to find work and to work, he need only not hold back: only a person who thinks work disgraceful — like the lady who requests her guest not to take the trouble to open the door, but to wait until she can call a man for this purpose — can put to himself the question, what he is to do.

The point does not lie in inventing work, — you can never get through all the work that is to be done for yourself and for others, — but the point lies in weaning one’s self from that criminal view of life in accordance with which I eat and sleep for my own pleasure; and in appropriating to myself that just and simple view with which the laboring man grows up and lives, — that man is, first of all, a machine, which loads itself with food in order to sustain itself, and that it is therefore disgraceful, wrong, and impossible to eat and not to work; that to eat and not to work is the most impious, unnatural, and, therefore, dangerous position, in the nature of the sin of Sodom. Only let this acknowledgement be made, and there will be work; and work will always be joyous and satisfying to both spiritual and bodily requirements.

The matter presented itself to me thus: The day is divided for every man, by food itself, into four parts, or four stints, as the peasants call it: (1) before breakfast; (2) from breakfast until dinner; (3) from dinner until four o’clock; (4) from four o’clock until evening.

A man’s employment, whatever it may be that he feels a need for in his own person, is also divided into four categories: (1) the muscular employment of power, labor of the hands, feet, shoulders, back, — hard labor, from which you sweat; (2) the employment of the fingers and wrists, the employment of artisan skill; (3) the employment of the mind and imagination; (4) the employment of intercourse with others.

The benefits which man enjoys are also divided into four categories. Every man enjoys, in the first place, the product of hard labor, — grain, cattle, buildings, wells, ponds, and so forth; in the second place, the results of artisan toil, — clothes, boots, utensils, and so forth; in the third place, the products of mental activity, — science, art; and, in the forth place, established intercourse between people.

And it struck me, that the best thing of all would be to arrange the occupations of the day in such a manner as to exercise all four of man’s capacities, and myself produce all these four sorts of benefits which men make use of, so that one portion of the day, the first, should be dedicated to hard labor; the second, to intellectual labor; the third, to artisan labor; and the forth, to intercourse with people. It struck me, that only then would that false division of labor, which exists in our society, be abrogated, and that just division of labor established, which does not destroy man’s happiness.

I, for example, have busied myself all my life with intellectual labor. I said to myself, that I had so divided labor, that writing, that is to say, intellectual labor, is my special employment, and the other matters which were necessary to me I had left free (or relegated, rather) to others. But this, which would appear to have been the most advantageous arrangement for intellectual toil, was precisely the most disadvantageous to mental labor, not to mention its injustice.

All my life long, I have regulated my whole life, food, sleep, diversion, in view of these hours of special labor, and I have done nothing except this work. The result of this has been, in the first place, that I have contracted my sphere of observations and knowledge, and have frequently had no means for the study even of problems which often presented themselves in describing the life of the people (for the life of the common people is the every-day problem of intellectual activity). I was conscious of my ignorance, and was obliged to obtain instruction, to ask about things which are known by every man not engaged in special labor. In the second place, the result was, that I had been in the habit of sitting down to write when I had no inward impulse to write, and when no one demanded from me writing, as writing, that is to say, my thoughts, but when my name was merely wanted for journalistic speculation. I tried to squeeze out of myself what I could. Sometimes I could extract nothing; sometimes it was very wretched stuff, and I was dissatisfied and grieved. But now that I have learned the indispensability of physical labor, both hard and artisan labor, the result is entirely different. My time has been occupied, however modestly, at least usefully and cheerfully, and in a manner instructive to me. And therefore I have torn myself from that indubitably useful and cheerful occupation for my special duties only when I felt an inward impulse, and when I saw a demand made upon me directly for my literary work.

And these demands called into play only good nature, and therefore the usefulness and the joy of my special labor. Thus it turned out, that employment in those physical labors which are indispensable to me, as they are to every man, not only did not interfere with my special activity, but was an indispensable condition of the usefulness, worth, and cheerfulness of that activity.

The bird is so constructed, that it is indispensable that it should fly, walk, peek, combine; and when it does all this, it is satisfied and happy, — then it is a bird. Just so man, when he walks, turns, raises, drags, works with his fingers, with his eyes, with his ears, with his tongue, with his brain, — only then is he satisfied, only then is he a man.

A man who acknowledges his appointment to labor will naturally strive towards that rotation of labor which is peculiar to him, for the satisfaction of his inward requirements; and he can alter this labor in no other way than when he feels within himself an irresistible summons to some exclusive form of labor, and when the demands of other men for that labor are expressed.

The character of labor is such, that the satisfaction of all a man’s requirements demands that same succession of the sorts of work which renders work not a burden but a joy. Only a false creed, δοξα, to the effect that labor is a curse, could have led men to rid themselves of certain kinds of work; i.e., to the appropriation of the work of others, demanding the forced occupation with special labor of other people, which they call division of labor.

We have only grown used to our false comprehension of the regulation of labor, because it seems to us that the shoemaker, the machinist, the writer, or the musician will be better off if he gets rid of the labor peculiar to man. Where there is no force exercised over the labor of others, or any false belief in the joy of idleness, not a single man will get rid of physical labor, necessary for the satisfaction of his requirements, for the sake of special work; because special work is not a privilege, but a sacrifice which man offers to inward pressure and to his brethren.

The shoemaker in the country, who abandons his wonted labor in the field, which is so grateful to him, and betakes himself to his trade, in order to repair or make boots for his neighbors, always deprives himself of the pleasant toil of the field, simply because he likes to make boots, because he knows that no one else can do it so well as he, and that people will be grateful to him for it; but the desire cannot occur to him, to deprive himself, for the whole period of his life, of the cheering rotation of labor.

It is the same with the starosta [village elder], the machinist, the writer, the learned man. To us, with our corrupt conception of things, it seems, that if a steward has been relegated to the position of a peasant by his master, or if a minister has been sent to the colonies, he has been chastised, he has been ill-treated. But in reality a benefit has been conferred on him; that is to say, his special, hard labor has been changed into a cheerful rotation of labor. In a naturally constituted society, this is quite otherwise. I know of one community where the people supported themselves. One of the members of this society was better educated than the rest; and they called upon him to read, so that he was obliged to prepare himself during the day, in order that he might read in the evening. This he did gladly, feeling that he was useful to others, and that he was performing a good deed. But he grew weary of exclusively intellectual work, and his health suffered from it. The members of the community took pity on him, and requested him to go to work in the fields.

For men who regard labor as the substance and the joy of life, the basis, the foundation of life will always be the struggle with nature, — labor both agricultural and mechanical, and intellectual, and the establishment of communion between men. Departure from one or from many of these varieties of labor, and the adoption of special labor, will then only occur when the man possessed of a special branch, and loving this work, and knowing that he can perform it better than others, sacrifices his own profit for the satisfaction of the direct demands made upon him. Only on condition of such a view of labor, and of the natural division of labor arising from it, is that curse which is laid upon our idea of labor abrogated, and does every sort of work becomes always a joy; because a man will either perform that labor which is undoubtedly useful and joyous, and not dull, or he will possess the consciousness of self-abnegation in the fulfilment of more difficult and restricted toil, which he exercises for the good of others.

But the division of labor is more profitable. More profitable for whom? It is more profitable in making the greatest possible quantity of calico, and boots in the shortest possible time. But who will make these boots and this calico? There are people who, for whole generations, make only the heads of pins. Then how can this be more profitable for men? If the point lies in manufacturing as much calico and as many pins as possible, then this is so. But the point concerns men and their welfare. And the welfare of men lies in life. And life is work. How, then, can the necessity for burdensome, oppressive toil be more profitable for people? For all men, that one thing is more profitable which I desire for myself, — the utmost well-being, and the gratification of all those requirements, both bodily and spiritual, of the conscience and of the reason, which are imposed upon me. And in my own case I have found, that for my own welfare, and for the satisfaction of these needs of mine, all that I require is to cure myself of that folly in which I had been living, in company with the Krapivensky madman, and which consisted in presupposing that some people need not work, and that certain other people should direct all this, and that I should therefore do only that which is natural to man, i.e., labor for the satisfaction of their requirements; and, having discovered this, I convinced myself that labor for the satisfaction of one’s own needs falls of itself into various kinds of labor, each one of which possesses its own charm, and which not only do not constitute a burden, but which serve as a respite to one another. I have made a rough division of this labor (not insisting on the justice of this arrangement), in accordance with my own needs in life, into four parts, corresponding to the four stints of labor of which the day is composed; and I seek in this manner to satisfy my requirements.

These, then, are the answers which I have found for myself to the question, “What is to be done?”

First, Not to lie to myself, however far removed my path in life may be from the true path which my reason discloses to me.

Second, To renounce my consciousness of my own righteousness, my superiority especially over other people; and to acknowledge my guilt.

Third, To comply with that eternal and indubitable law of humanity, — the labor of my whole being, feeling no shame at any sort of work; to contend with nature for the maintenance of my own life and the lives of others.

BETHINK YOURSELVES!

Translated by V. Tchertkoff 1904

“This is your hour, and the power of darkness.” — Luke xxii. 53.

I

Again war. Again sufferings, necessary to nobody, utterly uncalled for; again fraud; again the universal stupefaction and brutalization of men.

Men who are separated from each other by thousands of miles, hundreds of thousands of such men (on the one hand — Buddhists, whose law forbids the killing, not only of men, but of animals; on the other hand — Christians, professing the law of brotherhood and love) like wild beasts on land and on sea are seeking out each other, in order to kill, torture, and mutilate each other in the most cruel way. What can this be? Is it a dream or a reality? Something is taking place which should not, cannot be; one longs to believe that it is a dream and to awake from it. But no, it is not a dream, it is a dreadful reality!

One could yet understand how a poor, uneducated, defrauded Japanese, torn from his field and taught that Buddhism consists not in compassion to all that lives, but in sacrifices to idols, and how a similar poor illiterate fellow from the neighborhood of Toula or Nijni Novgorod, who has been taught that Christianity consists in worshipping Christ, the Madonna, Saints, and their ikons — one could understand how these unfortunate 2 men, brought by the violence and deceit of centuries to recognize the greatest crime in the world — the murder of one’s brethren — as a virtuous act, can commit these dreadful deeds, without regarding themselves as being guilty in so doing.

But how can so-called enlightened men preach war, support it, participate in it, and, worst of all, without suffering the dangers of war themselves, incite others to it, sending their unfortunate defrauded brothers to fight? These so-called enlightened men cannot possibly ignore, I do not say the Christian law, if they recognize themselves to be Christians, but all that has been written, is being written, has and is being said, about the cruelty, futility, and senselessness of war. They are regarded as enlightened men precisely because they know all this. The majority of them have themselves written and spoken about this. Not to mention The Hague Conference, which called forth universal praise, or all the books, pamphlets, newspaper articles, and speeches demonstrating the possibility of the solution of international misunderstandings by international arbitration — no enlightened man can help knowing that the universal competition in the armaments of States must inevitably lead them to endless wars, or to a general bankruptcy, or to both the one and the other. They cannot but know that besides the senseless, purposeless expenditure of milliards of roubles, i.e. of human labor, on the preparations for war, during the wars themselves millions of the most energetic and vigorous men perish in that period of their life which is best for productive labor (during the past century wars have destroyed fourteen million men). Enlightened 3 men cannot but know that occasions for war are always such as are not worth not only one human life, but not one hundredth part of all that which is spent upon wars (in fighting for the emancipation of the negroes much more was spent than it would have cost to redeem them from slavery).

Every one knows and cannot help knowing that, above all, wars, calling forth the lowest animal passions, deprave and brutalize men. Every one knows the weakness of the arguments in favor of war, such as were brought forward by De Maistre, Moltke, and others, for they are all founded on the sophism that in every human calamity it is possible to find an advantageous element, or else upon the utterly arbitrary assertion that wars have always existed and therefore always must exist, as if the bad actions of men could be justified by the advantages or the usefulness which they realize, or by the consideration that they have been committed during a long period of time. All so-called enlightened men know all this. Then suddenly war begins, and all this is instantly forgotten, and the same men who but yesterday were proving the cruelty, futility, the senselessness of wars now think, speak, and write only about killing as many men as possible, about ruining and destroying the greatest possible amount of the productions of human labor, and about exciting as much as possible the passion of hatred in those peaceful, harmless, industrious men who by their labor feed, clothe, maintain these same pseudo-enlightened men, who compel them to commit those dreadful deeds contrary to their conscience, welfare, or faith.

Chapter 2

Something is taking place incomprehensible and impossible in its cruelty, falsehood, and stupidity. The Russian Tsar, the same man who exhorted all the nations in the cause of peace, publicly announces that, notwithstanding all his efforts to maintain the peace so dear to his heart (efforts which express themselves in the seizing of other peoples’ lands and in the strengthening of armies for the defence of these stolen lands), he, owing to the attack of the Japanese, commands that the same shall be done to the Japanese as they had commenced doing to the Russians — i.e. that they should be slaughtered; and in announcing this call to murder he mentions God, asking the Divine blessing on the most dreadful crime in the world. The Japanese Emperor has proclaimed the same thing in relation to the Russians.

Men of science and of law (Messieurs Muravieff and Martens) strenuously try to prove that in the recent call of all nations to universal peace and the present incitement to war, because of the seizure of other peoples’ lands, there is no contradiction. Diplomatists, in their refined French language, publish and send out circulars in which they circumstantially and diligently prove (though they know no one believes them) that, after all its efforts to establish peaceful relations (in reality, after all its efforts to deceive other countries), the Russian Government has been compelled to have recourse to the only means for a rational solution of the question — i.e. to the murder of men. The same thing is written by Japanese diplomatists. Scientists, 5 historians, and philosophers, on their side, comparing the present with the past, deduce from these comparisons profound conclusions, and argue interminably about the laws of the movement of nations, about the relation between the yellow and white races, or about Buddhism and Christianity, and on the basis of these deductions and arguments justify the slaughter of those belonging to the yellow race by Christians; while in the same way the Japanese scientists and philosophers justify the slaughter of those of the white race. Journalists, without concealing their joy, try to outdo each other, and, not hesitating at any falsehood, however impudent and transparent, prove in all possible ways that the Russians only are right and strong and good in every respect, and that all the Japanese are wrong and weak and bad in every respect, and that all those are also bad who are inimical or may become inimical toward the Russians — the English, the Americans; and the same is proved likewise by the Japanese and their supporters in relation to the Russians.

Not to mention the military, who in the way of their profession prepare for murder, crowds of so-called enlightened people, such as professors, social reformers, students, nobles, merchants, without being forced thereto by anything or anybody, express the most bitter and contemptuous feelings toward the Japanese, the English, or the Americans, toward whom but yesterday they were either well-disposed or indifferent; while, without the least compulsion, they express the most abject, servile feelings toward the Tsar (to whom, to say the least, they were completely indifferent), assuring 6 him of their unlimited love and readiness to sacrifice their lives in his interests.

This unfortunate, entangled young man, recognized as the leader of one hundred and thirty millions of people, continually deceived and compelled to contradict himself, confidently thanks and blesses the troops whom he calls his own for murder in defence of lands which with yet less right he also calls his own. All present to each other hideous ikons in which not only no one amongst the educated believes, but which unlearned peasants are beginning to abandon; all bow down to the ground before these ikons, kiss them, and pronounce pompous and deceitful speeches in which no one really believes.

Wealthy people contribute insignificant portions of their immorally acquired riches for this cause of murder or the organization of help in connection with the work of murder; while the poor, from whom the Government annually collects two milliards, deem it necessary to do likewise, giving their mites also. The Government incites and encourages crowds of idlers, who walk about the streets with the Tsar’s portrait, singing, shouting hurrah! and who, under pretext of patriotism, are licensed in all kinds of excess. All over Russia, from the Palace to the remotest village, the pastors of churches, calling themselves Christians, appeal to that God who has enjoined love to one’s enemies — to the God of Love Himself — to help the work of the devil to further the slaughter of men.

Stupefied by prayers, sermons, exhortations, by processions, pictures, and newspapers, the cannon’s flesh, hundreds of thousands of men, uniformly dressed, carrying divers deadly weapons, leaving their parents, wives, 7 children, with hearts of agony, but with artificial sprightliness, go where they, risking their own lives, will commit the most dreadful act of killing men whom they do not know and who have done them no harm. And they are followed by doctors and nurses, who somehow imagine that at home they cannot serve simple, peaceful, suffering people, but can only serve those who are engaged in slaughtering each other. Those who remain at home are gladdened by news of the murder of men, and when they learn that many Japanese have been killed they thank some one whom they call God.

All this is not only regarded as the manifestation of elevated feeling, but those who refrain from such manifestations, if they endeavor to disabuse men, are deemed traitors and betrayers, and are in danger of being abused and beaten by a brutalized crowd which, in defence of its insanity and cruelty, can possess no other weapon than brute force.

Chapter 3

It is as if there had never existed either Voltaire, or Montaigne, or Pascal, or Swift, or Kant, or Spinoza, or hundreds of other writers who have exposed, with great force, the madness and futility of war, and have described its cruelty, immorality, and savagery; and, above all, it is as if there had never existed Jesus and his teaching of human brotherhood and love of God and of men.

One recalls all this to mind and looks around on what is now taking place, and one experiences horror less at the abominations of war than at that which is the most horrible of all horrors — the consciousness of the 8 impotency of human reason. That which alone distinguishes man from the animal, that which constitutes his merit — his reason — is found to be an unnecessary, and not only a useless, but a pernicious addition, which simply impedes action, like a bridle fallen from a horse’s head, and entangled in his legs and only irritating him.

It is comprehensible that a heathen, a Greek, a Roman, even a mediæval Christian, ignorant of the Gospel and blindly believing all the prescriptions of the Church, might fight and, fighting, pride himself on his military achievements; but how can a believing Christian, or even a sceptic, involuntarily permeated by the Christian ideals of human brotherhood and love which have inspired the works of the philosophers, moralists, and artists of our time, — how can such take a gun, or stand by a cannon, and aim at a crowd of his fellow-men, desiring to kill as many of them as possible?

The Assyrians, Romans, or Greeks might be persuaded that in fighting they were acting not only according to their conscience, but even fulfilling a righteous deed. But, whether we wish it or not, we are Christians, and however Christianity may have been distorted, its general spirit cannot but lift us to that higher plane of reason whence we can no longer refrain from feeling with our whole being not only the senselessness and the cruelty of war, but its complete opposition to all that we regard as good and right. Therefore, we cannot do as they did, with assurance, firmness, and peace, and without a consciousness of our criminality, without the desperate feeling of a murderer, who, having begun to kill his victim, and feeling in the depths 9 of his soul the guilt of his act, proceeds to try to stupefy or infuriate himself, to be able the better to complete his dreadful deed. All the unnatural, feverish, hot-headed, insane excitement which has now seized the idle upper ranks of Russian society is merely the symptom of their recognition of the criminality of the work which is being done. All these insolent, mendacious speeches about devotion to, and worship of, the Monarch, about readiness to sacrifice life (or one should say other people’s lives, and not one’s own); all these promises to defend with one’s breast land which does not belong to one; all these senseless benedictions of each other with various banners and monstrous ikons; all these Te Deums; all these preparations of blankets and bandages; all these detachments of nurses; all these contributions to the fleet and to the Red Cross presented to the Government, whose direct duty is (whilst it has the possibility of collecting from the people as much money as it requires), having declared war, to organize the necessary fleet and necessary means for attending the wounded; all these Slavonic, pompous, senseless, and blasphemous prayers, the utterance of which in various towns is communicated in the papers as important news; all these processions, calls for the national hymn, cheers; all this dreadful, desperate newspaper mendacity, which, being universal, does not fear exposure; all this stupefaction and brutalization which has now taken hold of Russian society, and which is being transmitted by degrees also to the masses; all this is only a symptom of the guilty consciousness of that dreadful act which is being accomplished.

Spontaneous feeling tells men that what they are doing should not be; but, as the murderer who has begun to assassinate his victim cannot stop, so also Russian people now imagine that the fact of the deadly work having been commenced is an unanswerable argument in favor of war. War has been begun, and therefore it should go on. Thus it seems to simple, benighted, unlearned men, acting under the influence of the petty passions and stupefaction to which they have been subjected. In exactly the same way the most educated men of our time argue to prove that man does not possess free will, and that, therefore, even were he to understand that the work he has commenced is evil, he can no longer cease to do it. And dazed, brutalized men continue their dreadful work.

Chapter 4

Ask a soldier, a private, a corporal, a non-commissioned officer, who has abandoned his old parents, his wife, his children, why he is preparing to kill men whom he does not know; he will at first be astonished at your question. He is a soldier, he has taken the oath, and it is his duty to fulfil the orders of his commanders. If you tell him that war — i.e. the slaughter of men — does not conform to the command, “Thou shalt not kill,” he will say: “And how if ours are attacked — For the King — For the Orthodox faith?” (One of them said in answer to my question: “And how if he attacks that which is sacred?” “What do you mean?” I asked. “Why,” said he, “the banner.”) And if you endeavor to explain to such a soldier that God’s Commandment 11 is more important not only than the banner but than anything else in the world, he will become silent, or he will get angry and report you to the authorities.

Ask an officer, a general, why he goes to the war. He will tell you that he is a military man, and that the military are indispensable for the defence of the fatherland. As to murder not conforming to the spirit of the Christian law, this does not trouble him, as either he does not believe in this law, or, if he does, it is not in the law itself, but in that explanation which has been given to this law. But, above all, he, like the soldier, in place of the personal question, what should he do himself, always put the general question about the State, or the fatherland. “At the present moment, when the fatherland is in danger, one should act, and not argue,” he will say.

Ask the diplomatists, who, by their deceits, prepare wars, why they do it. They will tell you that the object of their activity is the establishment of peace between nations, and that this object is attained, not by ideal, unrealizable theories, but by diplomatic action and readiness for war. And, just as the military, instead of the question concerning one’s own action, place the general question, so also diplomatists will speak about the interests of Russia, about the unscrupulousness of other Powers, about the balance of power in Europe, but not about their own position and its activities.

Ask the journalists why, by their writings, they incite men to war; they will say that wars in general are necessary and useful, especially the present war, and they will confirm this opinion of theirs by misty patriotic 12 phrases, and, just like the military and diplomatist, to the question why he, a journalist, a particular individual, a living man, acts in a certain way, he will speak about the general interests of the nation, about the State, civilization, the white race. In the same way, all those who prepare war will explain their participation in that work. They will perhaps agree that it would be desirable to abolish war, but at present this is impossible. At present they as Russians and as men who occupy certain positions, such as heads of the nobility, representatives of local self-government, doctors, workers of the Red Cross, are called upon to act and not to argue. “There is no time to argue and to think of oneself,” they will say, “when there is a great common work to be done.” The same will be said by the Tsar, seemingly responsible for the whole thing. He, like the soldier, will be astonished at the question, whether war is now necessary. He does not even admit the idea that the war might yet be arrested. He will say that he cannot refrain from fulfilling that which is demanded of him by the whole nation, that, although he does recognize that war is a great evil, and has used, and is ready to use, all possible means for its abolition — in the present case he could not help declaring war, and cannot help continuing it. It is necessary for the welfare and glory of Russia.

Every one of these men, to the question why he, so and so, Ivan, Peter, Nicholas, whilst recognizing as binding upon him the Christian law which not only forbids the killing of one’s neighbor but demands that one should love him, serve him, why he permits himself to participate in war; i.e. in violence, loot, 13 murder, will infallibly answer the same thing, that he is thus acting in the name of his fatherland, or faith, or oath, or honor, or civilization, or the future welfare of the whole of mankind — in general, of something abstract and indefinite. Moreover, these men are always so urgently occupied either by preparation for war, or by its organization, or discussions about it, that in their leisure time they can only rest from their labors, and have not time to occupy themselves with discussions about their life, regarding such discussions as idle.

Chapter 5

Men of our Christian world and of our time are like a man who, having missed the right turning, the further he goes the more he becomes convinced that he is going the wrong way. Yet the greater his doubts, the quicker and the more desperately does he hurry on, consoling himself with the thought that he will arrive somewhere. But the time comes when it becomes quite clear that the way along which he is going will lead to nothing but a precipice, which he is already beginning to discern before him.

In such a position stands the Christian humanity of our time. It is perfectly evident that, if we continue to live as we are now living, guided in our private lives, as well as in the life of separate States, by the sole desire of welfare for ourselves and for our State, and will, as we do now, think to ensure this welfare by violence, then, inevitably increasing the means of violence of one against the other and of State against State, we shall, first, keep subjecting ourselves more 14 and more, transferring the major portion of our productiveness to armaments; and, secondly, by killing in mutual wars the best physically developed men, we must become more and more degenerate and morally depraved.

That this will be the case if we do not alter our life is as certain as it is mathematically certain that two non-parallel straight lines must meet. But not only is this theoretically certain in our time; it is becoming certain not only to thought, but also to the consciousness. The precipice which we approach is already becoming apparent to us, and the most simple, non-philosophizing, and uneducated men cannot but see that, by arming ourselves more and more against each other and slaughtering each other in war, we, like spiders in a jar, can come to nothing else but the destruction of each other.

A sincere, serious, rational man can no longer console himself by the thought that matters can be mended, as was formerly supposed, by a universal empire such as that of Rome or of Charles the Great, or Napoleon, or by the mediæval spiritual power of the Pope, or by Holy Alliances, by the political balance of the European Concert, and by peaceful international tribunals, or, as some have thought, by the increase of military strength and the newly discovered powerful weapons of destruction.

It is impossible to organize a universal empire or republic, consisting of European States, as different nationalities will never desire to unite into one State. To organize international tribunals for the solution of international disputes? But who will impose 15 obedience to the decision of the tribunal upon a contending party who has an organized army of millions of men? To disarm? No one desires it or will begin it. To invent yet more dreadful means of destruction — balloons with bombs filled with suffocating gases, shells, which men will shower upon each other from above? Whatever may be invented, all States will furnish themselves with similar weapons of destruction. And cannon’s flesh, as after cold weapons it submitted to bullets, and meekly exposed itself to shells, bombs, far-reaching guns, mitrailleuses, mines, so it will also submit to bombs charged with suffocating gases scattered down upon it from balloons.

Nothing shows more evidently than the speeches of M. Muravieff and Professor Martens about the Japanese war not contradicting The Hague Peace Conference — nothing shows more obviously than these speeches to what an extent, amongst the men of our time, the means for the transmission of thought — speech — is distorted, and how the capacity for clear, rational thinking is completely lost. Thought and speech are used for the purpose, not of serving as a guide for human activity, but of justifying any activity, however criminal it may be. The late Boer war and the present Japanese war, which can at any moment pass into a universal slaughter, have proved this beyond all doubt. All anti-military discussions can as little contribute to the cessation of war as the most eloquent and persuasive considerations addressed to fighting dogs as to its being more advantageous to divide the piece of meat over which they are struggling than to mutilate each other and lose the piece of meat, 16 which will be carried away by some passing dog not joining in the fight. We are dashing on toward the precipice, cannot stop, and we are approaching its edge.

For every rational man who reflects upon the position in which humanity is now placed and upon that which it is inevitably approaching, it cannot but be obvious that there is no practical issue out of this position, that one cannot devise any combination or organization which would save us from the destruction toward which we are inevitably rushing. Not to mention the economical problems which become more and more complex, those mutual relations between the States arming themselves against each other and at any moment ready to break out into wars clearly point to the certain destruction toward which all so-called civilized humanity is being carried. Then what is to be done?

Chapter 6

Two thousand years ago John the Baptist and then Jesus said to men: The time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God is at hand; (μετανοεῖτε) bethink yourselves and believe in the Gospel (Mark i. 15); and if you do not bethink yourselves you will all perish (Luke xiii. 5).

But men did not listen to them, and the destruction they foretold is already near at hand. And we men of our time cannot but see it. We are already perishing, and, therefore, we cannot leave unheeded that — old in time, but for us new — means of salvation. We cannot but see that, besides all the other calamities which flow 17 from our bad and irrational life, military preparations alone and the wars inevitably growing from them must infallibly destroy us. We cannot but see that all the means of escape invented by men from these evils are found and must be found to be ineffectual, and that the disastrous position of the nations arming themselves against each other cannot but go on advancing continually. And therefore the words of Jesus refer to us and our time more than to any time or to any one.

Jesus said, “Bethink yourselves” — i.e. “Let every man interrupt the work he has begun and ask himself: Who am I? From whence have I appeared, and in what consists my destiny? And having answered these questions, according to the answer decide whether that which thou doest is in conformity with thy destiny.” And every man of our world and time, that is, being acquainted with the essence of the Christian teaching, needs only for a minute to interrupt his activity, to forget the capacity in which he is regarded by men, be it of Emperor, soldier, minister, or journalist, and seriously ask himself who he is and what is his destiny — in order to begin to doubt the utility, lawfulness, and reasonableness of his actions. “Before I am Emperor, soldier, minister, or journalist,” must say to himself every man of our time and of the Christian world, “before any of these, I am a man — i.e. an organic being sent by the Higher Will into a universe infinite in time and space, in order, after staying in it for an instant, to die — i.e. to disappear from it. And, therefore, all those personal, social, and even universal human aims which I may place before myself and which are placed before me by men are all insignificant, owing to 18 the shortness of my life as well as to the infiniteness of the life of the universe, and should be subordinated to that higher aim for the attainment of which I am sent into the world. This ultimate aim, owing to my limitations, is inaccessible to me, but it does exist (as there must be a purpose in all that exists), and my business is that of being its instrument — i.e. my destiny, my vocation, is that of being a workman of God, of fulfilling His work.” And having understood this destiny, every man of our world and time, from Emperor to soldier, cannot but regard differently those duties which he has taken upon himself or other men have imposed upon him.

“Before I was crowned, recognized as Emperor,” must the Emperor say to himself: “before I undertook to fulfil the duties of the head of the State, I, by the very fact that I live, have promised to fulfil that which is demanded of me by the Higher Will that sent me into life. These demands I not only know, but feel in my heart. They consist, as it is expressed in the Christian law, which I profess, in that I should submit to the will of God, and fulfil that which it requires of me, that I should love my neighbor, serve him, and act towards him as I would wish others to act towards me. Am I doing this? — ruling men, prescribing violence, executions, and, the most dreadful of all, — wars. Men tell me that I ought to do this. But God says that I ought to do something quite different. And, therefore, however much I may be told that, as the head of the State, I must direct acts of violence, the levying of taxes, executions and, above all, war, that is, the slaughter of one’s neighbor, I do not wish to and cannot do these things.”

So must say to himself the soldier, who is taught that he must kill men, and the minister, who deemed it his duty to prepare for war, and the journalist who incited to war, and every man, who puts to himself the question, Who is he, what is his destination in life? And the moment the head of the State will cease to direct war, the soldier to fight, the minister to prepare means for war, the journalist to incite thereto — then, without any new institutions, adaptations, balance of power, tribunals, there will of itself be destroyed that hopeless position in which men have placed themselves, not only in relation to war, but also to all other calamities which they themselves inflict upon themselves.

So that, however strange this may appear, the most effective and certain deliverance of men from all the calamities which they inflict upon themselves and from the most dreadful of all — war — is attainable, not by any external general measures, but merely by that simple appeal to the consciousness of each separate man which, nineteen hundred years ago, was proposed by Jesus — that every man bethink himself, and ask himself, who is he, why he lives, and what he should and should not do.

Chapter 7

The evil from which men of our time are suffering is produced by the fact that the majority live without that which alone affords a rational guidance for human activity — without religion; not that religion which consists in belief in dogmas, in the fulfilment of rites which afford a pleasant diversion, consolation, stimulant, but that religion which establishes the relation of man 20 to the All, to God, and, therefore, gives a general higher direction to all human activity, and without which people stand on the plane of animals and even lower than they. This evil which is leading men to inevitable destruction has manifested itself with special power in our time, because, having lost all rational guidance in life, and having directed all efforts to discoveries and improvements principally in the sphere of technical knowledge, men of our time have developed in themselves enormous power over the forces of nature; but, not having any guidance for the rational adaptation of this power, they naturally have used it for the satisfaction of their lowest and most animal propensities.

Bereft of religion, men possessing enormous power over the forces of nature are like children to whom powder or explosive gas has been given as a plaything. Considering this power which men of our time possess, and the way they use it, one feels that considering the degree of their moral development men have no right, not only to the use of railways, steam, electricity, telephones, photography, wireless telegraphs, but even to the simple art of manufacturing iron and steel, as all these improvements and arts they use only for the satisfaction of their lusts, for amusement, dissipation, and the destruction of each other.

Then, what is to be done? To reject all these improvements of life, all this power acquired by humanity — to forget that which it has learnt? This is impossible, however perniciously these mental acquisitions are used; they still are acquisitions, and men cannot forget them. To alter those combinations of nations which have been formed during centuries and to establish new 21 ones? To invent such new institutions as would hinder the minority from deceiving and exploiting the majority? To disseminate knowledge? All this has been tried, and is being done with great fervor. All these imaginary methods of improvement represent the chief methods of self-oblivion and of diverting one’s attention from the consciousness of inevitable perdition. The boundaries of States are changed, institutions are altered, knowledge is disseminated; but within other boundaries, with other organizations, with increased knowledge, men remain the same beasts, ready any minute to tear each other to pieces, or the same slaves they have always been, and always will be, while they continue to be guided, not by religious consciousness, but by passions, theories, and external influences.

Man has no choice; he must be the slave of the most unscrupulous and insolent amongst slaves, or else the servant of God, because for man there is only one way of being free — by uniting his will with the will of God. People bereft of religion, some repudiating religion itself, others recognizing as religion those external, monstrous forms which have superseded it, and guided only by their personal lusts, fear, human laws, and, above all, by mutual hypnotism, cannot cease to be animals or slaves, and no external efforts can extricate them from this state; for only religion makes a man free. And most of the people of our time are deprived of it.

Chapter 8

“But, in order to abolish the evil from which we are suffering,” those will say who are preoccupied by various 22 practical activities, “it would be necessary that not a few men only, but all men, should bethink themselves, and that, having done so, they should uniformly understand the destination of their lives, in the fulfilment of the will of God and in the service of one’s neighbor.

“Is this possible?” Not only possible, do I answer, but it is impossible that this should not take place. It is impossible for men not to bethink themselves — i.e. impossible that each man should not put to himself the question as to who he is and wherefore he lives; for man, as a rational being, cannot live without seeking to know why he lives, and he has always put to himself this question, and always, according to the degree of his development, has answered it in his religious teaching. In our time, the inner contradiction in which men feel themselves elicits this question with special insistence, and demands an answer. It is impossible for men of our time to answer this question otherwise than by recognizing the law of life in love to men and in the service of them, this being for our time the only rational answer as to the meaning of human life; and this answer nineteen hundred years ago has been expressed in the Christian religion and is likewise known to the vast majority of all mankind.

This answer in a latent state lives in the consciousness of all men of the Christian world of our time; but it does not openly express itself and serve as guidance for our life, only because, on the one hand, those who enjoy the greatest authority, so-called scientists, being under the coarse error that religion is a temporary and outgrown step in the development of 23 mankind and that men can live without religion, inculcate this error to those of the masses who are beginning to be educated; and, on the other hand, because those in power, sometimes consciously, but often unconsciously (being under the error that the Church faith is Christian religion), endeavor to support and excite in the people crude superstitions given out as the Christian religion. If only these two deceptions were to be destroyed, then true religion, already latent in men of our time, would become evident and obligatory.

To bring this about it is necessary that, on the one hand, men of science should understand that the principle of the brotherhood of all men and the rule of not doing unto others what one does not wish for oneself is not one casual idea out of a multitude of human theories which can be subordinated to any other considerations, but is an incontestable principle, standing higher than the rest, and flowing from the changeless relation of man to that which is eternal, to God, and is religion, all religion, and, therefore, always obligatory.

On the other hand, it is necessary that those who consciously or unconsciously preach crude superstitions under the guise of Christianity should understand that all these dogmas, sacraments, and rites which they support and preach are not only, as they think, harmless, but are in the highest degree pernicious, concealing from men that central religious truth which is expressed in the fulfilment of God’s will, in the service of men, and that the rule of acting toward others as one would wish others to act toward oneself is not merely one of the prescriptions of the Christian religion, but is the 24 whole of practical religion, as indeed is stated in the Gospels.

To bring about that men of our time should uniformly place before themselves the question of the meaning of life, and uniformly answer it, it is only necessary that those who regard themselves as enlightened should cease to think and to inculcate to other generations that religion is atavism, the survival of a past wild state, and that for the good life of men the spreading of education is sufficient — i.e. the spread of the most varied knowledge which is in some way to bring men to justice and to a moral life. These men should understand instead that for the good life of humanity religion is vital, and that this religion already exists and lives in the consciousness of the men of our time. Men who are intentionally and unintentionally stupefying the people by church superstitions should cease to do so, and recognize that what is important and binding in Christianity is not baptism, nor Communion, nor profession of dogmas, etc., but only love to God and to one’s neighbor, and the fulfilling of the commandment of acting toward others as one wishes others to act toward oneself — and that in this lies all the law and the prophets.

If only both pseudo-Christians and men of science understood and preached to children and to the uneducated these simple, clear, and necessary truths as they now preach their complicated, confused, and unnecessary theories, all men would uniformly understand the meaning of their lives and recognize one and the same duties as flowing from this meaning.

Chapter 9

But “How are we to act now, immediately among ourselves, in Russia, at this moment, when our foes have already attacked us, are killing our people, and threatening us; what should be the action,” I shall be asked, “of a Russian soldier, officer, general, Tsar, private individual? Are we, forsooth, to allow our enemies to ruin our possessions, to seize the productions of our labors, to carry away prisoners, or kill our men? What are we to do now that this thing has begun?”

But before the work of war was commenced, by whomsoever it was commenced — every awakened man must answer — before all else the work of my life was commenced. And the work of my life has nothing in common with recognition of the rights of the Chinese, Japanese, or Russians to Port Arthur. The work of my life consists in fulfilling the will of Him who sent me into this life. This will is known to me. This will is that I should love my neighbor and serve him. Then why should I, following temporary, casual, irrational, and cruel demands, deviate from the known eternal and changeless law of all my life? If there be a God, He will not ask me when I die (which may happen at any moment) whether I retained Chi-nam-po with its timber stores, or Port Arthur, or even that conglomeration which is called the Russian Empire, which He did not confide to my care; but He will ask me what I have done with that life which He put at my disposal; — did I use it for the purpose for which it was predestined, and under the conditions for fulfilling 26 which it was intrusted to me? Have I fulfilled His law?

So that to this question as to what is to be done now, when war is commenced, for me, a man who understands his destiny, whatever position I may occupy, there can be no other answer than this, whatever be my circumstances, whether the war be commenced or not, whether thousands of Russians or Japanese be killed, whether not only Port Arthur be taken, but St. Petersburg and Moscow — I cannot act otherwise than as God demands of me, and that therefore I as a man can neither directly nor indirectly, neither by directing, nor by helping, nor by inciting to it, participate in war; I cannot, I do not wish to, and I will not. What will happen immediately or soon, from my ceasing to do that which is contrary to the will of God, I do not and cannot know; but I believe that from the fulfilment of the will of God there can follow nothing but that which is good for me and for all men.

You speak with horror about what might happen if we Russians at this moment ceased to fight, and surrendered to the Japanese what they desire from us. But if it be true that the salvation of mankind from brutalization and self-destruction lies only in the establishment amongst men of that true religion which demands that we should love our neighbor and serve him (with which it is impossible to disagree), then every war, every hour of war, and my participation in it, only renders more difficult and distant the realization of this only possible salvation.

So that, even if one places oneself on the unstable point of view of defining actions according to their 27 presumed consequences — even then the surrender to the Japanese by the Russians of all which the former desire of us, besides the unquestionable advantage of the cessation of ruin and slaughter, would be an approach to the only means of the salvation of mankind from destruction; whereas the continuance of the war, however it may end, will be a postponement of that only means of salvation.

“Yet even if this be so,” it is replied, “wars can cease only when all men, or the majority, will refuse to participate in them. But the refusal of one man, whether he be Tsar or soldier, would only, unnecessarily, and without the slightest profit to any one, ruin his life. If the Russian Tsar were now to throw up the war, he would be dethroned, perhaps killed, in order to get rid of him; if an ordinary man were to refuse military service, he would be sent to a penal battalion and perhaps shot. Why, then, without the slightest use should one throw away one’s life, which may be profitable to society?” is the common question of those who do not think of the destination of their life and therefore do not understand it.

But this is not what is said and felt by any man who understands the destination of his life — i.e. by any religious man. Such a man is guided in his activity not by the presumed consequences of his action, but by the consciousness of the destination of his life. A factory workman goes to his factory and in it accomplishes the work which is allotted him without considering what will be the consequences of his labor. In the same way a soldier acts, carrying out the will of his commanders. So acts a religious man in fulfilling the 28 work prescribed to him by God, without arguing as to what precisely will come of that work. Therefore for a religious man there is no question as to whether many or few men act as he does, or of what may happen to him if he does that which he should do. He knows that besides life and death nothing can happen, and that life and death are in the hands of God whom he obeys.

A religious man acts thus and not otherwise, not because he desires to act thus, nor because it is advantageous to himself or to other men, but because, believing that his life is in the hands of God, he cannot act otherwise.

In this lies the distinction of the activity of religious men; and therefore it is that the salvation of men from the calamities which they inflict upon themselves can be realized only in that degree in which they are guided in their lives, not by advantage nor arguments, but by religious consciousness.

Chapter 10

“But how about the enemies that attack us?”

“Love your enemies, and ye will have none,” is said in the teaching of the Twelve Apostles. This answer is not merely words, as those may imagine who are accustomed to think that the recommendation of love to one’s enemies is something hyperbolical, and signifies not that which expressed, but something else. This answer is the indication of a very clear and definite activity, and of its consequences.

To love one’s enemies — the Japanese, the Chinese, those yellow people toward whom benighted men are now endeavoring to excite our hatred — to love them 29 means not to kill them for the purpose of having the right of poisoning them with opium, as did the English; not to kill them in order to seize their land, as was done by the French, the Russians, and the Germans; not to bury them alive in punishment for injuring roads, not to tie them together by their hair, not to drown them in their river Amur, as did the Russians.

“A disciple is not above his master.… It is enough for a disciple that he be as his master.”

To love the yellow people, whom we call our foes, means, not to teach them under the name of Christianity absurd superstitions about the fall of man, redemption, resurrection, etc., not to teach them the art of deceiving and killing others, but to teach them justice, unselfishness, compassion, love — and that not by words, but by the example of our own good life. And what have we been doing to them, and are still doing?

If we did indeed love our enemies, if even now we began to love our enemies, the Japanese, we would have no enemy.

Therefore, however strange it may appear to those occupied with military plans, preparations, diplomatic considerations, administrative, financial, economical measures, revolutionary, socialistic propaganda, and various unnecessary sciences, by which they think to save mankind from its calamities, the deliverance of man, not only from the calamities of war, but also from all the calamities which men inflict upon themselves, will take place not through emperors or kings instituting peace alliances, not through those who would dethrone emperors, kings, or restrain them by constitutions, or substitute republics for monarchies, not by 30 peace conferences, not by the realization of socialistic programmes, not by victories or defeats on land or sea, not by libraries or universities, nor by those futile mental exercises which are now called science; but only by there being more and more of those simple men who, like the Dukhobors, Drojjin, Olkhovik, in Russia, the Nazarenes in Austria, Condatier in France, Tervey in Holland, and others, having placed as their object not external alterations of life, but the closest fulfilment in themselves of the will of Him who has sent them into life, will direct all their powers to this realization. Only such people realizing the Kingdom of God in themselves, in their souls, will establish, without directly aiming at this purpose, that external Kingdom of God which every human soul is longing for.

Salvation will come to pass only in this one way and not in any other. Therefore what is now being done by those who, ruling men, inspire them with religious and patriotic superstitions, exciting in them exclusiveness, hatred, and murder, as well as by those who, for the purpose of freeing men from slavery and oppression, invoke them to violent external revolution, or think that the acquisition by men of very much incidental and for the most part unnecessary information will of itself bring them to a good life — all this, by distracting men from what alone they need, only removes them further from the possibility of salvation.

The evil from which the men of the Christian world suffer is that they have temporarily lost religion.

Some people, having come to see the discord between the existing religion and the degree of mental and 31 scientific development attained by humanity at the present time, have decided that in general no religion whatever is necessary. They live without religion and preach the uselessness of any religion of whatever kind. Others, holding to that distorted form of the Christian religion which is now preached, likewise live without religion, professing empty external forms, which cannot serve as guidance for men.

Yet a religion which answers to the demands of our time does exist and is known to all men, and in a latent state lives in the hearts of men of the Christian world. Therefore that this religion should become evident to and binding upon all men, it is only necessary that educated men — the leaders of the masses — should understand that religion is necessary to man, that without religion men cannot live a good life, and that what they call science cannot replace religion; and that those in power and who support the old empty forms of religion should understand that what they support and preach under the form of religion is not only not religion, but is the chief obstacle to men’s appropriating the true religion which they already know, and which can alone deliver them from their calamities. So that the only certain means of man’s salvation consists merely in ceasing to do that which hinders men from assimilating the true religion which already lives in their consciousness.

Chapter 11

I had finished this writing when news came of the destruction of six hundred innocent lives opposite Port Arthur. It would seem that the useless suffering and 32 death of these unfortunate deluded men who have needlessly and so dreadfully perished ought to disabuse those who were the cause of this destruction. I am not alluding to Makaroff and other officers — all these men knew what they were doing, and wherefore, and they voluntarily, for personal advantage, for ambition, did as they did, disguising themselves in pretended patriotism, a pretence not condemned merely because it is universal. I allude rather to those unfortunate men drawn from all parts of Russia, who, by the help of religious fraud, and under fear of punishment, have been torn from an honest, reasonable, useful, laborious family life, driven to the other end of the world, placed on a cruel, senseless machine for slaughter, and torn to bits, drowned along with this stupid machine in a distant sea, without any need or any possibility of advantage from all their privations, efforts, and sufferings, or from the death which overtook them.

In 1830, during the Polish war, the adjutant Vilijinsky sent to St. Petersburg by Klopitsky, in a conversation held in French with Dibitch, in answer to the latter’s demand that the Russian troops should enter Poland, said to him: —

“Monsieur le Maréchal, I think that in that case it will be quite impossible for the Polish nation to accept this manifesto.…”

“Believe me, the Emperor will make no further concessions.”

“Then I foresee that, unhappily, there will be war, that much blood will be shed, there will be many unfortunate victims.”

“Do not think so; at most there will be ten thousand 33 who will perish on both sides, and that is all,” said Dibitch in his German accent, quite confident that he, together with another man as cruel and foreign to Russian and Polish life as he was himself, — Nicholas I, — had the right to condemn or not to condemn to death ten or a hundred thousand Russians and Poles.

One hardly believes that this could have been, so senseless and dreadful is it, — and yet it was; sixty thousand maintainers of their families lost their lives owing to the will of those men. And now the same thing is taking place.

In order not to let the Japanese into Manchuria, and to expel them from Korea, not ten thousand, but fifty and more thousands will, according to all probability, be necessary. I do not know whether Nicholas II and Kuropatkin say like Dibitch in so many words that not more than fifty thousand lives will be necessary for this on the Russian side alone, only and only that; but they think it — they cannot but think it, because the work they are doing speaks for itself; that ceaseless stream of unfortunate, deluded Russian peasants now being transported by thousands to the Far East — these are those same not more than fifty thousand live Russian men whom Nicholas Romanoff and Alexis Kuropatkin have decided they may get killed, and who will be killed, in support of those stupidities, robberies, and every kind of abomination which were accomplished in China and Korea by immoral ambitious men 34 now sitting peacefully in their palaces and expecting new glory and new advantage and profit from the slaughter of these fifty thousand unfortunate, defrauded Russian workingmen guilty of nothing and gaining nothing by their sufferings and death. For other people’s land, to which the Russians have no right, which has been criminally seized from its legitimate owners, and which, in reality, is not even necessary to the Russians — and also for certain dark dealings by speculators, who in Korea wished to gain money out of other people’s forests — many millions of money are spent, i.e. a great part of the labor of the whole of the Russian people, while the future generations of this people are bound by debts, its best workmen are withdrawn from labor, and scores of thousands of its sons are mercilessly doomed to death; and the destruction of these unfortunate men is already begun. More than this: the war is being managed by those who have hatched it so badly, so negligently, all is so unexpected, so unprepared, that, as one paper admits, Russia’s chief chance of success lies in the fact that it possesses inexhaustible human material. It is upon this that those rely who send to death scores of thousands of Russian men!

It is frankly said that the regrettable reverses of our fleet must be compensated on the land. In plain language this means that if the authorities have badly directed things on sea, and by their negligence have destroyed not only the nation’s millions, but thousands of lives, we can make it up by condemning to death on land several more scores of thousands!

When crawling locusts cross rivers, it happens that 35 the lower layers are drowned until from the bodies of the drowned is formed a bridge over which the upper ranks can pass. In the same way are the Russian people being disposed of. Thus the first lower layer is already beginning to drown, indicating the way to other thousands, who will all likewise perish.

And are the originators, directors, and supporters of this dreadful work beginning to understand their sin, their crime? Not in the least. They are quite persuaded that they have fulfilled, and are fulfilling, their duty, and they are proud of their activity. People speak of the loss of the brave Makaroff, who, as all agree, was able to kill men very cleverly; they deplore the loss of a drowned excellent machine of slaughter which had cost so many millions of roubles; they discuss the question of how to find another murderer as capable as the poor benighted Makaroff; they invent new, still more efficacious, tools of slaughter; and all the guilty men engaged in this dreadful work, from the Tsar to the humblest journalist, all with one voice call for new insanities, new cruelties, for the increase of brutality and hatred of one’s fellow-men.

“Makaroff is not the only man in Russia, and every admiral placed in his position will follow in his steps and will continue the plan and the idea of Makaroff, who has nobly perished in the strife,” writes the Novoe Vremya.

“Let us earnestly pray God for those who have laid down their lives for the sacred Fatherland, without doubting for one moment that the Fatherland will give us new sons, equally virtuous, for the further struggle, and will find in them an inexhaustible store 36 of strength for a worthy completion of the work,” writes the St. Petersburg Viedomosti.

“A ripe nation will draw no other conclusion from the defeat, however unprecedented, than that we should continue, develop, and conclude the strife; therefore let us find in ourselves new strength; new heroes of the spirit will arise,” writes the Russ, — and so forth.

So murder and every kind of crime go on with greater fury. People enthusiastically admire the martial spirit of the volunteers who, having come unexpectedly upon fifty of their fellow-men, slay all of them, or take possession of a village and slaughter all its population, or hang or shoot those accused of being spies — i.e. of doing the very same thing which is regarded as indispensable and is constantly done on our side. News about these crimes is reported in pompous telegrams to their chief director, the Tsar, who, in return, sends to his virtuous troops his blessing on the continuation of such deeds.

Is it not evident that, if there be a salvation from this position, it is only one: that one which Jesus teaches?— “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness (that which is within you), and all the rest — i.e. all that practical welfare toward which man is striving — will of itself be realized.”

Such is the law of life: practical welfare is attained not when man strives toward this practical welfare — such striving, on the contrary, for the most part removes man from the attainment of what he seeks; but only when man, without thinking of the attainment of practical welfare, strives toward the most perfect 37 fulfilment of that which before God, before the Source and Law of his life, he regards as right. Then only, incidentally, is practical welfare also attained.

So that the true salvation of men is only one thing: the fulfilment of the will of God by each individual man within himself — i.e. in that portion of the universe which alone is subject to his power. In this is the chief, the only, destiny and duty of every individual man, and at the same time this is the only means by which every individual man can influence others; and, therefore, to this, and to this only, should all the efforts of every man be directed.

May 2, 1904.

Chapter 12

I had only just despatched the last of the preceding pages of this paper when the dreadful news came of a new iniquity committed in regard to the Russian people by those light-minded men who, crazed with power, have appropriated the right of managing them. Again coarse and servile slaves of slaves, dressed up in various dazzling attires — varieties of Generals wishing to distinguish themselves, or to earn the right to add one more little star, fingle fangle, or scrap of ribbon to their idiotic glaring get-up, or else from stupidity or carelessness — again these miserable men have destroyed amid dreadful sufferings thousands of those honorable, kind, hard-working laborers who feed them. And again this iniquity not only does not cause those responsible for it to reflect and repent, but one hears and reads only about its being necessary as speedily as possible to mutilate and slaughter a greater number 38 of men, and to ruin still more families, both Russian and Japanese.

More than this, to prepare men for fresh iniquities of this kind, the perpetrators of these crimes, far from recognizing what is evident to all — viz. that for the Russians this event, even from their patriotic, military point of view, was a scandalous defeat — endeavor to assure credulous people that these unfortunate Russian laboring men — lured into a trap like cattle into a slaughterhouse, of whom several thousands have been killed and maimed merely because one General did not understand what another General had said — have performed an act of heroism because those who could not run away were killed and those who did run away remained alive. As to the fact that one of these immoral and cruel men, distinguished by the titles of Generals, Admirals, drowned a quantity of peaceful Japanese, this is also described as a great and glorious act of heroism, which must gladden the hearts of Russians. And in all the papers are reprinted this awful appeal to murder: —

“Let the two thousand Russian soldiers killed on the Yalu, together with the maimed Retvisan and her sister ships, with our lost torpedo-boats, teach our cruisers with what devastation they must break in upon the shores of base Japan. She has sent her soldiers to shed Russian blood, and no quarter should be afforded her. Now one cannot — it is sinful — be sentimental; we must fight; we must direct such heavy blows that the memory of them shall freeze the treacherous hearts of the Japanese. Now is the time for the cruisers to go out to sea to reduce to ashes the towns of Japan, 39 flying as a dreadful calamity along its shores. No more sentimentality.”

The frightful work commenced is continued. Loot, violence, murder, hypocrisy, theft, and, above all, the most fearful fraud — the distortion of religious teachings, both Christian and Buddhistic — continue. The Tsar, the chief responsible person, continues to review the troops, to thank, reward, and encourage them; he issues an edict for the calling out of the reserves; his faithful subjects again and again lay down their property and lives at the feet of him they call, only with their lips, their adored Monarch. On the other hand, desiring to distinguish themselves before each other in deeds and not in words only, they tear away the fathers and the bread-winners from their orphaned families, preparing them for slaughter. The worse the position of Russia, the more recklessly do the journalists lie, transforming shameful defeats into victories, knowing that no one will contradict them; and they quietly collect money from subscriptions and sales. The more money and labor of the people is devoted to the war, the more is grabbed by various authorities and speculators, who know that no one will convict them because every one is doing the same. The military, trained for murder, having passed years in a school of inhumanity, coarseness, and idleness, rejoice — poor men — because, besides an increase of their salary, the slaughter of superiors opens vacancies for their promotion. Christian pastors continue to invite men to the greatest of crimes, continue to commit sacrilege, praying God to help the work of war; and, instead of condemning, they justify and praise that pastor who, with the cross in 40 his hands on the very scene of murder, encouraged men to the crime. The same thing is going on in Japan. The benighted Japanese go in for murder with yet greater fervor, owing to their victories; the Mikado also reviews and rewards his troops; various Generals boast of their bravery, imagining that, having learned to kill, they have acquired enlightenment. So, too, groan the unfortunate working people torn from useful labor and from their families. So their journalists also lie and rejoice over their gains. Also probably — for where murder is elevated into virtue every kind of vice is bound to flourish — also probably all kinds of commanders and speculators earn money; and Japanese theologians and religious teachers no less than the masters in the techniques of armament do not remain behind the Europeans in the techniques of religious deceit and sacrilege, but distort the great Buddhistic teaching by not only permitting but justifying that murder which Buddha forbade. The Buddhistic scientist, Soyen-Shaku, ruling over eight hundred monasteries, explains that although Buddha forbade manslaughter he also said he could never be at peace until all beings are united in the infinitely loving heart of all things, and that, therefore, in order to bring into harmony that which is discordant it is necessary to fight and to kill men.

It is as if there never had existed the Christian and Buddhistic teaching about the unity of the human spirit, the brotherhood of men, love, compassion, the sacredness of human life. Men, both Japanese and Russians, already enlightened by the truth, yet like wild animals, nay, worse than wild animals, throw themselves upon each other with the sole desire to destroy as many lives as possible. Thousands of unfortunates groan and writhe in cruel sufferings and die in agony in Japanese and Russian field hospitals, asking themselves in bewilderment why this fearful thing was done with them, while other thousands are already rotting in the earth or on the earth, or floating in the sea, in swollen decomposition. And scores of thousands of wives, fathers, mothers, children, are bemoaning their bread-winners; uselessly destroyed. Yet all this is still too little; new and newer victims are being prepared. The chief concern of the Russian organizers of slaughter is that 42 on the Russian side the stream of food for cannon — three thousand men per day doomed to destruction — should not be interrupted for one minute. The Japanese are preoccupied with the same thing. The locusts are incessantly being driven down into the river in order that the rows behind may pass over the bodies.

When will this cease, and the deceived people at last recover themselves and say: “Well, go you yourselves, you heartless Tsars, Mikados, Ministers, Bishops, priests, generals, editors, speculators, or however you may be called, go you yourselves under these shells and bullets, but we do not wish to go and we will not go. Leave us in peace, to plough, and sow, and build, — and also to feed you.” It would be so natural to say this now, when amongst us in Russia resounds the weeping and wailing of hundreds of thousands of mothers, wives, and children, from whom are being snatched away their bread-earners, the so-called “reserve.” These same men, the majority of the reserve, are able to read; they know what the Far East is; they know that war is going on, not for anything which is in the least necessary to Russia, but for some dealings in strange land, leased lands, as they themselves call them, on which it seemed advantageous to some corrupt speculators to build railways and so gain profit; also they know, or might know, that they will be killed like sheep in a slaughterhouse, since the Japanese possess the latest improvements in tools of murder, which we do not, as the Russian authorities who are sending these people to death had not thought in time of furnishing themselves with the same weapons as the Japanese. Knowing all this, it would indeed be so natural to say, “Go you, 43 those who have brought on this work, all you to whom war is necessary, and who justify it; go you, and face the Japanese bullets and mines, but we will not go, because we not only do not need to do this, but we cannot understand how it can be necessary to any one.”

But no, they do not say this; they go, and they will continue to go; they cannot but go as long as they fear that which ruins the body and not that which ruins both the body and the soul. “Whether we shall be killed,” they argue, “or maimed in these chinnampos, or whatever they are called, whither we are driven, we do not know; it yet may happen that we shall get through safely, and, moreover, with rewards and glory, like those sailors who are now being feasted all over Russia because the Japanese bombs and bullets did not hit them, but somebody else; whereas should we refuse, we should be certainly sent to prison, starved, beaten, exiled to the province of Yakoutsk, perhaps even killed immediately.” So with despair in their hearts, leaving behind a good rational life, leaving their wives and their children, — they go.

Yesterday I met a Reservist soldier accompanied by his mother and wife. All three were riding in a cart; he had had a drop too much; his wife’s face was swollen with tears. He turned to me: —

“Good-by to thee! Lyof Nikolaevitch, off to the Far East.”

“Well, art thou going to fight?”

“Well, some one has to fight!”

“No one need fight!”

He reflected for a moment. “But what is one to do; where can one escape?”

I saw that he had understood me, had understood that the work to which he was being sent was an evil work.

“Where can one escape?” That is the precise expression of that mental condition which in the official and journalistic world is translated into the words— “For the Faith, the Tsar, and the Fatherland.” Those who, abandoning their hungry families, go to suffering, to death, say as they feel, “Where can one escape?” Whereas those who sit in safety in their luxurious palaces say that all Russian men are ready to sacrifice their lives for their adored Monarch, and for the glory and greatness of Russia.

Yesterday, from a peasant I know, I received two letters, one after the other. This is the first: —

“Dear Lyof Nikolaevitch, — Well, to-day I have received the official announcement of my call to the Service; to-morrow I must present myself at the headquarters. That is all. And after that — to the Far East to meet the Japanese bullets. About my own and my household’s grief I will not tell you; it is not you who will fail to understand all the horror of my position and the horrors of war; all this you have long ago painfully realized, and you understand it all. How I have longed to visit you, to have a talk with you! I had written to you a long letter in which I described the torments of my soul; but I had not had time to copy it, when I received my summons. What is my wife to do now with her four children? As an old man, of course, you cannot do anything yourself for my folks, but you might ask some of your friends in their leisure to visit my orphaned family. I beg you 45 earnestly that if my wife proves unable to bear the agony of her helplessness with her burden of children and makes up her mind to go to you for help and counsel, you will receive and console her. Although she does not know you personally, she believes in your word, and that means much. I was not able to resist the summons, but I say beforehand that through me not one Japanese family shall be orphaned. My God! how dreadful is all this — how distressing and painful to abandon all by which one lives and in which one is concerned.”

The second letter is as follows: “Kindest Lyof Nikolaevitch, Only one day of actual service has passed, and I have already lived through an eternity of most desperate torments. From 8 o’clock in the morning till 9 in the evening we have been crowded and knocked about to and fro in the barrack yard, like a herd of cattle. The comedy of medical examination was three times repeated, and those who had reported themselves ill did not receive even ten minutes’ attention before they were marked ‘Satisfactory.’ When we, these two thousand satisfactory individuals, were driven from the military commander to the barracks, along the road spread out for almost a verst stood a crowd of relatives, mothers, and wives with infants in arms; and if you had only heard and seen how they clasped their fathers, husbands, sons, and hanging round their necks wailed hopelessly! Generally I behave in a reserved way and can restrain my feelings, but I could not hold out, and I also wept. [In journalistic language this same is expressed thus: “The upheaval of patriotic feeling is immense.”] Where is the standard that can measure 46 all this immensity of woe now spreading itself over almost one-third of the world? And we, we are now that food for cannon, which in the near future will be offered as sacrifice to the God of vengeance and horror. I cannot manage to establish my inner balance. Oh! how I execrate myself for this double-mindedness which prevents my serving one Master and God.”

This man does not yet sufficiently believe that what destroys the body is not dreadful, but that which destroys both the body and the soul, therefore he cannot refuse to go; yet while leaving his own family he promises beforehand that through him not one Japanese family shall be orphaned; he believes in the chief law of God, the law of all religions — to act toward others as one wishes others to act toward oneself. Of such men more or less consciously recognizing this law, there are in our time, not in the Christian world alone, but in the Buddhistic, Mahomedan, Confucian, and Brahminic world, not only thousands but millions.

There exist true heroes, not those who are now being fêted because, having wished to kill others, they were not killed themselves, but true heroes, who are now confined in prisons and in the province of Yakoutsk for having categorically refused to enter the ranks of murderers, and who have preferred martyrdom to this departure from the law of Jesus. There are also such as he who writes to me, who go, but who will not kill. But also that majority which goes without thinking, and endeavors not to think of what it is doing, still in the depth of its soul does now already feel that it is doing an evil deed by obeying authorities who tear men from labor and from their families and send them to 47 needless slaughter of men, repugnant to their soul and their faith; and they go only because they are so entangled on all sides that— “Where can one escape?”

Meanwhile those who remain at home not only feel this, but know and express it. Yesterday in the high road I met some peasants returning from Toula. One of them was reading a leaflet as he walked by the side of his cart.

I asked, “What is that — a telegram?”

“This is yesterday’s, — but here is one of to-day.” He took another out of his pocket. We stopped. I read it.

“You should have seen what took place yesterday at the station,” he said; “it was dreadful. Wives, children, more than a thousand of them, weeping. They surrounded the train, but were allowed no further. Strangers wept, looking on. One woman from Toula gasped and fell down dead. Five children. They have since been placed in various institutions; but the father was driven away all the same.… What do we want with this Manchuria, or whatever it is called? There is sufficient land here. And what a lot of people and of property has been destroyed.”

Yes, the relation of men to war is now quite different from that which formerly existed, even so lately as the year ‘77. That which is now taking place never took place before.

The papers set forth that, during the receptions of the Tsar, who is travelling about Russia for the purpose of hypnotizing the men who are being sent to murder, indescribable enthusiasm is manifested amongst the people. As a matter of fact, something quite different 48 is being manifested. From all sides one hears reports that in one place three Reservists have hanged themselves; in another spot, two more; in yet another, about a woman whose husband had been taken away bringing her children to the conscription committee-room and leaving them there; while another hanged herself in the yard of the military commander. All are dissatisfied, gloomy, exasperated. The words, “For the Faith, the King, and the Fatherland,” the National Anthem, and shouts of “Hurrah” no longer act upon people as they once did. Another warfare of a different kind — the struggling consciousness of the deceit and sinfulness of the work to which people are being called — is more and more taking possession of the people.

Yes, the great strife of our time is not that now taking place between the Japanese and the Russians, nor that which may blaze up between the white and yellow races, not that strife which is carried on by mines, bombs, bullets, but that spiritual strife which without ceasing has gone on and is now going on between the enlightened consciousness of mankind now waiting for manifestation and that darkness and that burden which surrounds and oppresses mankind.

In His own time Jesus yearned in expectation, and said, “I came to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish that it were already kindled.” Luke xii. 49.

That which Jesus longed for is being accomplished, the fire is being kindled. Then do not let us check it, but let us spread and serve it.

13 May, 1904.

I should never finish this paper if I were to continue to add to it all that corroborates its essential idea. 49 Yesterday the news came in of the sinking of the Japanese ironclads; and in the so-called higher circles of Russian fashionable, rich, intellectual society they are, without the slightest conscientious scruples, rejoicing at the destruction of a thousand human lives. Yet to-day I have received from a simple seaman, a man standing on the lowest plane of society, the following letter:

“Much respected Lyof Nikolaevitch, I greet you with a low bow, with love, much respected Lyof Nikolaevitch. I have read your book. It was very pleasant reading for me. I have been a great lover of reading your works. Well, Lyof Nikolaevitch, we are now in a state of war, please write to me whether it is agreeable to God or not that our commanders compel us to kill. I beg you, Lyof Nikolaevitch, write to me please whether or not the truth now exists on earth. Tell me, Lyof Nikolaevitch. In church here a prayer is being read, the priest mentions the Christ-loving army. Is it true or not that God loves war? I pray you, Lyof Nikolaevitch, have you got any books from which I could see whether truth exists on earth or not? Send me such books. What they cost, I will pay. I beg you, Lyof Nikolaevitch, do not neglect my request. If there are no books then send me a letter. I will be very glad when I receive a letter from you. I will await your letter with impatience. Good-by for the present. I remain alive and well and wish the same to you from the Lord God. Good health and good success in your work.”

Moscow Census

ARTICLE ON THE CENSUS IN MOSCOW.

Translated by Isabel F. Hapgood 1887

The object of a census is scientific. A census is a sociological investigation. And the object of the science of sociology is the happiness of the people. This science and its methods differ sharply from all other sciences.

Its peculiarity lies in this, that sociological investigations are not conducted by learned men in their cabinets, observatories and laboratories, but by two thousand people from the community. A second peculiarity is this, that the investigations of other sciences are not conducted on living people, but here living people are the subjects. A third peculiarity is, that the aim of every other science is simply knowledge, while here it is the good of the people. One man may investigate a nebula, but for the investigation of Moscow, two thousand persons are necessary. The object of the study of nebulæ is merely that we may know about nebulæ; the object of the study of inhabitants is that sociological laws may be deduced, and that, on the foundation of these laws, a better life for the people may be established. It makes no difference to the nebula whether it is studied or not, and it has waited long, and is ready to wait a great while longer; but it is not a matter of indifference to the inhabitants of Moscow, especially to those unfortunates who constitute the most interesting subjects of the science of sociology.

The census-taker enters a night lodging-house; in the basement he finds a man dying of hunger, and he politely inquires his profession, his name, his native place, the character of his occupation, and after a little hesitation as to whether he is to be entered in the list as alive, he writes him in and goes his way.

And thus will the two thousand young men proceed. This is not as it should be.

Science does its work, and the community, summoned in the persons of these two thousand young men to aid science, must do its work. A statistician drawing his deductions from figures may feel indifferent towards people, but we census-takers, who see these people and who have no scientific prepossessions, cannot conduct ourselves towards them in an inhuman manner. Science fulfils its task, and its work is for its objects and in the distant future, both useful and necessary to us. For men of science, we can calmly say, that in 1882 there were so many beggars, so many prostitutes, and so many uncared-for children. Science may say this with composure and with pride, because it knows that the confirmation of this fact conduces to the elucidation of the laws of sociology, and that the elucidation of the laws of sociology leads to a better constitution of society. But what if we, the unscientific people, say: “You are perishing in vice, you are dying of hunger, you are pining away, and killing each other; so do not grieve about this; when you shall have all perished, and hundreds of thousands more like you, then, possibly, science may be able to arrange everything in an excellent manner.” For men of science, the census has its interest; and for us also, it possesses an interest of a wholly different significance. The interest and significance of the census for the community lie in this, that it furnishes it with a mirror into which, willy nilly, the whole community, and each one of us, gaze.

The figures and deductions will be the mirror. It is possible to refrain from reading them, as it is possible to turn away from the looking-glass. It is possible to glance cursorily at both figures and mirror, and it is also possible to scrutinize them narrowly. To go about in connection with the census as thousands of people are now about to do, is to scrutinize one’s self closely in the mirror.

What does this census, that is about to be made, mean for us people of Moscow, who are not men of science? It means two things. In the first place, this, that we may learn with certainty, that among us tens of thousands who live in ease, there dwell tens of thousands of people who lack bread, clothing and shelter; in the second place, this, that our brothers and sons will go and view this and will calmly set down according to the schedules, how many have died of hunger and cold.

And both these things are very bad.

All cry out upon the instability of our social organization, about the exceptional situation, about revolutionary tendencies. Where lies the root of all this? To what do the revolutionists point? To poverty, to inequality in the distribution of wealth. To what do the conservatives point? To the decline in moral principle. If the opinion of the revolutionists is correct, what must be done? Poverty and the inequality of wealth must be lessened. How is this to be effected? The rich must share with the poor. If the opinion of the conservatives is correct, that the whole evil arises from the decline in moral principle, what can be more immoral and vicious than the consciously indifferent survey of popular sufferings, with the sole object of cataloguing them? What must be done? To the census we must add the work of affectionate intercourse of the idle and cultivated rich, with the oppressed and unenlightened poor.

Science will do its work, let us perform ours also. Let us do this. In the first place, let all of us who are occupied with the census, superintendents and census-takers, make it perfectly clear to ourselves what we are to investigate and why. It is the people, and the object is that they may be happy. Whatever may be one’s view of life, every one will agree that there is nothing more important than human life, and that there is no more weighty task than to remove the obstacles to the development of this life, and to assist it.

This idea, that the relations of men to poverty are at the foundation of all popular suffering, is expressed in the Gospels with striking harshness, but at the same time, with decision and clearness for all.

“He who has clothed the naked, fed the hungry, visited the prisoner, that man has clothed Me, fed Me, visited Me,” that is, has done the deed for that which is the most important thing in the world.

However a man may look upon things, every one knows that this is more important than all else on earth.

And this must not be forgotten, and we must not permit any other consideration to veil from us the most weighty fact of our existence. Let us inscribe, and reckon, but let us not forget that if we encounter a man who is hungry and without clothes, it is of more moment to succor him than to make all possible investigations, than to discover all possible sciences. Perish the whole census if we may but feed an old woman. The census will be longer and more difficult, but we cannot pass by people in the poorer quarters and merely note them down without taking any heed of them and without endeavoring, according to the measure of our strength and moral sensitiveness, to aid them. This in the first place. In the second, this is what must be done: All of us, who are to take part in the census, must refrain from irritation because we are annoyed; let us understand that this census is very useful for us; that if this is not cure, it is at least an effort to study the disease, for which we should be thankful; that we must seize this occasion, and, in connection with it, we must seek to recover our health, in some small degree. Let all of us, then, who are connected with the census, endeavor to take advantage of this solitary opportunity in ten years to purify ourselves somewhat; let us not strive against, but assist the census, and assist it especially in this sense, that it may not have merely the harsh character of the investigation of a hopelessly sick person, but may have the character of healing and restoration to health. For the occasion is unique: eighty energetic, cultivated men, having under their orders two thousand young men of the same stamp, are to make their way over the whole of Moscow, and not leave a single man in Moscow with whom they have not entered into personal relations. All the wounds of society, the wounds of poverty, of vice, of ignorance — all will be laid bare. Is there not something re-assuring in this? The census-takers will go about Moscow, they will set down in their lists, without distinction, those insolent with prosperity, the satisfied, the calm, those who are on the way to ruin, and those who are ruined, and the curtain will fall. The census-takers, our sons and brothers, these young men will behold all this. They will say: “Yes, our life is very terrible and incurable,” and with this admission they will live on like the rest of us, awaiting a remedy for the evil from this or that extraneous force. But those who are perishing will go on dying, in their ruin, and those on the road to ruin will continue in their course. No, let us rather grasp the idea that science has its task, and that we, on the occasion of this census, have our task, and let us not allow the curtain once lifted to be dropped, but let us profit by the opportunity in order to remove the immense evil of the separation existing between us and the poor, and to establish intercourse and the work of redressing the evil of unhappiness and ignorance, and our still greater misfortune, — the indifference and aimlessness of our life.

I already hear the customary remark: “All this is very fine, these are sounding phrases; but do you tell us what to do and how to do it?” Before I say what is to be done, it is indispensable that I should say what is not to be done. It is indispensable, first of all, in my opinion, in order that something practical may come of this activity, that no society should be formed, that there should be no publicity, that there should be no collection of money by balls, bazaars or theatres; that there should be no announcement that Prince A. has contributed one thousand rubles, and the honorable citizen B. three thousand; that there shall be no collection, no calling to account, no writing up, — most of all, no writing up, so that there may not be the least shadow of any institution, either governmental or philanthropic.

But in my opinion, this is what should be done instantly: Firstly, All those who agree with me should go to the directors, and ask for their shares the poorest sections, the poorest dwellings; and in company with the census-takers, twenty-three, twenty-four or twenty-five in number, they should go to these quarters, enter into relations with the people who are in need of assistance, and labor for them.

Secondly: We should direct the attention of the superintendents and census-takers to the inhabitants in need of assistance, and work for them personally, and point them out to those who wish to work over them. But I am asked: What do you mean by working over them? I reply; Doing good to people. The words “doing good” are usually understood to mean, giving money. But, in my opinion, doing good and giving money are not only not the same thing, but two different and generally opposite things. Money, in itself, is evil. And therefore he who gives money gives evil. This error of thinking that the giving of money means doing good, arose from the fact, that generally, when a man does good, he frees himself from evil, and from money among other evils. And therefore, to give money is only a sign that a man is beginning to rid himself of evil. To do good, signifies to do that which is good for man. But, in order to know what is good for man, it is necessary to be on humane, i.e., on friendly terms with him. And therefore, in order to do good, it is not money that is necessary, but, first of all, a capacity for detaching ourselves, for a time at least, from the conditions of our own life. It is necessary that we should not be afraid to soil our boots and clothing, that we should not fear lice and bedbugs, that we should not fear typhus fever, diphtheria, and small-pox. It is necessary that we should be in a condition to seat ourselves by the bunk of a tatterdemalion and converse earnestly with him in such a manner, that he may feel that the man who is talking with him respects and loves him, and is not putting on airs and admiring himself. And in order that this may be so, it is necessary that a man should find the meaning of life outside himself. This is what is requisite in order that good should be done, and this is what it is difficult to find.

When the idea of assisting through the medium of the census occurred to me, I discussed the matter with divers of the wealthy, and I saw how glad the rich were of this opportunity of decently getting rid of their money, that extraneous sin which they cherish in their hearts. “Take three hundred — five hundred rubles, if you like,” they said to me, “but I cannot go into those dens myself.” There was no lack of money. Remember Zaccheus, the chief of the Publicans in the Gospel. Remember how he, because he was small of stature, climbed into a tree to see Christ, and how when Christ announced that he was going to his house, having understood but one thing, that the Master did not approve of riches, he leaped headlong from the tree, ran home and arranged his feast. And how, as soon as Christ entered, Zaccheus instantly declared that he gave the half of his goods to the poor, and if he had wronged any man, to him he would restore fourfold. And remember how all of us, when we read the Gospel, set but little store on this Zaccheus, and involuntarily look with scorn on this half of his goods, and fourfold restitution. And our feeling is correct. Zaccheus, according to his lights, performed a great deed. He had not even begun to do good. He had only begun in some small measure to purify himself from evil, and so Christ told him.

He merely said to him: “To-day is salvation come nigh unto this house.”

What if the Moscow Zaccheuses were to do the same that he did? Assuredly, more than one milliard could be collected. Well, and what of that? Nothing. There would be still greater sin if we were to think of distributing this money among the poor. Money is not needed. What is needed is self-sacrificing action; what is needed are people who would like to do good, not by giving extraneous sin-money, but by giving their own labor, themselves, their lives. Where are such people to be found? Here they are, walking about Moscow. They are the student enumerators. I have seen how they write out their charts. The student writes in the night lodging-house, by the bedside of a sick man. “What is your disease?”— “Small-pox.” And the student does not make a wry face, but proceeds with his writing. And this he does for the sake of some doubtful science. What would he do if he were doing it for the sake of his own undoubted good and the good of others?

When children, in merry mood, feel a desire to laugh, they never think of devising some reason for laughter, but they laugh without any reason, because they are gay; and thus these charming youths sacrifice themselves. They have not, as yet, contrived to devise any means of sacrificing themselves, but they devote their attention, their labor, their lives, in order to write out a chart, from which something does or does not appear. What would it be if this labor were something really worth their while? There is and there always will be labor of this sort, which is worthy of the devotion of a whole life, whatever the man’s life may be. This labor is the loving intercourse of man with man, and the breaking-down of the barriers which men have erected between themselves, so that the enjoyment of the rich man may not be disturbed by the wild howls of the men who are reverting to beasts, and by the groans of helpless hunger, cold and disease.

This census will place before the eyes of us well-to-do and so-called cultivated people, all the poverty and oppression which is lurking in every corner of Moscow. Two thousand of our brothers, who stand on the highest rung of the ladder, will come face to face with thousands of people who stand on the lowest round of society. Let us not miss this opportunity of communion. Let us, through these two thousand men, preserve this communion, and let us make use of it to free ourselves from the aimlessness and the deformity of our lives, and to free the condemned from that indigence and misery which do not allow the sensitive people in our ranks to enjoy our good fortune in peace.

This is what I propose: (1) That all our directors and enumerators should join to their business of the census a task of assistance, — of work in the interest of the good of these people, who, in our opinion, are in need of assistance, and with whom we shall come in contact; (2) That all of us, directors and enumerators, not by appointment of the committee of the City Council, but by the appointment of our own hearts, shall remain in our posts, — that is, in our relations to the inhabitants of the town who are in need of assistance, — and that, at the conclusion of the work of the census, we shall continue our work of aid. If I have succeeded in any degree in expressing what I feel, I am sure that the only impossibility will be getting the directors and enumerators to abandon this, and that others will present themselves in the places of those who leave; (3) That we should collect all those inhabitants of Moscow, who feel themselves fit to work for the needy, into sections, and begin our activity now, in accordance with the hints of the census-takers and directors, and afterwards carry it on; (4) That all who, on account of age, weakness, or other causes, cannot give their personal labor among the needy, shall intrust the task to their young, strong, and willing relatives. (Good consists not in the giving of money, it consists in the loving intercourse of men. This alone is needed.)

Whatever may be the outcome of this, any thing will be better than the present state of things.

Then let the final act of our enumerators and directors be to distribute a hundred twenty-kopek pieces to those who have no food; and this will be not a little, not so much because the hungry will have food, but because the directors and enumerators will conduct themselves in a humane manner towards a hundred poor people. How are we to compute the possible results which will accrue to the balance of public morality from the fact that, instead of the sentiments of irritation, anger, and envy which we arouse by reckoning the hungry, we shall awaken in a hundred instances a sentiment of good, which will be communicated to a second and a third, and an endless wave which will thus be set in motion and flow between men? And this is a great deal. Let those of the two thousand enumerators who have never comprehended this before, come to understand that, when going about among the poor, it is impossible to say, “This is very interesting;” that a man should not express himself with regard to another man’s wretchedness by interest only; and this will be a good thing. Then let assistance be rendered to all those unfortunates, of whom there are not so many as I at first supposed in Moscow, who can easily be helped by money alone to a great extent. Then let those laborers who have come to Moscow and have eaten their very clothing from their backs, and who cannot return to the country, be despatched to their homes; let the abandoned orphans receive supervision; let feeble old men and indigent old women, who subsist on the charity of their companions, be released from their half-famished and dying condition. (And this is very possible. There are not very many of them.) And this will also be a very, very great deal accomplished. But why not think and hope that more and yet more will be done? Why not expect that that real task will be partially carried out, or at least begun, which is effected, not by money, but by labor; that weak drunkards who have lost their health, unlucky thieves, and prostitutes who are still capable of reformation, should be saved? All evil may not be exterminated, but there will arise some understanding of it, and the contest with it will not be police methods, but by inward modes, — by the brotherly intercourse of the men who perceive the evil, with the men who do not perceive it because they are a part of it.

No matter what may be accomplished, it will be a great deal. But why not hope that every thing will be accomplished? Why not hope that we shall accomplish thus much, that there shall not exist in Moscow a single person in want of clothing, a single hungry person, a single human being sold for money, nor a single individual oppressed by the judgment of man, who shall not know that there is fraternal aid for him? It is not surprising that this should not be so, but it is surprising that this should exist side by side with our superfluous leisure and wealth, and that we can live on composedly, knowing that these things are so. Let us forget that in great cities and in London, there is a proletariat, and let us not say that so it must needs be. It need not be this, and it should not, for this is contrary to our reason and our heart, and it cannot be if we are living people. Why not hope that we shall come to understand that there is not a single duty incumbent upon us, not to mention personal duty, for ourselves, nor our family, nor social, nor governmental, nor scientific, which is more weighty than this? Why not think that we shall at last come to apprehend this? Only because to do so would be too great a happiness. Why not hope that some the people will wake up, and will comprehend that every thing else is a delusion, but that this is the only work in life? And why should not this “some time” be now, and in Moscow? Why not hope that the same thing may happen in society and humanity which suddenly takes place in a diseased organism, when the moment of convalescence suddenly sets in? The organism is diseased this means, that the cells cease to perform their mysterious functions; some die, others become infected, others still remain in perfect condition, and work on by themselves. But all of a sudden the moment comes when every living cell enters upon an independent and healthy activity: it crowds out the dead cells, encloses the infected ones in a living wall, it communicates life to that which was lifeless; and the body is restored, and lives with new life.

Why should we not think and expect that the cells of our society will acquire fresh life and re-invigorate the organism? We know not in what the power of the cells consists, but we do know that our life is in our own power. We can show forth the light that is in us, or we may extinguish it.

Let one man approach the Lyapinsky house in the dusk, when a thousand persons, naked and hungry, are waiting in the bitter cold for admission, and let that one man attempt to help, and his heart will ache till it bleeds, and he will flee thence with despair and anger against men; but let a thousand men approach that other thousand with a desire to help, and the task will prove easy and delightful. Let the mechanicians invent a machine for lifting the weight that is crushing us — that is a good thing; but until they shall have invented it, let us bear down upon the people, like fools, like muzhiki, like peasants, like Christians, and see whether we cannot raise them.

And now, brothers, all together, and away it goes!

TOLSTOY ON SHAKESPEARE

Translated by V. Tchertkoff 1906

Chapter 1

Mr. Crosby’s article on Shakespeare’s attitude toward the working classes suggested to me the idea of also expressing my own long-established opinion about the works of Shakespeare, in direct opposition, as it is, to that established in all the whole European world. Calling to mind all the struggle of doubt and self-deceit, — efforts to attune myself to Shakespeare — which I went through owing to my complete disagreement with this universal adulation, and, presuming that many have experienced and are experiencing the same, I think that it may not be unprofitable to express definitely and frankly this view of mine, opposed to that of the majority, and the more so as the conclusions to which I came, when examining the causes of my disagreement with the universally established opinion, are, it seems to me, not without interest and significance.

My disagreement with the established opinion about Shakespeare is not the result of an accidental frame of mind, nor of a light-minded attitude toward the matter, but is the outcome of many years’ repeated and insistent endeavors to harmonize my own views of Shakespeare with those established amongst all civilized men of the Christian world.

I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful esthetic pleasure, but having read, one after the other, works regarded as his best: “King Lear,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Hamlet” and “Macbeth,” not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium, and doubted as to whether I was senseless in feeling works regarded as the summit of perfection by the whole of the civilized world to be trivial and positively bad, or whether the significance which this civilized world attributes to the works of Shakespeare was itself senseless. My consternation was increased by the fact that I always keenly felt the beauties of poetry in every form; then why should artistic works recognized by the whole world as those of a genius, — the works of Shakespeare, — not only fail to please me, but be disagreeable to me? For a long time I could not believe in myself, and during fifty years, in order to test myself, I several times recommenced reading Shakespeare in every possible form, in Russian, in English, in German and in Schlegel’s translation, as I was advised. Several times I read the dramas and the comedies and historical plays, and I invariably underwent the same feelings: repulsion, weariness, and bewilderment. At the present time, before writing this preface, being desirous once more to test myself, I have, as an old man of seventy-five, again read the whole of Shakespeare, including the historical plays, the “Henrys,” “Troilus and Cressida,” the “Tempest,” “Cymbeline,” and I have felt, with even greater force, the same feelings, — this time, however, not of bewilderment, but of firm, indubitable conviction that the unquestionable glory of a great genius which Shakespeare enjoys, and which compels writers of our time to imitate him and readers and spectators to discover in him non-existent merits, — thereby distorting their esthetic and ethical understanding, — is a great evil, as is every untruth.

Altho I know that the majority of people so firmly believe in the greatness of Shakespeare that in reading this judgment of mine they will not admit even the possibility of its justice, and will not give it the slightest attention, nevertheless I will endeavor, as well as I can, to show why I believe that Shakespeare can not be recognized either as a great genius, or even as an average author.

For illustration of my purpose I will take one of Shakespeare’s most extolled dramas, “King Lear,” in the enthusiastic praise of which, the majority of critics agree.

“The tragedy of Lear is deservedly celebrated among the dramas of Shakespeare,” says Dr. Johnson. “There is perhaps no play which keeps the attention so strongly fixed, which so much agitates our passions, and interests our curiosity.”

“We wish that we could pass this play over and say nothing about it,” says Hazlitt, “all that we can say must fall far short of the subject, or even of what we ourselves conceive of it. To attempt to give a description of the play itself, or of its effects upon the mind, is mere impertinence; yet we must say something. It is, then, the best of Shakespeare’s plays, for it is the one in which he was the most in earnest.”

“If the originality of invention did not so much stamp almost every play of Shakespeare,” says Hallam, “that to name one as the most original seems a disparagement to others, we might say that this great prerogative of genius, was exercised above all in ‘Lear.’ It diverges more from the model of regular tragedy than ‘Macbeth,’ or ‘Othello,’ and even more than ‘Hamlet,’ but the fable is better constructed than in the last of these and it displays full as much of the almost superhuman inspiration of the poet as the other two.”

“‘King Lear’ may be recognized as the perfect model of the dramatic art of the whole world,” says Shelley.

“I am not minded to say much of Shakespeare’s Arthur,” says Swinburne. “There are one or two figures in the world of his work of which there are no words that would be fit or good to say. Another of these is Cordelia. The place they have in our lives and thoughts is not one for talk. The niche set apart for them to inhabit in our secret hearts is not penetrable by the lights and noises of common day. There are chapels in the cathedrals of man’s highest art, as in that of his inmost life, not made to be set open to the eyes and feet of the world. Love, and Death, and Memory, keep charge for us in silence of some beloved names. It is the crowning glory of genius, the final miracle and transcendent gift of poetry, that it can add to the number of these and engrave on the very heart of our remembrance fresh names and memories of its own creation.”

“Lear is the occasion for Cordelia,” says Victor Hugo. “Maternity of the daughter toward the father; profound subject; maternity venerable among all other maternities, so admirably rendered by the legend of that Roman girl, who, in the depths of a prison, nurses her old father. The young breast near the white beard! There is not a spectacle more holy. This filial breast is Cordelia. Once this figure dreamed of and found, Shakespeare created his drama.... Shakespeare, carrying Cordelia in his thoughts, created that tragedy like a god who, having an aurora to put forward, makes a world expressly for it.”

“In ‘King Lear,’ Shakespeare’s vision sounded the abyss of horror to its very depths, and his spirit showed neither fear, nor giddiness, nor faintness, at the sight,” says Brandes. “On the threshold of this work, a feeling of awe comes over one, as on the threshold of the Sistine Chapel, with its ceiling of frescoes by Michael Angelo, — only that the suffering here is far more intense, the wail wilder, and the harmonies of beauty more definitely shattered by the discords of despair.”

Such are the judgments of the critics about this drama, and therefore I believe I am not wrong in selecting it as a type of Shakespeare’s best.

As impartially as possible, I will endeavor to describe the contents of the drama, and then to show why it is not that acme of perfection it is represented to be by critics, but is something quite different.

Chapter 2

The drama of “Lear” begins with a scene giving the conversation between two courtiers, Kent and Gloucester. Kent, pointing to a young man present, asks Gloucester whether that is not his son. Gloucester says that he has often blushed to acknowledge the young man as his son, but has now ceased doing so. Kent says he “can not conceive him.” Then Gloucester in the presence of this son of his says: “The fellow’s mother could, and grew round-wombed, and had a son for her cradle ere she had a husband for her bed.” “I have another, a legitimate son,” continues Gloucester, “but altho this one came into the world before he was sent for, his mother was fair and there was good sport at his making, and therefore I acknowledge this one also.”

Such is the introduction. Not to mention the coarseness of these words of Gloucester, they are, farther, out of place in the mouth of a person intended to represent a noble character. One can not agree with the opinion of some critics that these words are given to Gloucester in order to show the contempt for his illegitimacy from which Edmund suffers. Were this so, it would first have been unnecessary to make the father express the contempt felt by men in general, and, secondly, Edmund, in his monolog about the injustice of those who despise him for his birth, would have mentioned such words from his father. But this is not so, and therefore these words of Gloucester at the very beginning of the piece, were merely intended as a communication to the public — in a humorous form — of the fact that Gloucester has a legitimate son and an illegitimate one.

After this, trumpets are blown, and King Lear enters with his daughters and sons-in-law, and utters a speech to the effect that, owing to old age, he wishes to retire from the cares of business and divide his kingdom between his daughters. In order to know how much he should give to each daughter, he announces that to the one who says she loves him most he will give most. The eldest daughter, Goneril, says that words can not express the extent of her love, that she loves her father more than eyesight, space, and liberty, loves him so much that it “makes her breath poor.” King Lear immediately allots his daughter on the map, her portion of fields, woods, rivers, and meadows, and asks the same question of the second daughter. The second daughter, Regan, says that her sister has correctly expressed her own feelings, only not strongly enough. She, Regan, loves her father so much that everything is abhorrent to her except his love. The king rewards this daughter, also, and then asks his youngest, the favorite, in whom, according to his expression, are “interess’d the vines of France and the milk of Burgundy,” that is, whose hand is being claimed by the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy, — he asks Cordelia how she loves him. Cordelia, who personifies all the virtues, as the eldest two all the vices, says, quite out of place, as if on purpose to irritate her father, that altho she loves and honors him, and is grateful to him, yet if she marries, all her love will not belong to her father, but she will also love her husband.

Hearing these words, the King loses his temper, and curses this favorite daughter with the most dreadful and strange maledictions, saying, for instance, that he will henceforth love his daughter as little as he loves the man who devours his own children.

“The barbarous Scythian,

Or he that makes his generation messes

To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom

Be as well neighbour’d, pitied, and relieved.

As thou, my sometime daughter.”

The courtier, Kent, defends Cordelia, and desiring to appease the King, rebukes him for his injustice, and says reasonable things about the evil of flattery. Lear, unmoved by Kent, banishes him under pain of death, and calling to him Cordelia’s two suitors, the Duke of Burgundy and the King of France, proposes to them in turn to take Cordelia without dowry. The Duke of Burgundy frankly says that without dowry he will not take Cordelia, but the King of France takes her without dowry and leads her away. After this, the elder sisters, there and then entering into conversation, prepare to injure their father who had endowed them. Thus ends the first scene.

Not to mention the pompous, characterless language of King Lear, the same in which all Shakespeare’s Kings speak, the reader, or spectator, can not conceive that a King, however old and stupid he may be, could believe the words of the vicious daughters, with whom he had passed his whole life, and not believe his favorite daughter, but curse and banish her; and therefore the spectator, or reader, can not share the feelings of the persons participating in this unnatural scene.

The second scene opens with Edmund, Gloucester’s illegitimate son, soliloquizing on the injustice of men, who concede rights and respect to the legitimate son, but deprive the illegitimate son of them, and he determines to ruin Edgar, and to usurp his place. For this purpose, he forges a letter to himself as from Edgar, in which the latter expresses a desire to murder his father. Awaiting his father’s approach, Edmund, as if against his will, shows him this letter, and the father immediately believes that his son Edgar, whom he tenderly loves, desires to kill him. The father goes away, Edgar enters and Edmund persuades him that his father for some reason desires to kill him. Edgar immediately believes this and flees from his parent.

The relations between Gloucester and his two sons, and the feelings of these characters are as unnatural as Lear’s relation to his daughters, or even more so, and therefore it is still more difficult for the spectator to transport himself into the mental condition of Gloucester and his sons and sympathize with them, than it is to do so into that of Lear and his daughters.

In the fourth scene, the banished Kent, so disguised that Lear does not recognize him, presents himself to Lear, who is already staying with Goneril. Lear asks who he is, to which Kent answers, one doesn’t know why, in a tone quite inappropriate to his position: “A very honest-hearted fellow and as poor as the King.”— “If thou be as poor for a subject as he is for a King, thou art poor enough — How old art thou?” asks the King. “Not so young, Sir, to love a woman, etc., nor so old to dote on her.” To this the King says, “If I like thee no worse after dinner, I will not part from thee yet.”

These speeches follow neither from Lear’s position, nor his relation to Kent, but are put into the mouths of Lear and Kent, evidently because the author regards them as witty and amusing.

Goneril’s steward appears, and behaves rudely to Lear, for which Kent knocks him down. The King, still not recognizing Kent, gives him money for this and takes him into his service. After this appears the fool, and thereupon begins a prolonged conversation between the fool and the King, utterly unsuited to the position and serving no purpose. Thus, for instance, the fool says, “Give me an egg and I’ll give thee two crowns.” The King asks, “What crowns shall they be?”— “Why,” says the fool, “after I have cut the egg i’ the middle, and eat up the meat, the two crowns of the egg. When thou clovest thy crown i’ the middle, and gavest away both parts, thou borest thine ass on thy back o’er the dirt: thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown when thou gavest thy golden one away. If I speak like myself in this, let him be whipp’d that first finds it so.”

In this manner lengthy conversations go on calling forth in the spectator or reader that wearisome uneasiness which one experiences when listening to jokes which are not witty.

This conversation was interrupted by the approach of Goneril. She demands of her father that he should diminish his retinue; that he should be satisfied with fifty courtiers instead of a hundred. At this suggestion, Lear gets into a strange and unnatural rage, and asks:

“Doth any here know me? This is not Lear:

Does Lear walk thus? speak thus? Where are his eyes?

Either his notion weakens, his discernings

Are lethargied. Ha! ’tis not so.

Who is it that can tell me who I am?”

And so forth.

While this goes on the fool does not cease to interpolate his humorless jokes. Goneril’s husband then enters and wishes to appease Lear, but Lear curses Goneril, invoking for her either sterility or the birth of such an infant-monster as would return laughter and contempt for her motherly cares, and would thus show her all the horror and pain caused by a child’s ingratitude.

These words which express a genuine feeling, might have been touching had they stood alone. But they are lost among long and high-flown speeches, which Lear keeps incessantly uttering quite inappropriately. He either invokes “blasts and fogs” upon the head of his daughter, or desires his curse to “pierce every sense about her,” or else appealing to his own eyes, says that should they weep, he will pluck them out and “cast them with the waters that they lose to temper clay.” And so on.

After this, Lear sends Kent, whom he still fails to recognize, to his other daughter, and notwithstanding the despair he has just manifested, he talks with the fool, and elicits his jokes. The jokes continue to be mirthless and besides creating an unpleasant feeling, similar to shame, the usual effect of unsuccessful witticisms, they are also so drawn out as to be positively dull. Thus the fool asks the King whether he can tell why one’s nose stands in the middle of one’s face? Lear says he can not. —

“Why, to keep one’s eyes of either side ‘s nose, that what a man can not smell out, he may spy out.”

“Canst tell how an oyster makes his shell?”

“No.”

“Nor I either; but I can tell why a snail has a house.”

“Why?”

“Why, to put his head in; not to give it away to his daughters and leave his horns without a case.”

“ —— Be my horses ready?”

“Thy asses are gone about ‘em. The reason why the seven stars are no more than seven is a pretty reason.”

“Because they are not eight?”

“Yes, indeed: thou would’st make a good fool.”

And so on.

After this lengthy scene, a gentleman enters and announces that the horses are ready. The fool says:

“She that’s a maid now, and laughs at my departure,

Shall not be a maid long, unless things be cut shorter.”

The second part of the first scene of the second act begins by the villain Edmund persuading his brother, when their father enters, to pretend that they are fighting with their swords. Edgar consents, altho it is utterly incomprehensible why he should do so. The father finds them fighting. Edgar flies and Edmund scratches his arm to draw blood and persuades his father that Edgar was working charms for the purpose of killing his father and had desired Edmund to help him, but that he, Edmund, had refused and that then Edgar flew at him and wounded his arm. Gloucester believes everything, curses Edgar and transfers all the rights of the elder and legitimate son to the illegitimate Edmund. The Duke, hearing of this, also rewards Edmund.

In the second scene, in front of Gloucester’s palace, Lear’s new servant, Kent, still unrecognized by Lear, without any reason, begins to abuse Oswald, Goneril’s steward, calling him,— “A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; — the son and heir of a mongrel bitch.” And so on. Then drawing his sword, he demands that Oswald should fight with him, saying that he will make a “sop o’ the moonshine” of him, — words which no commentators can explain. When he is stopped, he continues to give vent to the strangest abuse, saying that a tailor made Oswald, as “a stone-cutter or a painter could not have made him so ill, tho they had been but two hours o’ the trade!” He further says that, if only leave be given him, he will “tread this unbolted villain into mortar and daub the wall of a jakes with him.”

Thus Kent, whom nobody recognizes, altho both the King and the Duke of Cornwall, as well as Gloucester who is present, ought to know him well, continues to brawl, in the character of Lear’s new servant, until he is taken and put in the stocks.

The third scene takes place on a heath. Edgar, flying from the persecutions of his father, hides in a wood and tells the public what kind of lunatics exist there — beggars who go about naked, thrust wooden pricks and pins into their flesh, scream with wild voices and enforce charity, and says that he wishes to simulate such a lunatic in order to save himself from persecution. Having communicated this to the public, he retires.

The fourth scene is again before Gloucester’s castle. Enter Lear and the fool. Lear sees Kent in the stocks, and, still not recognizing him, is inflamed with rage against those who dared so to insult his messenger, and calls for the Duke and Regan. The fool goes on with his jokes.

Lear with difficulty restrains his ire. Enter the Duke and Regan. Lear complains of Goneril but Regan justifies her sister. Lear curses Goneril, and, when Regan tells him he had better return to her sister, he is indignant and says: “Ask her forgiveness?” and falls down on his knees demonstrating how indecent it would be if he were abjectly to beg food and clothing as charity from his own daughter, and he curses Goneril with the strangest curses and asks who put his servant in the stocks. Before Regan can answer, Goneril arrives. Lear becomes yet more exasperated and again curses Goneril, but when he is told that it was the Duke himself who ordered the stocks, he does not say anything, because, at this moment, Regan tells him that she can not receive him now and that he had best return to Goneril, and that in a month’s time she herself will receive him, with, however, not a hundred but fifty servants. Lear again curses Goneril and does not want to go to her, continuing to hope that Regan will accept him with the whole hundred servants. But Regan says she will receive him only with twenty-five and then Lear makes up his mind to go back to Goneril who admits fifty. But when Goneril says that even twenty-five are too many, Lear pours forth a long argument about the superfluous and the needful being relative and says that if man is not allowed more than he needs, he is not to be distinguished from a beast. Lear, or rather the actor who plays Lear’s part, adds that there is no need for a lady’s finery, which does not keep her warm. After this he flies into a mad fury and says that to take vengeance on his daughters he will do something dreadful but that he will not weep, and so he departs. A storm begins.

Such is the second act, full of unnatural events, and yet more unnatural speeches, not flowing from the position of the characters, — and finishing with a scene between Lear and his daughters which might have been powerful if it had not been permeated with the most absurdly foolish, unnatural speeches — which, moreover, have no relation to the subject, — put into the mouth of Lear. Lear’s vacillations between pride, anger, and the hope of his daughters’ giving in, would be exceedingly touching if it were not spoilt by the verbose absurdities to which he gives vent, about being ready to divorce himself from Regan’s dead mother, should Regan not be glad to receive him, — or about his calling down “fen suck’d frogs” which he invokes, upon the head of his daughter, or about the heavens being obliged to patronize old people because they themselves are old.

The third act begins with thunder, lightning, a storm of some special kind such as, according to the words of the characters in the piece, had never before taken place. On the heath, a gentleman tells Kent that Lear, banished by his daughters from their homes, is running about the heath alone, tearing his hair and throwing it to the wind, and that none but the fool is with him. In return Kent tells the gentleman that the dukes have quarrelled, and that the French army has landed at Dover, and, having communicated this intelligence, he dispatches the gentleman to Dover to meet Cordelia.

The second scene of the third act also takes place on the heath, but in another part of it. Lear walks about the heath and says words which are meant to express his despair: he desires that the winds should blow so hard that they should crack their cheeks and that the rain should flood everything, that lightning should singe his white head, and the thunder flatten the world and destroy all germens “that make ungrateful man!” The fool keeps uttering still more senseless words. Enter Kent. Lear says that for some reason during this storm all criminals shall be found out and convicted. Kent, still unrecognized by Lear, endeavors to persuade him to take refuge in a hovel. At this point the fool pronounces a prophecy in no wise related to the situation and they all depart.

The third scene is again transferred to Gloucester’s castle. Gloucester tells Edmund that the French King has already landed with his troops, and intends to help Lear. Learning this, Edmund decides to accuse his father of treason in order that he may get his heritage.

The fourth scene is again on the heath in front of the hovel. Kent invites Lear into the hovel, but Lear answers that he has no reason to shelter himself from the tempest, that he does not feel it, having a tempest in his mind, called forth by the ingratitude of his daughters, which extinguishes all else. This true feeling, expressed in simple words, might elicit sympathy, but amidst the incessant, pompous raving it escapes one and loses its significance.

The hovel into which Lear is led, turns out to be the same which Edgar has entered, disguised as a madman, i.e., naked. Edgar comes out of the hovel, and, altho all have known him, no one recognizes him, — as no one recognizes Kent, — and Edgar, Lear, and the fool begin to say senseless things which continue with interruptions for many pages. In the middle of this scene, enter Gloucester, who also does not recognize either Kent or his son Edgar, and tells them how his son Edgar wanted to kill him.

This scene is again cut short by another in Gloucester’s castle, during which Edmund betrays his father and the Duke promises to avenge himself on Gloucester. Then the scene shifts back to Lear. Kent, Edgar, Gloucester, Lear, and the fool are at a farm and talking. Edgar says: “Frateretto calls me, and tells me Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness....” The fool says: “Tell me whether a madman be a gentleman or a yeoman?” Lear, having lost his mind, says that the madman is a king. The fool says no, the madman is the yeoman who has allowed his son to become a gentleman. Lear screams: “To have a thousand with red burning spirits. Come hissing in upon ‘em,” — while Edgar shrieks that the foul fiend bites his back. At this the fool remarks that one can not believe “in the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health, a boy’s love, or a whore’s oath.” Then Lear imagines he is judging his daughters. “Sit thou here, most learned justicer,” says he, addressing the naked Edgar; “Thou, sapient sir, sit here. Now, you she foxes.” To this Edgar says: “Look where he stands and glares! Wantest thou eyes at trial, madam?” “Come o’er the bourn, Bessy, to me, — — “ while the fool sings:

“Her boat hath a leak

And she must not speak

Why she dares not come over to thee.”

Edgar goes on in his own strain. Kent suggests that Lear should lie down, but Lear continues his imaginary trial: “Bring in their evidence,” he cries. “Thou robed man of justice, take thy place,” he says to Edgar, “and thou” (to the fool) “his yoke-fellow of equity, bench by his side. You are o’ the commission, sit you too,” addressing Kent.

“Purr, the cat is gray,” shouts Edgar.

“Arraign her first, ’tis Goneril,” cries Lear. “I here take my oath before this honorable assembly, she kicked the poor king, her father.”

“Come hither, mistress. Is your name Goneril?” says the fool, addressing the seat.

“And here’s another,” cries Lear. “Stop her there! arms, arms, sword, fire! Corruption in the place! False justice, why hast thou let her ‘scape?”

This raving terminates by Lear falling asleep and Gloucester persuading Kent, still without recognizing him, to carry Lear to Dover, and Kent and the fool carry off the King.

The scene is transferred to Gloucester’s castle. Gloucester himself is about to be accused of treason. He is brought forward and bound. The Duke of Cornwall plucks out one of his eyes and sets his foot on it. Regan says, “One side will mock another; the other too.” The Duke wishes to pluck the other out also, but some servant, for some reason, suddenly takes Gloucester’s part and wounds the Duke. Regan kills the servant, who, dying, says to Gloucester that he has “one eye left to see some mischief on him.” The Duke says, “Lest it see more, prevent it,” and he tears out Gloucester’s other eye and throws it on the ground. Here Regan says that it was Edmund who betrayed his father and then Gloucester immediately understands that he has been deceived and that Edgar did not wish to kill him.

Thus ends the third act.

The fourth act is again on the heath. Edgar, still attired as a lunatic, soliloquizes in stilted terms about the instability of fortune and the advantages of a humble lot. Then there comes to him somehow into the very place on the heath where he is, his father, the blinded Gloucester, led by an old man. In that characteristic Shakespearean language, — the chief peculiarity of which is that the thoughts are bred either by the consonance or the contrasts of words, — Gloucester also speaks about the instability of fortune. He tells the old man who leads him to leave him, but the old man points out to him that he can not see his way. Gloucester says he has no way and therefore does not require eyes. And he argues about his having stumbled when he saw, and about defects often proving commodities. “Ah! dear son Edgar,” he adds, “might I but live to see thee in my touch, I’d say I had eyes again.” Edgar naked, and in the character of a lunatic, hearing this, still does not disclose himself to his father. He takes the place of the aged guide and talks with his father, who does not recognize his voice, but regards him as a wandering madman. Gloucester avails himself of the opportunity to deliver himself of a witticism: “’Tis the times’ plague when madmen lead the blind,” and he insists on dismissing the old man, obviously not from motives which might be natural to Gloucester at that moment, but merely in order, when left alone with Edgar, to enact the later scene of the imaginary leaping from the cliff.

Notwithstanding Edgar has just seen his blinded father, and has learnt that his father repents of having banished him, he puts in utterly unnecessary interjections which Shakespeare might know, having read them in Haronet’s book, but which Edgar had no means of becoming acquainted with, and above all, which it was quite unnatural for him to repeat in his present position. He says, “Five friends have been in poor Tom at once: of lust, as Obidient; Hobbididance, prince of dumbness; Mahu, of stealing; Modo, of murder; Flibbertigibbet, of mopping and mowing; who since possesses chambermaids and waiting women.”

Hearing these words, Gloucester makes a present of his purse to Edgar, saying:

“That I am so wretched

Makes thee the happier; heavens, deal so still,

Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man,

That slaves your ordinance, that will not see

Because he doth not feel, feel your power quickly.

So distribution should undo excess,

And each man have enough.”

Having pronounced these strange words, the blind Gloucester requests Edgar to lead him to a certain cliff overhanging the sea, and they depart.

The second scene of the fourth act takes place before the Duke of Albany’s palace. Goneril is not only cruel, but also depraved. She despises her husband and discloses her love to the villain Edmund, who has inherited the title of his father Gloucester. Edmund leaves, and a conversation takes place between Goneril and her husband. The Duke of Albany, the only figure with human feelings, who had already previously been dissatisfied with his wife’s treatment of her father, now resolutely takes Lear’s side, but expresses his emotion in such words as to shake one’s confidence in his feeling. He says that a bear would lick Lear’s reverence, that if the heavens do not send their visible spirits to tame these vile offenses, humanity must prey on itself like monsters, etc.

Goneril does not listen to him, and then he begins to abuse her:

“See thyself, devil!

Proper deformity seems not in the fiend

So horrid as in woman.”

“O vain fool,” says Goneril. “Thou changed and self-cover’d thing, for shame,” continues the Duke:

“Be-monster not thy feature. Were’t my fitness

To let these hands obey my blood,

They are apt enough to dislocate and tear

Thy flesh and bones; howe’er thou art a fiend,

A woman’s shape doth shield thee.”

After this a messenger enters, and announces that the Duke of Cornwall, wounded by his servant whilst plucking out Gloucester’s eyes, had died. Goneril is glad but already anticipates with fear that Regan, now a widow, will deprive her of Edmund. Here the second scene ends.

The third scene of the fourth act represents the French camp. From a conversation between Kent and a gentleman, the reader or spectator learns that the King of France is not in the camp and that Cordelia has received a letter from Kent and is greatly grieved by what she has learned about her father. The gentleman says that her face reminded one of sunshine and rain.

“Her smiles and tears

Were like a better day; those happy smiles

That play’d on her ripe lip seem’d not to know

What guests were in her eyes; which parted thence,

As pearls from diamonds dropp’d.”

And so forth.

The gentleman says that Cordelia desires to see her father, but Kent says that Lear is ashamed of seeing this daughter whom he has treated so unkindly.

In the fourth scene, Cordelia, talking with a physician, tells him that Lear has been seen, that he is quite mad, wearing on his head a wreath of various weeds, that he is roaming about and that she has sent soldiers in search of him, adding that she desires all secret remedies to spring with her tears, and the like.

She is informed that the forces of the Dukes are approaching, but she is concerned only about her father and departs.

The fifth scene of the fourth act lies in Gloucester’s castle. Regan is talking with Oswald, Goneril’s steward, who is carrying a letter from Goneril to Edmund, and she announces to him that she also loves Edmund and that, being a widow, it is better for her to marry him than for Goneril to do so, and she begs him to persuade her sister of this. Further she tells him that it was very unreasonable to blind Gloucester and yet leave him alive, and therefore advises Oswald, should he meet Gloucester, to kill him, promising him a great reward if he does this.

In the sixth scene, Gloucester again appears with his still unrecognized son Edgar, who (now in the guise of a peasant) pretends to lead his father to the cliff. Gloucester is walking along on level land but Edgar persuades him that they are with difficulty ascending a steep hill. Gloucester believes this. Edgar tells his father that the noise of the sea is heard; Gloucester believes this also. Edgar stops on a level place and persuades his father that he has ascended the cliff and that in front of him lies a dreadful abyss, and leaves him alone. Gloucester, addressing the gods, says that he shakes off his affliction as he can bear it no longer, and that he does not condemn them — the gods. Having said this, he leaps on the level ground and falls, imagining that he has jumped off the cliff. On this occasion, Edgar, soliloquizing, gives vent to a yet more entangled utterance:

“I know not how conceit may rob

The treasury of life when life itself

Yields to the theft; had he been where he thought,

By this had thought been past.”

He approaches Gloucester, in the character of yet a different person, and expressing astonishment at the latter not being hurt by his fall from such a dreadful height. Gloucester believes that he has fallen and prepares to die, but he feels that he is alive and begins to doubt that he has fallen from such a height. Then Edgar persuades him that he has indeed jumped from the dreadful height and tells him that the individual who had been with him at the top was the devil, as he had eyes like two full moons and a thousand noses and wavy horns. Gloucester believes this, and is persuaded that his despair was the work of the devil, and therefore decides that he will henceforth despair no more, but will quietly await death. Hereupon enters Lear, for some reason covered with wild-flowers. He has lost his senses and says things wilder than before. He speaks about coining, about the moon, gives some one a yard — then he cries that he sees a mouse, which he wishes to entice by a piece of cheese. Then he suddenly demands the password from Edgar, and Edgar immediately answers him with the words “Sweet marjoram.” Lear says, “Pass,” and the blind Gloucester, who has not recognized either his son or Kent, recognizes the King’s voice.

Then the King, after his disconnected utterances, suddenly begins to speak ironically about flatterers, who agreed to all he said, “Ay, and no, too, was no good divinity,” but, when he got into a storm without shelter, he saw all this was not true; and then goes on to say that as all creation addicts itself to adultery, and Gloucester’s bastard son had treated his father more kindly than his daughters had treated him (altho Lear, according to the development of the drama, could not know how Edmund had treated Gloucester), therefore, let dissoluteness prosper, the more so as, being a King, he needs soldiers. He here addresses an imaginary hypocritically virtuous lady who acts the prude, whereas

“The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to’t

With a more riotous appetite.

All women inherit the gods only to the girdle

Beneath is all the fiend’s” —

and, saying this, Lear screams and spits from horror. This monolog is evidently meant to be addressed by the actor to the audience, and probably produces an effect on the stage, but it is utterly uncalled for in the mouth of Lear, equally with his words: “It smells of mortality,” uttered while wiping his hand, as Gloucester expresses a desire to kiss it. Then Gloucester’s blindness is referred to, which gives occasion for a play of words on eyes, about blind Cupid, at which Lear says to Gloucester, “No eyes in your head, nor no money in your purse? Your eyes are in a heavy case, your purse in a light.” Then Lear declaims a monolog on the unfairness of legal judgment, which is quite out of place in the mouth of the insane Lear. After this, enter a gentleman with attendants sent by Cordelia to fetch her father. Lear continues to act as a madman and runs away. The gentleman sent to fetch Lear, does not run after him, but lengthily describes to Edgar the position of the French and British armies. Oswald enters, and seeing Gloucester, and desiring to receive the reward promised by Regan, attacks him, but Edgar with his club kills Oswald, who, in dying, transmits to his murderer, Edgar, Goneril’s letter to Edmund, the delivery of which would insure reward. In this letter Goneril promises to kill her husband and marry Edmund. Edgar drags out Oswald’s body by the legs and then returns and leads his father away.

The seventh scene of the fourth act takes place in a tent in the French camp. Lear is asleep on a bed. Enter Cordelia and Kent, still in disguise. Lear is awakened by the music, and, seeing Cordelia, does not believe she is a living being, thinks she is an apparition, does not believe that he himself is alive. Cordelia assures him that she is his daughter, and begs him to bless her. He falls on his knees before her, begs her pardon, acknowledges that he is as old and foolish, says he is ready to take poison, which he thinks she has probably prepared for him, as he is persuaded she must hate him. (“For your sisters,” he says, “have done me wrong: you have some cause, they have not.”) Then he gradually comes to his senses and ceases to rave. His daughter suggests that he should take a walk. He consents and says: “You must bear with me. Pray you now forget and forgive: I am old and foolish.” They depart. The gentleman and Kent, remaining on the scene, hold a conversation which explains to the spectator that Edmund is at the head of the troops and that a battle must soon begin between Lear’s defenders and his enemies. So the fourth act closes.

In this fourth act, the scene between Lear and his daughter might have been touching if it had not been preceded in the course of the earlier acts by the tediously drawn out, monotonous ravings of Lear, and if, moreover, this expression of his feelings constituted the last scene. But the scene is not the last.

In the fifth act, the former coldly pompous, artificial ravings of Lear go on again, destroying the impression which the previous scene might have produced.

The first scene of the fifth act at first represents Edmund and Regan; the latter is jealous of her sister and makes an offer. Then come Goneril, her husband, and some soldiers. The Duke of Albany, altho pitying Lear, regards it as his duty to fight with the French who have invaded his country, and so he prepares for battle.

Then Edgar enters, still disguised, and hands to the Duke of Albany the letter he had received from Goneril’s dying steward, and tells him if he gains the victory to sound the trumpet, saying that he can produce a champion who will confirm the contents of the letter.

In the second scene, Edgar enters leading his father Gloucester, seats him by a tree, and goes away himself. The noise of battle is heard, Edgar runs back and says that the battle is lost and Lear and Cordelia are prisoners. Gloucester again falls into despair. Edgar, still without disclosing himself to his father, counsels endurance, and Gloucester immediately agrees with him.

The third scene opens with a triumphal progress of the victor Edmund. Lear and Cordelia are prisoners. Lear, altho no longer insane, continues to utter the same senseless, inappropriate words, as, for example, that in prison he will sing with Cordelia, she will ask his blessing, and he will kneel down (this process of kneeling down is repeated three times) and will ask her forgiveness. And he further says that, while they are living in prison, they will wear out “packs and sects of great ones”; that he and Cordelia are sacrifices upon which the gods will throw incense, and that he that parts them “shall bring a brand from heaven and fire them like foxes; that he will not weep, and that the plague shall sooner devour his eyes, flesh and fell, than they shall make them weep.”

Edmund orders Lear and his daughter to be led away to prison, and, having called the officer to do this, says he requires another duty and asks him whether he’ll do it? The captain says he can not draw a cart nor eat dried oats, but if it be men’s work he can do it. Enter the Duke of Albany, Goneril, and Regan. The Duke of Albany wishes to champion Lear, but Edmund does not allow it. The daughters take part in the dialog and begin to abuse each other, being jealous of Edmund. Here everything becomes so confused that it is difficult to follow the action. The Duke of Albany wishes to arrest Edmund, and tells Regan that Edmund has long ago entered into guilty relations with his wife, and that, therefore, Regan must give up her claims on Edmund, and if she wishes to marry, should marry him, the Duke of Albany.

Having said this, the Duke of Albany calls Edmund, orders the trumpet to be sounded, saying that, if no one appears, he will fight him himself.

Here Regan, whom Goneril has evidently poisoned, falls deadly sick. Trumpets are sounded and Edgar enters with a vizor concealing his face, and, without giving his name, challenges Edmund. Edgar abuses Edmund; Edmund throws all the abuses back on Edgar’s head. They fight and Edmund falls. Goneril is in despair. The Duke of Albany shows Goneril her letter. Goneril departs.

The dying Edmund discovers that his opponent was his brother. Edgar raises his vizor and pronounces a moral lesson to the effect that, having begotten his illegitimate son Edmund, the father has paid for it with his eyesight. After this Edgar tells the Duke of Albany his adventures and how he has only just now, before entering on the recent combat, disclosed everything to his father, and the father could not bear it and died from emotion. Edmund is not yet dead, and wants to know all that has taken place.

Then Edgar relates that, while he was sitting over his father’s body, a man came and closely embraced him, and, shouting as loudly as if he wished to burst heaven, threw himself on the body of Edgar’s father, and told the most piteous tale about Lear and himself, and that while relating this the strings of life began to crack, but at this moment the trumpet sounded twice and Edgar left him “tranced” — and this was Kent.

Edgar has hardly finished this narrative when a gentleman rushes in with a bloody knife, shouting “Help!” In answer to the question, “Who is killed?” the gentleman says that Goneril has been killed, having poisoned her sister, she has confessed it.

Enters Kent, and at this moment the corpses of Goneril and Regan are brought in. Edmund here says that the sisters evidently loved him, as one has poisoned the other for his sake, and then slain herself. At the same time he confesses that he had given orders to kill Lear and to hang Cordelia in prison, and pretend that she had taken her own life; but now he wishes to prevent these deeds, and having said this he dies, and is carried away.

After this enters Lear with the dead Cordelia in his arms, altho he is more than eighty years old and ill. Again begins Lear’s awful ravings, at which one feels ashamed as at unsuccessful jokes. Lear demands that all should howl, and, alternately, believes that Cordelia is dead and that she is alive.

“Had I your tongues and eyes,” he says “I’d use them so that heaven’s vault should crack.”

Then he says that he killed the slave who hanged Cordelia. Next he says that his eyes see badly, but at the same time he recognizes Kent whom all along he had not recognized.

The Duke of Albany says that he will resign during the life of Lear and that he will reward Edgar and Kent and all who have been faithful to him. At this moment the news is brought that Edmund is dead, and Lear, continuing his ravings, begs that they will undo one of his buttons — the same request which he had made when roaming about the heath. He expresses his thanks for this, tells everyone to look at something, and thereupon dies.

In conclusion, the Duke of Albany, having survived the others, says:

“The weight of this sad time we must obey;

Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.

The oldest hath borne most: we that are young

Shall never see so much, nor live so long.”

All depart to the music of a dead march. Thus ends the fifth act and the drama.

Chapter 3

Such is this celebrated drama. However absurd it may appear in my rendering (which I have endeavored to make as impartial as possible), I may confidently say that in the original it is yet more absurd. For any man of our time — if he were not under the hypnotic suggestion that this drama is the height of perfection — it would be enough to read it to its end (were he to have sufficient patience for this) to be convinced that far from being the height of perfection, it is a very bad, carelessly composed production, which, if it could have been of interest to a certain public at a certain time, can not evoke among us anything but aversion and weariness. Every reader of our time, who is free from the influence of suggestion, will also receive exactly the same impression from all the other extolled dramas of Shakespeare, not to mention the senseless, dramatized tales, “Pericles,” “Twelfth Night,” “The Tempest,” “Cymbeline,” “Troilus and Cressida.”

But such free-minded individuals, not inoculated with Shakespeare-worship, are no longer to be found in our Christian society. Every man of our society and time, from the first period of his conscious life, has been inoculated with the idea that Shakespeare is a genius, a poet, and a dramatist, and that all his writings are the height of perfection. Yet, however hopeless it may seem, I will endeavor to demonstrate in the selected drama— “King Lear” — all those faults equally characteristic also of all the other tragedies and comedies of Shakespeare, on account of which he not only is not representing a model of dramatic art, but does not satisfy the most elementary demands of art recognized by all.

Dramatic art, according to the laws established by those very critics who extol Shakespeare, demands that the persons represented in the play should be, in consequence of actions proper to their characters, and owing to a natural course of events, placed in positions requiring them to struggle with the surrounding world to which they find themselves in opposition, and in this struggle should display their inherent qualities.

In “King Lear” the persons represented are indeed placed externally in opposition to the outward world, and they struggle with it. But their strife does not flow from the natural course of events nor from their own characters, but is quite arbitrarily established by the author, and therefore can not produce on the reader the illusion which represents the essential condition of art.

Lear has no necessity or motive for his abdication; also, having lived all his life with his daughters, has no reason to believe the words of the two elders and not the truthful statement of the youngest; yet upon this is built the whole tragedy of his position.

Similarly unnatural is the subordinate action: the relation of Gloucester to his sons. The positions of Gloucester and Edgar flow from the circumstance that Gloucester, just like Lear, immediately believes the coarsest untruth and does not even endeavor to inquire of his injured son whether what he is accused of be true, but at once curses and banishes him. The fact that Lear’s relations with his daughters are the same as those of Gloucester to his sons makes one feel yet more strongly that in both cases the relations are quite arbitrary, and do not flow from the characters nor the natural course of events. Equally unnatural, and obviously invented, is the fact that all through the tragedy Lear does not recognize his old courtier, Kent, and therefore the relations between Lear and Kent fail to excite the sympathy of the reader or spectator. The same, in a yet greater degree, holds true of the position of Edgar, who, unrecognized by any one, leads his blind father and persuades him that he has leapt off a cliff, when in reality Gloucester jumps on level ground.

These positions, into which the characters are placed quite arbitrarily, are so unnatural that the reader or spectator is unable not only to sympathize with their sufferings but even to be interested in what he reads or sees. This in the first place.

Secondly, in this, as in the other dramas of Shakespeare, all the characters live, think, speak, and act quite unconformably with the given time and place. The action of “King Lear” takes place 800 years b.c., and yet the characters are placed in conditions possible only in the Middle Ages: participating in the drama are kings, dukes, armies, and illegitimate children, and gentlemen, courtiers, doctors, farmers, officers, soldiers, and knights with vizors, etc. It is possible that such anachronisms (with which Shakespeare’s dramas abound) did not injure the possibility of illusion in the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, but in our time it is no longer possible to follow with interest the development of events which one knows could not take place in the conditions which the author describes in detail. The artificiality of the positions, not flowing from the natural course of events, or from the nature of the characters, and their want of conformity with time and space, is further increased by those coarse embellishments which are continually added by Shakespeare and intended to appear particularly touching. The extraordinary storm during which King Lear roams about the heath, or the grass which for some reason he puts on his head — like Ophelia in “Hamlet” — or Edgar’s attire, or the fool’s speeches, or the appearance of the helmeted horseman, Edgar — all these effects not only fail to enhance the impression, but produce an opposite effect. “Man sieht die Absicht und man wird verstimmt,” as Goethe says. It often happens that even during these obviously intentional efforts after effect, as, for instance, the dragging out by the legs of half a dozen corpses, with which all Shakespeare’s tragedies terminate, instead of feeling fear and pity, one is tempted rather to laugh.

Chapter 4

But it is not enough that Shakespeare’s characters are placed in tragic positions which are impossible, do not flow from the course of events, are inappropriate to time and space — these personages, besides this, act in a way which is out of keeping with their definite character, and is quite arbitrary. It is generally asserted that in Shakespeare’s dramas the characters are specially well expressed, that, notwithstanding their vividness, they are many-sided, like those of living people; that, while exhibiting the characteristics of a given individual, they at the same time wear the features of man in general; it is usual to say that the delineation of character in Shakespeare is the height of perfection.

This is asserted with such confidence and repeated by all as indisputable truth; but however much I endeavored to find confirmation of this in Shakespeare’s dramas, I always found the opposite. In reading any of Shakespeare’s dramas whatever, I was, from the very first, instantly convinced that he was lacking in the most important, if not the only, means of portraying characters: individuality of language, i.e., the style of speech of every person being natural to his character. This is absent from Shakespeare. All his characters speak, not their own, but always one and the same Shakespearian, pretentious, and unnatural language, in which not only they could not speak, but in which no living man ever has spoken or does speak.

No living men could or can say, as Lear says, that he would divorce his wife in the grave should Regan not receive him, or that the heavens would crack with shouting, or that the winds would burst, or that the wind wishes to blow the land into the sea, or that the curled waters wish to flood the shore, as the gentleman describes the storm, or that it is easier to bear one’s grief and the soul leaps over many sufferings when grief finds fellowship, or that Lear has become childless while I am fatherless, as Edgar says, or use similar unnatural expressions with which the speeches of all the characters in all Shakespeare’s dramas overflow.

Again, it is not enough that all the characters speak in a way in which no living men ever did or could speak — they all suffer from a common intemperance of language. Those who are in love, who are preparing for death, who are fighting, who are dying, all alike speak much and unexpectedly about subjects utterly inappropriate to the occasion, being evidently guided rather by consonances and play of words than by thoughts. They speak all alike. Lear raves exactly as does Edgar when feigning madness. Both Kent and the fool speak alike. The words of one of the personages might be placed in the mouth of another, and by the character of the speech it would be impossible to distinguish who speaks. If there is a difference in the speech of Shakespeare’s various characters, it lies merely in the different dialogs which are pronounced for these characters — again by Shakespeare and not by themselves. Thus Shakespeare always speaks for kings in one and the same inflated, empty language. Also in one and the same Shakespearian, artificially sentimental language speak all the women who are intended to be poetic: Juliet, Desdemona, Cordelia, Imogen, Marina. In the same way, also, it is Shakespeare alone who speaks for his villains: Richard, Edmund, Iago, Macbeth, expressing for them those vicious feelings which villains never express. Yet more similar are the speeches of the madmen with their horrible words, and those of fools with their mirthless puns. So that in Shakespeare there is no language of living individuals — that language which in the drama is the chief means of setting forth character. If gesticulation be also a means of expressing character, as in ballets, this is only a secondary means. Moreover, if the characters speak at random and in a random way, and all in one and the same diction, as is the case in Shakespeare’s work, then even the action of gesticulation is wasted. Therefore, whatever the blind panegyrists of Shakespeare may say, in Shakespeare there is no expression of character. Those personages who, in his dramas, stand out as characters, are characters borrowed by him from former works which have served as the foundation of his dramas, and they are mostly depicted, not by the dramatic method which consists in making each person speak with his own diction, but in the epic method of one person describing the features of another.

The perfection with which Shakespeare expresses character is asserted chiefly on the ground of the characters of Lear, Cordelia, Othello, Desdemona, Falstaff, and Hamlet. But all these characters, as well as all the others, instead of belonging to Shakespeare, are taken by him from dramas, chronicles, and romances anterior to him. All these characters not only are not rendered more powerful by him, but, in most cases, they are weakened and spoilt. This is very striking in this drama of “King Lear,” which we are examining, taken by him from the drama “King Leir,” by an unknown author. The characters of this drama, that of King Lear, and especially of Cordelia, not only were not created by Shakespeare, but have been strikingly weakened and deprived of force by him, as compared with their appearance in the older drama.

In the older drama, Leir abdicates because, having become a widower, he thinks only of saving his soul. He asks his daughters as to their love for him — that, by means of a certain device he has invented, he may retain his favorite daughter on his island. The elder daughters are betrothed, while the youngest does not wish to contract a loveless union with any of the neighboring suitors whom Leir proposes to her, and he is afraid that she may marry some distant potentate.

The device which he has invented, as he informs his courtier, Perillus (Shakespeare’s Kent), is this, that when Cordelia tells him that she loves him more than any one or as much as her elder sisters do, he will tell her that she must, in proof of her love, marry the prince he will indicate on his island. All these motives for Lear’s conduct are absent in Shakespeare’s play. Then, when, according to the old drama, Leir asks his daughters about their love for him, Cordelia does not say, as Shakespeare has it, that she will not give her father all her love, but will love her husband, too, should she marry — which is quite unnatural — but simply says that she can not express her love in words, but hopes that her actions will prove it. Goneril and Regan remark that Cordelia’s answer is not an answer, and that the father can not meekly accept such indifference, so that what is wanting in Shakespeare — i.e., the explanation of Lear’s anger which caused him to disinherit his youngest daughter, — exists in the old drama. Leir is annoyed by the failure of his scheme, and the poisonous words of his eldest daughters irritate him still more. After the division of the kingdom between the elder daughters, there follows in the older drama a scene between Cordelia and the King of Gaul, setting forth, instead of the colorless Cordelia of Shakespeare, a very definite and attractive character of the truthful, tender, and self-sacrificing youngest daughter. While Cordelia, without grieving that she has been deprived of a portion of the heritage, sits sorrowing at having lost her father’s love, and looking forward to earn her bread by her labor, there comes the King of Gaul, who, in the disguise of a pilgrim, desires to choose a bride from among Leir’s daughters. He asks Cordelia why she is sad. She tells him the cause of her grief. The King of Gaul, still in the guise of a pilgrim, falls in love with her, and offers to arrange a marriage for her with the King of Gaul, but she says she will marry only a man whom she loves. Then the pilgrim, still disguised, offers her his hand and heart and Cordelia confesses she loves the pilgrim and consents to marry him, notwithstanding the poverty that awaits her. Then the pilgrim discloses to her that he it is who is the King of Gaul, and Cordelia marries him. Instead of this scene, Lear, according to Shakespeare, offers Cordelia’s two suitors to take her without dowry, and one cynically refuses, while the other, one does not know why, accepts her. After this, in the old drama, as in Shakespeare’s, Leir undergoes the insults of Goneril, into whose house he has removed, but he bears these insults in a very different way from that represented by Shakespeare: he feels that by his conduct toward Cordelia, he has deserved this, and humbly submits. As in Shakespeare’s drama, so also in the older drama, the courtiers, Perillus — Kent — who had interceded for Cordelia and was therefore banished — comes to Leir and assures him of his love, but under no disguise, but simply as a faithful old servant who does not abandon his king in a moment of need. Leir tells him what, according to Shakespeare, he tells Cordelia in the last scene, that, if the daughters whom he has benefited hate him, a retainer to whom he has done no good can not love him. But Perillus — Kent — assures the King of his love toward him, and Leir, pacified, goes on to Regan. In the older drama there are no tempests nor tearing out of gray hairs, but there is the weakened and humbled old man, Leir, overpowered with grief, and banished by his other daughter also, who even wishes to kill him. Turned out by his elder daughters, Leir, according to the older drama, as a last resource, goes with Perillus to Cordelia. Instead of the unnatural banishment of Lear during the tempest, and his roaming about the heath, Leir, with Perillus, in the older drama, during their journey to France, very naturally reach the last degree of destitution, sell their clothes in order to pay for their crossing over the sea, and, in the attire of fishermen, exhausted by cold and hunger, approach Cordelia’s house. Here, again, instead of the unnatural combined ravings of the fool, Lear, and Edgar, as represented by Shakespeare, there follows in the older drama a natural scene of reunion between the daughter and the father. Cordelia — who, notwithstanding her happiness, has all the time been grieving about her father and praying to God to forgive her sisters who had done him so much wrong — meets her father in his extreme want, and wishes immediately to disclose herself to him, but her husband advises her not to do this, in order not to agitate her weak father. She accepts the counsel and takes Leir into her house without disclosing herself to him, and nurses him. Leir gradually revives, and then the daughter asks him who he is and how he lived formerly:

“If from the first,” says Leir, “I should relate the cause,

I would make a heart of adamant to weep.

And thou, poor soul, kind-hearted as thou art,

Dost weep already, ere I do begin.”

Cordelia: “For God’s love tell it, and when you have done

I’ll tell the reason why I weep so soon.”

And Leir relates all he has suffered from his elder daughters, and says that now he wishes to find shelter with the child who would be in the right even were she to condemn him to death. “If, however,” he says, “she will receive me with love, it will be God’s and her work, but not my merit.” To this Cordelia says: “Oh, I know for certain that thy daughter will lovingly receive thee.”— “How canst thou know this without knowing her?” says Leir. “I know,” says Cordelia, “because not far from here, I had a father who acted toward me as badly as thou hast acted toward her, yet, if I were only to see his white head, I would creep to meet him on my knees.”— “No, this can not be,” says Leir, “for there are no children in the world so cruel as mine.”— “Do not condemn all for the sins of some,” says Cordelia, and falls on her knees. “Look here, dear father,” she says, “look on me: I am thy loving daughter.” The father recognizes her and says: “It is not for thee, but for me, to beg thy pardon on my knees for all my sins toward thee.”

Is there anything approaching this exquisite scene in Shakespeare’s drama?

However strange this opinion may seem to worshipers of Shakespeare, yet the whole of this old drama is incomparably and in every respect superior to Shakespeare’s adaptation. It is so, first, because it has not got the utterly superfluous characters of the villain Edmund and unlifelike Gloucester and Edgar, who only distract one’s attention; secondly because it has not got the completely false “effects” of Lear running about the heath, his conversations with the fool, and all these impossible disguises, failures to recognize, and accumulated deaths; and, above all, because in this drama there is the simple, natural, and deeply touching character of Leir and the yet more touching and clearly defined character of Cordelia, both absent in Shakespeare. Therefore, there is in the older drama, instead of Shakespeare’s long-drawn scene of Lear’s interview with Cordelia and of Cordelia’s unnecessary murder, the exquisite scene of the interview between Leir and Cordelia, unequaled by any in all Shakespeare’s dramas.

The old drama also terminates more naturally and more in accordance with the moral demands of the spectator than does Shakespeare’s, namely, by the King of the Gauls conquering the husbands of the elder sisters, and Cordelia, instead of being killed, restoring Leir to his former position.

Thus it is in the drama we are examining, which Shakespeare has borrowed from the drama “King Leir.” So it is also with Othello, taken from an Italian romance, the same also with the famous Hamlet. The same with Antony, Brutus, Cleopatra, Shylock, Richard, and all Shakespeare’s characters, all taken from some antecedent work. Shakespeare, while profiting by characters already given in preceding dramas, or romances, chronicles, or, Plutarch’s “Lives,” not only fails to render them more truthful and vivid, as his eulogists affirm, but, on the contrary, always weakens them and often completely destroys them, as with Lear, compelling his characters to commit actions unnatural to them, and, above all, to utter speeches natural neither to them nor to any one whatever. Thus, in “Othello,” altho that is, perhaps, I will not say the best, but the least bad and the least encumbered by pompous volubility, the characters of Othello, Iago, Cassio, Emilia, according to Shakespeare, are much less natural and lifelike than in the Italian romance. Shakespeare’s Othello suffers from epilepsy, of which he has an attack on the stage; moreover, in Shakespeare’s version, Desdemona’s murder is preceded by the strange vow of the kneeling Othello. Othello, according to Shakespeare, is a negro and not a Moor. All this is erratic, inflated, unnatural, and violates the unity of the character. All this is absent in the romance. In that romance the reasons for Othello’s jealousy are represented more naturally than in Shakespeare. In the romance, Cassio, knowing whose the handkerchief is, goes to Desdemona to return it, but, approaching the back-door of Desdemona’s house, sees Othello and flies from him. Othello perceives the escaping Cassio, and this, more than anything, confirms his suspicions. Shakespeare has not got this, and yet this casual incident explains Othello’s jealousy more than anything else. With Shakespeare, this jealousy is founded entirely on Iago’s persistent, successful machinations and treacherous words, which Othello blindly believes. Othello’s monolog over the sleeping Desdemona, about his desiring her when killed to look as she is alive, about his going to love her even dead, and now wishing to smell her “balmy breath,” etc., is utterly impossible. A man who is preparing for the murder of a beloved being, does not utter such phrases, still less after committing the murder would he speak about the necessity of an eclipse of sun and moon, and of the globe yawning; nor can he, negro tho he may be, address devils, inviting them to burn him in hot sulphur and so forth. Lastly, however effective may be the suicide, absent in the romance, it completely destroys the conception of his clearly defined character. If he indeed suffered from grief and remorse, he would not, intending to kill himself, pronounce phrases about his own services, about the pearl, and about his eyes dropping tears “as fast as the Arabian trees their medicinal gum”; and yet less about the Turk’s beating an Italian and how he, Othello, smote him — thus! So that notwithstanding the powerful expression of emotion in Othello when, under the influence of Iago’s hints, jealousy rises in him, and again in his scenes with Desdemona, one’s conception of Othello’s character is constantly infringed by his false pathos and the unnatural speeches he pronounces.

So it is with the chief character, Othello, but notwithstanding its alteration and the disadvantageous features which it is made thereby to present in comparison with the character from which it was taken in the romance, this character still remains a character, but all the other personages are completely spoiled by Shakespeare.

Iago, according to Shakespeare, is an unmitigated villain, deceiver, and thief, a robber who robs Roderigo and always succeeds even in his most impossible designs, and therefore is a person quite apart from real life. In Shakespeare, the motive of his villainy is, first, that Othello did not give him the post he desired; secondly, that he suspects Othello of an intrigue with his wife and, thirdly, that, as he says, he feels a strange kind of love for Desdemona. There are many motives, but they are all vague. Whereas in the romance there is but one simple and clear motive, Iago’s passionate love for Desdemona, transmitted into hatred toward her and Othello after she had preferred the Moor to him and resolutely repulsed him. Yet more unnatural is the utterly unnecessary Roderigo whom Iago deceives and robs, promising him Desdemona’s love, and whom he forces to fulfil all he commands: to intoxicate Cassio, provoke and then kill Cassio. Emilia, who says anything it may occur to the author to put into her mouth, has not even the slightest semblance of a live character.

“But Falstaff, the wonderful Falstaff,” Shakespeare’s eulogists will say, “of him, at all events, one can not say that he is not a living character, or that, having been taken from the comedy of an unknown author, it has been weakened.”

Falstaff, like all Shakespeare’s characters, was taken from a drama or comedy by an unknown author, written on a really living person, Sir John Oldcastle, who had been the friend of some duke. This Oldcastle had once been convicted of heresy, but had been saved by his friend the duke. But afterward he was condemned and burned at the stake for his religious beliefs, which did not conform with Catholicism. It was on this same Oldcastle that an anonymous author, in order to please the Catholic public, wrote a comedy or drama, ridiculing this martyr for his faith and representing him as a good-for-nothing man, the boon companion of the duke, and it is from this comedy that Shakespeare borrowed, not only the character of Falstaff, but also his own ironical attitude toward it. In Shakespeare’s first works, when this character appeared, it was frankly called “Oldcastle,” but later, in Elizabeth’s time, when Protestantism again triumphed, it was awkward to bring out with mockery a martyr in the strife with Catholicism, and, besides, Oldcastle’s relatives had protested, and Shakespeare accordingly altered the name of Oldcastle to that of Falstaff, also a historical figure, known for having fled from the field of battle at Agincourt.

Falstaff is, indeed, quite a natural and typical character; but then it is perhaps the only natural and typical character depicted by Shakespeare. And this character is natural and typical because, of all Shakespeare’s characters, it alone speaks a language proper to itself. And it speaks thus because it speaks in that same Shakespearian language, full of mirthless jokes and unamusing puns which, being unnatural to all Shakespeare’s other characters, is quite in harmony with the boastful, distorted, and depraved character of the drunken Falstaff. For this reason alone does this figure truly represent a definite character. Unfortunately, the artistic effect of this character is spoilt by the fact that it is so repulsive by its gluttony, drunkenness, debauchery, rascality, deceit, and cowardice, that it is difficult to share the feeling of gay humor with which the author treats it. Thus it is with Falstaff.

But in none of Shakespeare’s figures is his, I will not say incapacity to give, but utter indifference to giving, his personages a typical character so strikingly manifest as in Hamlet; and in connection with none of Shakespeare’s works do we see so strikingly displayed that blind worship of Shakespeare, that unreasoning state of hypnotism owing to which the mere thought even is not admitted that any of Shakespeare’s productions can be wanting in genius, or that any of the principal personages in his dramas can fail to be the expression of a new and deeply conceived character.

Shakespeare takes an old story, not bad in its way, relating:

“Avec quelle ruse Amlette qui depuis fut Roy de Dannemarch, vengea la mort de son père Horwendille, occis par Fengon son frère, et autre occurrence de son histoire,” or a drama which was written on this theme fifteen years before him. On this subject he writes his own drama, introducing quite inappropriately (as indeed he always does) into the mouth of the principal person all those thoughts of his own which appeared to him worthy of attention. And putting into the mouth of his hero these thoughts: about life (the grave-digger), about death (To be or not to be) — the same which are expressed in his sixty-sixth sonnet — about the theater, about women. He is utterly unconcerned as to the circumstances under which these words are said, and it naturally turns out that the person expressing all these thoughts is a mere phonograph of Shakespeare, without character, whose actions and words do not agree.

In the old legend, Hamlet’s personality is quite comprehensible: he is indignant at his mother’s and his uncle’s deeds, and wishes to revenge himself upon them, but is afraid his uncle may kill him as he had killed his father. Therefore he simulates insanity, desiring to bide his time and observe all that goes on in the palace. Meanwhile, his uncle and mother, being afraid of him, wish to test whether he is feigning or is really mad, and send to him a girl whom he loves. He persists, then sees his mother in private, kills a courtier who was eavesdropping, and convicts his mother of her sin. Afterward he is sent to England, but intercepts letters and, returning from England, takes revenge of his enemies, burning them all.

All this is comprehensible and flows from Hamlet’s character and position. But Shakespeare, putting into Hamlet’s mouth speeches which he himself wishes to express, and making him commit actions which are necessary to the author in order to produce scenic effects, destroys all that constitutes the character of Hamlet and of the legend. During the whole of the drama, Hamlet is doing, not what he would really wish to do, but what is necessary for the author’s plan. One moment he is awe-struck at his father’s ghost, another moment he begins to chaff it, calling it “old mole”; one moment he loves Ophelia, another moment he teases her, and so forth. There is no possibility of finding any explanation whatever of Hamlet’s actions or words, and therefore no possibility of attributing any character to him.

But as it is recognized that Shakespeare the genius can not write anything bad, therefore learned people use all the powers of their minds to find extraordinary beauties in what is an obvious and crying failure, demonstrated with especial vividness in “Hamlet,” where the principal figure has no character whatever. And lo! profound critics declare that in this drama, in the person of Hamlet, is expressed singularly powerful, perfectly novel, and deep personality, existing in this person having no character; and that precisely in this absence of character consists the genius of creating a deeply conceived character. Having decided this, learned critics write volumes upon volumes, so that the praise and explanation of the greatness and importance of the representation of the character of a man who has no character form in volume a library. It is true that some of the critics timidly express the idea that there is something strange in this figure, that Hamlet is an unsolved riddle, but no one has the courage to say (as in Hans Andersen’s story) that the King is naked — i.e., that it is as clear as day that Shakespeare did not succeed and did not even wish to give any character to Hamlet, did not even understand that this was necessary. And learned critics continue to investigate and extol this puzzling production, which reminds one of the famous stone with an inscription which Pickwick found near a cottage doorstep, and which divided the scientific world into two hostile camps.

So that neither do the characters of Lear nor Othello nor Falstaff nor yet Hamlet in any way confirm the existing opinion that Shakespeare’s power consists in the delineation of character.

If in Shakespeare’s dramas one does meet figures having certain characteristic features, for the most part secondary figures, such as Polonius in “Hamlet” and Portia in “The Merchant of Venice,” these few lifelike characters among five hundred or more other secondary figures, with the complete absence of character in the principal figures, do not at all prove that the merit of Shakespeare’s dramas consists in the expression of character.

That a great talent for depicting character is attributed to Shakespeare arises from his actually possessing a peculiarity which, for superficial observers and in the play of good actors, may appear to be the capacity of depicting character. This peculiarity consists in the capacity of representative scenes expressing the play of emotion. However unnatural the positions may be in which he places his characters, however improper to them the language which he makes them speak, however featureless they are, the very play of emotion, its increase, and alteration, and the combination of many contrary feelings, as expressed correctly and powerfully in some of Shakespeare’s scenes, and in the play of good actors, evokes even, if only for a time, sympathy with the persons represented. Shakespeare, himself an actor, and an intelligent man, knew how to express by the means not only of speech, but of exclamation, gesture, and the repetition of words, states of mind and developments or changes of feeling taking place in the persons represented. So that, in many instances, Shakespeare’s characters, instead of speaking, merely make an exclamation, or weep, or in the middle of a monolog, by means of gestures, demonstrate the pain of their position (just as Lear asks some one to unbutton him), or, in moments of great agitation, repeat a question several times, or several times demand the repetition of a word which has particularly struck them, as do Othello, Macduff, Cleopatra, and others. Such clever methods of expressing the development of feeling, giving good actors the possibility of demonstrating their powers, were, and are, often mistaken by many critics for the expression of character. But however strongly the play of feeling may be expressed in one scene, a single scene can not give the character of a figure when this figure, after a correct exclamation or gesture, begins in a language not its own, at the author’s arbitrary will, to volubly utter words which are neither necessary nor in harmony with its character.

Chapter 5

“Well, but the profound utterances and sayings expressed by Shakespeare’s characters,” Shakespeare’s panegyrists will retort. “See Lear’s monolog on punishment, Kent’s speech about vengeance, or Edgar’s about his former life, Gloucester’s reflections on the instability of fortune, and, in other dramas, the famous monologs of Hamlet, Antony, and others.”

Thoughts and sayings may be appreciated, I will answer, in a prose work, in an essay, a collection of aphorisms, but not in an artistic dramatic production, the object of which is to elicit sympathy with that which is represented. Therefore the monologs and sayings of Shakespeare, even did they contain very many deep and new thoughts, which they do not, do not constitute the merits of an artistic, poetic production. On the contrary, these speeches, expressed in unnatural conditions, can only spoil artistic works.

An artistic, poetic work, particularly a drama, must first of all excite in the reader or spectator the illusion that whatever the person represented is living through, or experiencing, is lived through or experienced by himself. For this purpose it is as important for the dramatist to know precisely what he should make his characters both do and say as what he should not make them say and do, so as not to destroy the illusion of the reader or spectator. Speeches, however eloquent and profound they may be, when put into the mouth of dramatic characters, if they be superfluous or unnatural to the position and character, destroy the chief condition of dramatic art — the illusion, owing to which the reader or spectator lives in the feelings of the persons represented. Without putting an end to the illusion, one may leave much unsaid — the reader or spectator will himself fill this up, and sometimes, owing to this, his illusion is even increased, but to say what is superfluous is the same as to overthrow a statue composed of separate pieces and thereby scatter them, or to take away the lamp from a magic lantern: the attention of the reader or spectator is distracted, the reader sees the author, the spectator sees the actor, the illusion disappears, and to restore it is sometimes impossible; therefore without the feeling of measure there can not be an artist, and especially a dramatist.

Shakespeare is devoid of this feeling. His characters continually do and say what is not only unnatural to them, but utterly unnecessary. I do not cite examples of this, because I believe that he who does not himself see this striking deficiency in all Shakespeare’s dramas will not be persuaded by any examples and proofs. It is sufficient to read “King Lear,” alone, with its insanity, murders, plucking out of eyes, Gloucester’s jump, its poisonings, and wranglings — not to mention “Pericles,” “Cymbeline,” “The Winter’s Tale,” “The Tempest” — to be convinced of this. Only a man devoid of the sense of measure and of taste could produce such types as “Titus Andronicus” or “Troilus and Cressida,” or so mercilessly mutilate the old drama “King Leir.”

Gervinus endeavors to prove that Shakespeare possessed the feeling of beauty, “Schönheit’s sinn,” but all Gervinus’s proofs prove only that he himself, Gervinus, is completely destitute of it. In Shakespeare everything is exaggerated: the actions are exaggerated, so are their consequences, the speeches of the characters are exaggerated, and therefore at every step the possibility of artistic impression is interfered with. Whatever people may say, however they may be enraptured by Shakespeare’s works, whatever merits they may attribute to them, it is perfectly certain that he was not an artist and that his works are not artistic productions. Without the sense of measure, there never was nor can be an artist, as without the feeling of rhythm there can not be a musician. Shakespeare might have been whatever you like, but he was not an artist.

“But one should not forget the time at which Shakespeare wrote,” say his admirers. “It was a time of cruel and coarse habits, a time of the then fashionable euphemism, i.e., artificial way of expressing oneself — a time of forms of life strange to us, and therefore, to judge about Shakespeare, one should have in view the time when he wrote. In Homer, as in Shakespeare, there is much which is strange to us, but this does not prevent us from appreciating the beauties of Homer,” say these admirers. But in comparing Shakespeare with Homer, as does Gervinus, that infinite distance which separates true poetry from its semblance manifests itself with especial force. However distant Homer is from us, we can, without the slightest effort, transport ourselves into the life he describes, and we can thus transport ourselves because, however alien to us may be the events Homer describes, he believes in what he says and speaks seriously, and therefore he never exaggerates, and the sense of measure never abandons him. This is the reason why, not to speak of the wonderfully distinct, lifelike, and beautiful characters of Achilles, Hector, Priam, Odysseus, and the eternally touching scenes of Hector’s leave-taking, of Priam’s embassy, of Odysseus’s return, and others — the whole of the “Iliad” and still more the “Odyssey” are so humanly near to us that we feel as if we ourselves had lived, and are living, among its gods and heroes. Not so with Shakespeare. From his first words, exaggeration is seen: the exaggeration of events, the exaggeration of emotion, and the exaggeration of effects. One sees at once that he does not believe in what he says, that it is of no necessity to him, that he invents the events he describes, and is indifferent to his characters — that he has conceived them only for the stage and therefore makes them do and say only what may strike his public; and therefore we do not believe either in the events, or in the actions, or in the sufferings of the characters. Nothing demonstrates so clearly the complete absence of esthetic feeling in Shakespeare as comparison between him and Homer. The works which we call the works of Homer are artistic, poetic, original works, lived through by the author or authors; whereas the works of Shakespeare — borrowed as they are, and, externally, like mosaics, artificially fitted together piecemeal from bits invented for the occasion — have nothing whatever in common with art and poetry.

Chapter 6

But, perhaps, the height of Shakespeare’s conception of life is such that, tho he does not satisfy the esthetic demands, he discloses to us a view of life so new and important for men that, in consideration of its importance, all his failures as an artist become imperceptible. So, indeed, say Shakespeare’s admirers. Gervinus says distinctly that besides Shakespeare’s significance in the sphere of dramatic poetry in which, according to his opinion, Shakespeare equals “Homer in the sphere of Epos, Shakespeare being the very greatest judge of the human soul, represents a teacher of most indisputable ethical authority and the most select leader in the world and in life.”

In what, then, consists this indisputable authority of the most select leader in the world and in life? Gervinus devotes the concluding chapter of his second volume, about fifty pages, to an explanation of this.

The ethical authority of this supreme teacher of life consists in the following: The starting point of Shakespeare’s conception of life, says Gervinus, is that man is gifted with powers of activity, and therefore, first of all, according to Gervinus, Shakespeare regarded it as good and necessary for man that he should act (as if it were possible for a man not to act):

“Die thatkräftigen Männer, Fortinbras, Bolingbroke, Alcibiades, Octavius spielen hier die gegensätzlichen Rollen gegen die verschiedenen thatlosen; nicht ihre Charaktere verdienen ihnen Allen ihr Glück und Gedeihen etwa durch eine grosse Ueberlegenheit ihrer Natur, sondern trotz ihrer geringeren Anlage stellt sich ihre Thatkraft an sich über die Unthätigkeit der Anderen hinaus, gleichviel aus wie schöner Quelle diese Passivität, aus wie schlechter jene Thätigkeit fliesse.”

I.e., active people, like Fortinbras, Bolingbroke, Alcibiades, Octavius, says Gervinus, are placed in contrast, by Shakespeare, with various characters who do not exhibit energetic activity. And happiness and success, according to Shakespeare, are attained by individuals possessing this active character, not at all owing to the superiority of their nature; on the contrary, notwithstanding their inferior gifts, the capacity of activity itself always gives them the advantage over inactivity, quite independent of any consideration whether the inactivity of some persons flows from excellent impulses and the activity of others from bad ones. “Activity is good, inactivity is evil. Activity transforms evil into good,” says Shakespeare, according to Gervinus. Shakespeare prefers the principle of Alexander (of Macedonia) to that of Diogenes, says Gervinus. In other words, he prefers death and murder due to ambition, to abstinence and wisdom.

According to Gervinus, Shakespeare believes that humanity need not set up ideals, but that only healthy activity and the golden mean are necessary in everything. Indeed, Shakespeare is so penetrated by this conviction that, according to Gervinus’s assertion, he allows himself to deny even Christian morality, which makes exaggerated demands on human nature. Shakespeare, as we read, did not approve of limits of duty exceeding the intentions of nature. He teaches the golden mean between heathen hatred to one’s enemies and Christian love toward them (pp. 561, 562). How far Shakespeare was penetrated with this fundamental principle of reasonable moderation, says Gervinus, can be seen from the fact that he has the courage to express himself even against the Christian rules which prompt human nature to the excessive exertion of its powers. He did not admit that the limits of duties should exceed the biddings of Nature. Therefore he preached a reasonable mean natural to man, between Christian and heathen precepts, of love toward one’s enemies on the one hand, and hatred toward them on the other.

That one may do too much good (exceed the reasonable limits of good) is convincingly proved by Shakespeare’s words and examples. Thus excessive generosity ruins Timon, while Antonio’s moderate generosity confers honor; normal ambition makes Henry V. great, whereas it ruins Percy, in whom it has risen too high; excessive virtue leads Angelo to destruction, and if, in those who surround him, excessive severity becomes harmful and can not prevent crime, on the other hand the divine element in man, even charity, if it be excessive, can create crime.

Shakespeare taught, says Gervinus, that one may be too good.

He teaches that morality, like politics, is a matter in which, owing to the complexity of circumstances and motives, one can not establish any principles (p. 563), and in this he agrees with Bacon and Aristotle — there are no positive religious and moral laws which may create principles for correct moral conduct suitable for all cases.

Gervinus most clearly expresses the whole of Shakespeare’s moral theory by saying that Shakespeare does not write for those classes for whom definite religious principles and laws are suitable (i.e., for nine hundred and ninety-nine one-thousandths of men) but for the educated:

“There are classes of men whose morality is best guarded by the positive precepts of religion and state law; to such persons Shakespeare’s creations are inaccessible. They are comprehensible and accessible only to the educated, from whom one can expect that they should acquire the healthy tact of life and self-consciousness by means of which the innate guiding powers of conscience and reason, uniting with the will, lead us to the definite attainment of worthy aims in life. But even for such educated people, Shakespeare’s teaching is not always without danger. The condition on which his teaching is quite harmless is that it should be accepted in all its completeness, in all its parts, without any omission. Then it is not only without danger, but is the most clear and faultless and therefore the most worthy of confidence of all moral teaching” (p. 564).

In order thus to accept all, one should understand that, according to his teaching, it is stupid and harmful for the individual to revolt against, or endeavor to overthrow, the limits of established religious and state forms. “Shakespeare,” says Gervinus, “would abhor an independent and free individual who, with a powerful spirit, should struggle against all convention in politics and morality and overstep that union between religion and the State which has for thousands of years supported society. According to his views, the practical wisdom of men could not have a higher object than the introduction into society of the greatest spontaneity and freedom, but precisely because of this one should safeguard as sacred and irrefragable the natural laws of society — one should respect the existing order of things and, continually verifying it, inculcate its rational sides, not overlooking nature for the sake of culture, or vice versa” (p. 566). Property, the family, the state, are sacred; but aspiration toward the recognition of the equality of men is insanity. Its realization would bring humanity to the greatest calamities. No one struggled more than Shakespeare against the privileges of rank and position, but could this freethinking man resign himself to the privileges of the wealthy and educated being destroyed in order to give room to the poor and ignorant? How could a man who so eloquently attracts people toward honors, permit that the very aspiration toward that which was great be crushed together with rank and distinction for services, and, with the destruction of all degrees, “the motives for all high undertakings be stifled”? Even if the attraction of honors and false power treacherously obtained were to cease, could the poet admit of the most dreadful of all violence, that of the ignorant crowd? He saw that, thanks to this equality now preached, everything may pass into violence, and violence into arbitrary acts and thence into unchecked passion which will rend the world as the wolf does its prey, and in the end the world will swallow itself up. Even if this does not happen with mankind when it attains equality — if the love of nations and eternal peace prove not to be that impossible “nothing,” as Alonso expressed it in “The Tempest” — but if, on the contrary, the actual attainment of aspirations toward equality is possible, then the poet would deem that the old age and extinction of the world had approached, and that, therefore, for active individuals, it is not worth while to live (pp. 571, 572).

Such is Shakespeare’s view of life as demonstrated by his greatest exponent and admirer.

Another of the most modern admirers of Shakespeare, George Brandes, further sets forth:

“No one, of course, can conserve his life quite pure from evil, from deceit, and from the injury of others, but evil and deceit are not always vices, and even the evil caused to others, is not necessarily a vice: it is often merely a necessity, a legitimate weapon, a right. And indeed, Shakespeare always held that there are no unconditional prohibitions, nor unconditional duties. For instance, he did not doubt Hamlet’s right to kill the King, nor even his right to stab Polonius to death, and yet he could not restrain himself from an overwhelming feeling of indignation and repulsion when, looking around, he saw everywhere how incessantly the most elementary moral laws were being infringed. Now, in his mind there was formed, as it were, a closely riveted ring of thoughts concerning which he had always vaguely felt: such unconditional commandments do not exist; the quality and significance of an act, not to speak of a character, do not depend upon their enactment or infringement; the whole substance lies in the contents with which the separate individual, at the moment of his decision and on his own responsibility, fills up the form of these laws.”

In other words, Shakespeare at last clearly saw that the moral of the aim is the only true and possible one; so that, according to Brandes, Shakespeare’s fundamental principle, for which he extols him, is that the end justifies the means — action at all costs, the absence of all ideals, moderation in everything, the conservation of the forms of life once established, and the end justifying the means. If you add to this a Chauvinist English patriotism, expressed in all the historical dramas, a patriotism according to which the English throne is something sacred, Englishmen always vanquishing the French, killing thousands and losing only scores, Joan of Arc regarded as a witch, and the belief that Hector and all the Trojans, from whom the English came, are heroes, while the Greeks are cowards and traitors, and so forth, — such is the view of life of the wisest teacher of life according to his greatest admirers. And he who will attentively read Shakespeare’s works can not fail to recognize that the description of this Shakespearian view of life by his admirers is quite correct.

The merit of every poetic work depends on three things:

(1) The subject of the work: the deeper the subject, i.e., the more important it is to the life of mankind, the higher is the work.

(2) The external beauty achieved by technical methods proper to the particular kind of art. Thus, in dramatic art, the technical method will be a true individuality of language, corresponding to the characters, a natural, and at the same time touching plot, a correct scenic rendering of the demonstration and development of emotion, and the feeling of measure in all that is represented.

(3) Sincerity, i.e., that the author should himself keenly feel what he expresses. Without this condition there can be no work of art, as the essence of art consists in the contemplation of the work of art being infected with the author’s feeling. If the author does not actually feel what he expresses, then the recipient can not become infected with the feeling of the author, does not experience any feeling, and the production can no longer be classified as a work of art.

The subject of Shakespeare’s pieces, as is seen from the demonstrations of his greatest admirers, is the lowest, most vulgar view of life, which regards the external elevation of the lords of the world as a genuine distinction, despises the crowd, i.e., the working classes — repudiates not only all religious, but also all humanitarian, strivings directed to the betterment of the existing order.

The second condition also, with the exception of the rendering of the scenes in which the movement of feelings is expressed, is quite absent in Shakespeare. He does not grasp the natural character of the positions of his personages, nor the language of the persons represented, nor the feeling of measure without which no work can be artistic.

The third and most important condition, sincerity, is completely absent in all Shakespeare’s works. In all of them one sees intentional artifice; one sees that he is not in earnest, but that he is playing with words.

Chapter 7

Shakespeare’s works do not satisfy the demands of all art, and, besides this, their tendency is of the lowest and most immoral. What then signifies the great fame these works have enjoyed for more than a hundred years?

Many times during my life I have had occasion to argue about Shakespeare with his admirers, not only with people little sensitive to poetry, but with those who keenly felt poetic beauty, such as Turgenef, Fet, and others, and every time I encountered one and the same attitude toward my objection to the praises of Shakespeare. I was not refuted when I pointed out Shakespeare’s defects; they only condoled with me for my want of comprehension, and urged upon me the necessity of recognizing the extraordinary supernatural grandeur of Shakespeare, and they did not explain to me in what the beauties of Shakespeare consisted, but were merely vaguely and exaggeratedly enraptured with the whole of Shakespeare, extolling some favorite passages: the unbuttoning of Lear’s button, Falstaff’s lying, Lady Macbeth’s ineffaceable spots, Hamlet’s exhortation to his father’s ghost, “forty thousand brothers,” etc.

“Open Shakespeare,” I used to say to these admirers, “wherever you like, or wherever it may chance, you will see that you will never find ten consecutive lines which are comprehensible, unartificial, natural to the character that says them, and which produce an artistic impression.” (This experiment may be made by any one. And either at random, or according to their own choice.) Shakespeare’s admirers opened pages in Shakespeare’s dramas, and without paying any attention to my criticisms as to why the selected ten lines did not satisfy the most elementary demands of esthetic and common sense, they were enchanted with the very thing which to me appeared absurd, incomprehensible, and inartistic. So that, in general, when I endeavored to get from Shakespeare’s worshipers an explanation of his greatness, I met in them exactly the same attitude which I have met, and which is usually met, in the defenders of any dogmas accepted not through reason, but through faith. It is this attitude of Shakespeare’s admirers toward their object — an attitude which may be seen also in all the mistily indefinite essays and conversations about Shakespeare — which gave me the key to the understanding of the cause of Shakespeare’s fame. There is but one explanation of this wonderful fame: it is one of those epidemic “suggestions” to which men constantly have been and are subject. Such “suggestion” always has existed and does exist in the most varied spheres of life. As glaring instances, considerable in scope and in deceitful influence, one may cite the medieval Crusades which afflicted, not only adults, but even children, and the individual “suggestions,” startling in their senselessness, such as faith in witches, in the utility of torture for the discovery of the truth, the search for the elixir of life, the philosopher’s stone, or the passion for tulips valued at several thousand guldens a bulb which took hold of Holland. Such irrational “suggestions” always have been existing, and still exist, in all spheres of human life — religious, philosophical, political, economical, scientific, artistic, and, in general, literary — and people clearly see the insanity of these suggestions only when they free themselves from them. But, as long as they are under their influence, the suggestions appear to them so certain, so true, that to argue about them is regarded as neither necessary nor possible. With the development of the printing press, these epidemics became especially striking.

With the development of the press, it has now come to pass that so soon as any event, owing to casual circumstances, receives an especially prominent significance, immediately the organs of the press announce this significance. As soon as the press has brought forward the significance of the event, the public devotes more and more attention to it. The attention of the public prompts the press to examine the event with greater attention and in greater detail. The interest of the public further increases, and the organs of the press, competing with one another, satisfy the public demand. The public is still more interested; the press attributes yet more significance to the event. So that the importance of the event, continually growing, like a lump of snow, receives an appreciation utterly inappropriate to its real significance, and this appreciation, often exaggerated to insanity, is retained so long as the conception of life of the leaders of the press and of the public remains the same. There are innumerable examples of such an inappropriate estimation which, in our time, owing to the mutual influence of press and public on one another, is attached to the most insignificant subjects. A striking example of such mutual influence of the public and the press was the excitement in the case of Dreyfus, which lately caught hold of the whole world.

The suspicion arose that some captain of the French staff was guilty of treason. Whether because this particular captain was a Jew, or because of some special internal party disagreements in French society, the press attached a somewhat prominent interest to this event, whose like is continually occurring without attracting any one’s attention, and without being able to interest even the French military, still less the whole world. The public turned its attention to this incident, the organs of the press, mutually competing, began to describe, examine, discuss the event; the public was yet more interested; the press answered to the demand of the public, and the lump of snow began to grow and grow, till before our eyes it attained such a bulk that there was not a family where controversies did not rage about “l’affaire.” The caricature by Caran d’Ache representing at first a peaceful family resolved to talk no more about Dreyfus, and then, like exasperated furies, members of the same family fighting with each other, quite correctly expressed the attitude of the whole of the reading world to the question about Dreyfus. People of foreign nationalities, who could not be interested in the question whether a French officer was a traitor or not — people, moreover, who could know nothing of the development of the case — all divided themselves for and against Dreyfus, and the moment they met they talked and argued about Dreyfus, some asserting his guilt with assurance, others denying it with equal assurance. Only after the lapse of some years did people begin to awake from the “suggestion” and to understand that they could not possibly know whether Dreyfus was guilty or not, and that each one had thousands of subjects much more near to him and interesting than the case of Dreyfus.

Such infatuations take place in all spheres, but they are especially noticeable in the sphere of literature, as the press naturally occupies itself the more keenly with the affairs of the press, and they are particularly powerful in our time when the press has received such an unnatural development. It continually happens that people suddenly begin to extol some most insignificant works, in exaggerated language, and then, if these works do not correspond to the prevailing view of life, they suddenly become utterly indifferent to them, and forget both the works themselves and their former attitude toward them.

So within my recollection, in the forties, there was in the sphere of art the laudation and glorification of Eugène Sue, and Georges Sand; and in the social sphere Fourier; in the philosophical sphere, Comte and Hegel; in the scientific sphere, Darwin.

Sue is quite forgotten, Georges Sand is being forgotten and replaced by the writings of Zola and the Decadents, Beaudelaire, Verlaine, Maeterlinck, and others. Fourier with his phalansteries is quite forgotten, his place being taken by Marx. Hegel, who justified the existing order, and Comte, who denied the necessity of religious activity in mankind, and Darwin with his law of struggle, still hold on, but are beginning to be forgotten, being replaced by the teaching of Nietzsche, which, altho utterly extravagant, unconsidered, misty, and vicious in its bearing, yet corresponds better with existing tendencies. Thus sometimes artistic, philosophic, and, in general, literary crazes suddenly arise and are as quickly forgotten. But it also happens that such crazes, having arisen in consequence of special reasons accidentally favoring to their establishment, correspond in such a degree to the views of life spread in society, and especially in literary circles, that they are maintained for a long time. As far back as in the time of Rome, it was remarked that often books have their own very strange fates: consisting in failure notwithstanding their high merits, and in enormous undeserved success notwithstanding their triviality. The saying arose: “pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli” — i.e., that the fate of books depends on the understanding of those who read them. There was harmony between Shakespeare’s writings and the view of life of those amongst whom his fame arose. And this fame has been, and still is, maintained owing to Shakespeare’s works continuing to correspond to the life concept of those who support this fame.

Until the end of the eighteenth century Shakespeare not only failed to gain any special fame in England, but was valued less than his contemporary dramatists: Ben Jonson, Fletcher, Beaumont, and others. His fame originated in Germany, and thence was transferred to England. This happened for the following reason:

Art, especially dramatic art, demanding for its realization great preparations, outlays, and labor, was always religious, i.e., its object was to stimulate in men a clearer conception of that relation of man to God which had, at that time, been attained by the leading men of the circles interested in art.

So it was bound to be from its own nature, and so, as a matter of fact, has it always been among all nations — Egyptians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks — commencing in some remote period of human life. And it has always happened that, with the coarsening of religious forms, art has more and more diverged from its original object (according to which it could be regarded as an important function — almost an act of worship), and, instead of serving religious objects, it strove for worldly aims, seeking to satisfy the demands of the crowd or of the powerful, i.e., the aims of recreation and amusement. This deviation of art from its true and high vocation took place everywhere, and even in connection with Christianity.

The first manifestations of Christian art were services in churches: in the administration of the sacraments and the ordinary liturgy. When, in course of time, the forms of art as used in worship became insufficient, there appeared the Mysteries, describing those events which were regarded as the most important in the Christian religious view of life. When, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the center of gravity of Christian teaching was more and more transferred, the worship of Christ as God, and the interpretation and following of His teaching, the form of Mysteries describing external Christian events became insufficient, and new forms were demanded. As the expression of the aspirations which gave rise to these changes, there appeared the Moralities, dramatic representations in which the characters were personifications of Christian virtues and their opposite vices.

But allegories, owing to the very fact of their being works of art of a lower order, could not replace the former religious dramas, and yet no new forms of dramatic art corresponding to the conception now entertained of Christianity, according to which it was regarded as a teaching of life, had yet been found. Hence, dramatic art, having no foundation, came in all Christian countries to swerve farther and farther from its proper use and object, and, instead of serving God, it took to serving the crowd (by crowd, I mean, not simply the masses of common people, but the majority of immoral or unmoral men, indifferent to the higher problems of human life). This deviation was, moreover, encouraged by the circumstance that, at this very time, the Greek thinkers, poets, and dramatists, hitherto unknown in the Christian world, were discovered and brought back into favor. From all this it followed that, not having yet had time to work out their own form of dramatic art corresponding to the new conception entertained of Christianity as being a teaching of life, and, at the same time, recognizing the previous form of Mysteries and Moralities as insufficient, the writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in their search for a new form, began to imitate the newly discovered Greek models, attracted by their elegance and novelty.

Since those who could principally avail themselves of dramatic representations were the powerful of this world: kings, princes, courtiers, the least religious people, not only utterly indifferent to the questions of religion, but in most cases completely depraved — therefore, in satisfying the demands of its audience, the drama of the fifteenth and sixteenth and seventeenth centuries entirely gave up all religious aim. It came to pass that the drama, which formerly had such a lofty and religious significance, and which can, on this condition alone, occupy an important place in human life, became, as in the time of Rome, a spectacle, an amusement, a recreation — only with this difference, that in Rome the spectacles existed for the whole people, whereas in the Christian world of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries they were principally meant for depraved kings and the higher classes. Such was the case with the Spanish, English, Italian, and French drama.

The dramas of that time, principally composed, in all these countries, according to ancient Greek models, or taken from poems, legends, or biographies, naturally reflected the characteristics of their respective nationalities: in Italy comedies were chiefly elaborated, with humorous positions and persons. In Spain there flourished the worldly drama, with complicated plots and historical heroes. The peculiarities of the English drama were the coarse incidents of murders, executions, and battles taking place on the stage, and popular, humorous interludes. Neither the Italian nor the Spanish nor the English drama had European fame, but they all enjoyed success in their own countries. General fame, owing to the elegance of its language and the talent of its writers, was possessed only by the French drama, distinguished by its strict adherence to the Greek models, and especially to the law of the three Unities.

So it continued till the end of the eighteenth century, at which time this happened: In Germany, which had not produced even passable dramatic writers (there was a weak and little known writer, Hans Sachs), all educated people, together with Frederick the Great, bowed down before the French pseudo-classical drama. Yet at this very time there appeared in Germany a group of educated and talented writers and poets, who, feeling the falsity and coldness of the French drama, endeavored to find a new and freer dramatic form. The members of this group, like all the upper classes of the Christian world at that time, were under the charm and influence of the Greek classics, and, being utterly indifferent to religious questions, they thought that if the Greek drama, describing the calamities and sufferings and strife of its heroes, represented the highest dramatic ideal, then such a description of the sufferings and the struggles of heroes would be a sufficient subject in the Christian world, too, if only the narrow demands of pseudo-classicalism were rejected. These men, not understanding that, for the Greeks, the strife and sufferings of their heroes had a religious significance, imagined that they needed only to reject the inconvenient law of the three Unities, without introducing into the drama any religious element corresponding to their time, in order that the drama should have sufficient scope in the representation of various moments in the lives of historical personages and, in general, of strong human passions. Exactly this kind of drama existed at that time among the kindred English people, and, becoming acquainted with it, the Germans decided that precisely such should be the drama of the new period.

Thereupon, because of the clever development of scenes which constituted Shakespeare’s peculiarity, they chose Shakespeare’s dramas in preference to all other English dramas, excluding those which were not in the least inferior, but were even superior, to Shakespeare. At the head of the group stood Goethe, who was then the dictator of public opinion in esthetic questions. He it was who, partly owing to a desire to destroy the fascination of the false French art, partly owing to his desire to give a greater scope to his own dramatic writing, but chiefly through the agreement of his view of life with Shakespeare’s, declared Shakespeare a great poet. When this error was announced by an authority like Goethe, all those esthetic critics who did not understand art threw themselves on it like crows on carrion and began to discover in Shakespeare beauties which did not exist, and to extol them. These men, German esthetic critics, for the most part utterly devoid of esthetic feeling, without that simple, direct artistic sensibility which, for people with a feeling for art, clearly distinguishes esthetic impressions from all others, but believing the authority which had recognized Shakespeare as a great poet, began to praise the whole of Shakespeare indiscriminately, especially distinguishing such passages as struck them by their effects, or which expressed thoughts corresponding to their views of life, imagining that these effects and these thoughts constitute the essence of what is called art. These men acted as blind men would act who endeavored to find diamonds by touch among a heap of stones they were fingering. As the blind man would for a long time strenuously handle the stones and in the end would come to no other conclusion than that all stones are precious and especially so the smoothest, so also these esthetic critics, without artistic feeling, could not but come to similar results in relation to Shakespeare. To give the greater force to their praise of the whole of Shakespeare, they invented esthetic theories according to which it appeared that no definite religious view of life was necessary for works of art in general, and especially for the drama; that for the purpose of the drama the representation of human passions and characters was quite sufficient; that not only was an internal religious illumination of what was represented unnecessary, but art should be objective, i.e., should represent events quite independently of any judgment of good and evil. As these theories were founded on Shakespeare’s own views of life, it naturally turned out that the works of Shakespeare satisfied these theories and therefore were the height of perfection.

It is these people who are chiefly responsible for Shakespeare’s fame. It was principally owing to their writings that the interaction took place between writers and public which expressed itself, and is still expressing itself, in an insane worship of Shakespeare which has no rational foundation. These esthetic critics have written profound treatises about Shakespeare. Eleven thousand volumes have been written about him, and a whole science of Shakespearology composed; while the public, on the one hand, took more and more interest, and the learned critics, on the other hand, gave further and further explanations, adding to the confusion.

So that the first cause of Shakespeare’s fame was that the Germans wished to oppose to the cold French drama, of which they had grown weary, and which, no doubt, was tedious enough, a livelier and freer one. The second cause was that the young German writers required a model for writing their own dramas. The third and principal cause was the activity of the learned and zealous esthetic German critics without esthetic feeling, who invented the theory of objective art, deliberately rejecting the religious essence of the drama.

“But,” I shall be asked, “what do you understand by the word’s religious essence of the drama? May not what you are demanding for the drama, religious instruction, or didactics, be called ‘tendency,’ a thing incompatible with true art?” I reply that by the religious essence of art I understand not the direct inculcation of any religious truths in an artistic guise, and not an allegorical demonstration of these truths, but the exhibition of a definite view of life corresponding to the highest religious understanding of a given time, which, serving as the motive for the composition of the drama, penetrates, to the knowledge of the author, through all of his work. So it has always been with true art, and so it is with every true artist in general and especially the dramatist. Hence — as it was when the drama was a serious thing, and as it should be according to the essence of the matter — that man alone can write a drama who has something to say to men, and something which is of the greatest importance for them: about man’s relation to God, to the Universe, to the All, the Eternal, the Infinite. But when, thanks to the German theories about objective art, the idea was established that, for the drama, this was quite unnecessary, then it is obvious how a writer like Shakespeare — who had not got developed in his mind the religious convictions proper to his time, who, in fact, had no convictions at all, but heaped up in his drama all possible events, horrors, fooleries, discussions, and effects — could appear to be a dramatic writer of the greatest genius.

But these are all external reasons. The fundamental inner cause of Shakespeare’s fame was and is this: that his dramas were “pro captu lectoris,” i.e., they corresponded to the irreligious and immoral frame of mind of the upper classes of his time.

Chapter 8

At the beginning of the last century, when Goethe was dictator of philosophic thought and esthetic laws, a series of casual circumstances made him praise Shakespeare. The esthetic critics caught up this praise and took to writing their lengthy, misty, learned articles, and the great European public began to be enchanted with Shakespeare. The critics, answering to the popular interest, and endeavoring to compete with one another, wrote new and ever new essays about Shakespeare; the readers and spectators on their side were increasingly confirmed in their admiration, and Shakespeare’s fame, like a lump of snow, kept growing and growing, until in our time it has attained that insane worship which obviously has no other foundation than “suggestion.”

Shakespeare finds no rival, not even approximately, either among the old or the new writers. Here are some of the tributes paid to him.

“Poetic truth is the brightest flower in the crown of Shakespeare’s merits;” “Shakespeare is the greatest moralist of all times;” “Shakespeare exhibits such many-sidedness and such objectivism that they carry him beyond the limits of time and nationality;” “Shakespeare is the greatest genius that has hitherto existed;” “For the creation of tragedy, comedy, history, idyll, idyllistic comedy, esthetic idyll, for the profoundest presentation, or for any casually thrown off, passing piece of verse, he is the only man. He not only wields an unlimited power over our mirth and our tears, over all the workings of passion, humor, thought, and observation, but he possesses also an infinite region full of the phantasy of fiction, of a horrifying and an amusing character. He possesses penetration both in the world of fiction and of reality, and above this reigns one and the same truthfulness to character and to nature, and the same spirit of humanity;” “To Shakespeare the epithet of Great comes of itself; and if one adds that independently of his greatness he has, further, become the reformer of all literature, and, moreover, has in his works not only expressed the phenomenon of life as it was in his day, but also, by the genius of thought which floated in the air has prophetically forestalled the direction that the social spirit was going to take in the future (of which we see a striking example in Hamlet), — one may, without hesitation, say that Shakespeare was not only a great poet, but the greatest of all poets who ever existed, and that in the sphere of poetic creation his only worthy rival was that same life which in his works he expressed to such perfection.”

The obvious exaggeration of this estimate proves more conclusively than anything that it is the consequence, not of common sense, but of suggestion. The more trivial, the lower, the emptier a phenomenon is, if only it has become the subject of suggestion, the more supernatural and exaggerated is the significance attributed to it. The Pope is not merely saintly, but most saintly, and so forth. So Shakespeare is not merely a good writer, but the greatest genius, the eternal teacher of man kind.

Suggestion is always a deceit, and every deceit is an evil. In truth, the suggestion that Shakespeare’s works are great works of genius, presenting the height of both esthetic and ethical perfection, has caused, and is causing, great injury to men.

This injury is twofold: first, the fall of the drama, and the replacement of this important weapon of progress by an empty and immoral amusement; and secondly, the direct depravation of men by presenting to them false models for imitation.

Human life is perfected only through the development of the religious consciousness, the only element which permanently unites men. The development of the religious consciousness of men is accomplished through all the sides of man’s spiritual activity. One direction of this activity is in art. One section of art, perhaps the most influential, is the drama.

Therefore the drama, in order to deserve the importance attributed to it, should serve the development of religious consciousness. Such has the drama always been, and such it was in the Christian world. But upon the appearance of Protestantism in its broader sense, i.e., the appearance of a new understanding of Christianity as of a teaching of life, the dramatic art did not find a form corresponding to the new understanding of Christianity, and the men of the Renaissance were carried away by the imitation of classical art. This was most natural, but the tendency was bound to pass, and art had to discover, as indeed it is now beginning to do, its new form corresponding to the change in the understanding of Christianity.

But the discovery of this new form was arrested by the teaching arising among German writers at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries — as to so-called objective art, i.e., art indifferent to good or evil — and therein the exaggerated praise of Shakespeare’s dramas, which partly corresponded to the esthetic teaching of the Germans, and partly served as material for it. If there had not been exaggerated praise of Shakespeare’s dramas, presenting them as the most perfect models, the men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would have had to understand that the drama, to have a right to exist and to be a serious thing, must serve, as it always has served and can not but do otherwise, the development of the religious consciousness. And having understood this, they would have searched for a new form of drama corresponding to their religious understanding.

But when it was decided that the height of perfection was Shakespeare’s drama, and that we ought to write as he did, not only without any religious, but even without any moral, significance, then all writers of dramas in imitation of him began to compose such empty pieces as are those of Goethe, Schiller, Hugo, and, in Russia, of Pushkin, or the chronicles of Ostrovski, Alexis Tolstoy, and an innumerable number of other more or less celebrated dramatic productions which fill all the theaters, and can be prepared wholesale by any one who happens to have the idea or desire to write a play. It is only thanks to such a low, trivial understanding of the significance of the drama that there appears among us that infinite quantity of dramatic works describing men’s actions, positions, characters, and frames of mind, not only void of any spiritual substance, but often of any human sense.

Let not the reader think that I exclude from this estimate of contemporary drama the theatrical pieces I have myself incidentally written. I recognize them, as well as all the rest, as not having that religious character which must form the foundation of the drama of the future.

The drama, then, the most important branch of art, has, in our time, become the trivial and immoral amusement of a trivial and immoral crowd. The worst of it is, moreover, that to dramatic art, fallen as low as it is possible to fall, is still attributed an elevated significance no longer appropriate to it. Dramatists, actors, theatrical managers, and the press — this last publishing in the most serious tone reports of theaters and operas — and the rest, are all perfectly certain that they are doing something very worthy and important.

The drama in our time is a great man fallen, who has reached the last degree of his degradation, and at the same time continues to pride himself on his past of which nothing now remains. The public of our time is like those who mercilessly amuse themselves over this man once so great and now in the lowest stage of his fall.

Such is one of the mischievous effects of the epidemic suggestion about the greatness of Shakespeare. Another deplorable result of this worship is the presentation to men of a false model for imitation. If people wrote of Shakespeare that for his time he was a good writer, that he had a fairly good turn for verse, was an intelligent actor and good stage manager — even were this appreciation incorrect and somewhat exaggerated — if only it were moderately true, people of the rising generation might remain free from Shakespeare’s influence. But when every young man entering into life in our time has presented to him, as the model of moral perfection, not the religious and moral teachers of mankind, but first of all Shakespeare, concerning whom it has been decided and is handed down by learned men from generation to generation, as an incontestable truth, that he was the greatest poet, the greatest teacher of life, the young man can not remain free from this pernicious influence. When he is reading or listening to Shakespeare the question for him is no longer whether Shakespeare be good or bad, but only: In what consists that extraordinary beauty, both esthetic and ethical, of which he has been assured by learned men whom he respects, and which he himself neither sees nor feels? And constraining himself, and distorting his esthetic and ethical feeling, he tries to conform to the ruling opinion. He no longer believes in himself, but in what is said by the learned people whom he respects. I have experienced all this. Then reading critical examinations of the dramas and extracts from books with explanatory comments, he begins to imagine that he feels something of the nature of an artistic impression. The longer this continues, the more does his esthetical and ethical feeling become distorted. He ceases to distinguish directly and clearly what is artistic from an artificial imitation of art. But, above all, having assimilated the immoral view of life which penetrates all Shakespeare’s writings, he loses the capacity of distinguishing good from evil. And the error of extolling an insignificant, inartistic writer — not only not moral, but directly immoral — executes its destructive work.

This is why I think that the sooner people free themselves from the false glorification of Shakespeare, the better it will be.

First, having freed themselves from this deceit, men will come to understand that the drama which has no religious element at its foundation is not only not an important and good thing, as it is now supposed to be, but the most trivial and despicable of things. Having understood this, they will have to search for, and work out, a new form of modern drama, a drama which will serve as the development and confirmation of the highest stage of religious consciousness in men.

Secondly, having freed themselves from this hypnotic state, men will understand that the trivial and immoral works of Shakespeare and his imitators, aiming merely at the recreation and amusement of the spectators, can not possibly represent the teaching of life, and that, while there is no true religious drama, the teaching of life should be sought for in other sources.

TOLSTOY’S JOURNAL

Translated by Rose Strunsky 1917

1895

October

October 28. Yasnaya Polyana.

Have been thinking:

Have been thinking one thing: that this life which we see around us is a movement of matter according to fixed, well-known laws ; but that in us we feel the presence of an altogether different law, having nothing in common with the others and re-quiring from us the fulfilment of its demands. It can be said that we see and recognise all the other laws only because we have in us this law. If we did not recognise this law, we would not recognise the others.

This law is different from all the rest, principally in this, that those other laws are outside of us and forces us to obey them ; but this law is in us and more than in us; it is our very selves and there-fore it does not force us when we obey it, but on the contrary frees us, because in following it we become ourselves. And for this reason we are drawn to fulfil this law and we sooner or later will inevitably fulfil it. In this then consists the freedom of the will. This freedom consists in this, that we should recognise that which is namely that this inner law is ourselves.

This inner law is what we call reason, conscience, love, the good, God. These words have different meanings, but all from different angles mean one and the same thing. In our understanding of this inner law, the son of God, consists indeed the essence of the Christian doctrine.

The world can be looked upon in this way: a world exists governed by certain, well-known laws, and within this world are beings subject to the same laws, but who at the same time bear in them-selves another law not in accord with the former laws of the world, a higher law, and this law must inevitably triumph within these beings and defeat the lower law. And in this struggle and in the gradual victory of the higher law over the lower, in this only is life for man and the whole world.

Oct. 29. Yasnaya Polyana.

If I live.

November

Nov. 5. Y. P.

I have skipped 6 days. It seems to me, I thought little during this time: I wrote a little, chopped wood and was indisposed but lived through much. I lived through much, because in fulfilling a promise to S. 3 , I read through all my journals for the past seven years.

It seems to me, I am approaching a simple and clear expression of that by which I live. How good that I didn’t finish the Catechism ! 4 I think I shall write it differently and better, if the Father wishes it. I understand why it is impossible to say it quickly. If it could be said all at once, by what then would we live in the realm of thought? It will never be given me to go farther than this task.

I just took a walk and understood clearly why I can’t make Resurrection go better : it was begun falsely. I understood this in thinking over again the story: Who is Right? 5 (about children). I understood that one must begin with the life of the peasants, that they are the subject, they are positive, but that the other thing is shadow, the other thing is negative. And I understood the same thing about Resurrection. One must begin with her. 6 I want to begin immediately.

During this time there were letters : from Ken-worthy, 7 a beautiful one from Shkarvan, 8 and from a Dukhobor in Tiflis. 9

Have written to no one for a long time. Gen-eral indisposition and no energy. The stage man-ager and the decorator 10 were here, students from Kharkov against whom I think I did not sin, Ivan Ivanovich Bochkarev, 11 Kolasha. 12 . . .

Nov. 6. Y. P.

If I live.

November 7. Y. P.

I wrote a little these two days on the new Resur-rection. My conscience hurts when I remember how trivially I began it. So far, I rejoice when I think of the work as I am beginning it.

I chopped a little. I went to Ovsiannikovo, had a good talk with Maria Alexandrovna 13 and Ivan Ivanovich. 14 Waltz’s assistant was here and a Frenchman with a poem. . . .

November 8,9. Y. P.

Have written little on Resurrection. I was not disappointed, but I was weak.

Yesterday Dunaev 15 came. Chopped much yesterday, overtired myself. To-day I walked. I went to Constantine Bieli’s. 16 He is very much to be pitied. Then I walked in the village. It is good with them, but with us it is shameful. Wrote letters. Wrote to Bazhenov 17 and three others. Thought :

1 ) The. confirmation of the fact, that reason liberates the latent love in man for justice is the proverb, “ Comprendre c’est tout pardoner.” If you forgive a man, you will love him. To for-give means to cease to condemn and to hate.

2) If a man believes something at the word of another, he will lose his belief in that which he would have inevitably believed in, had he not trusted the other one. He who believes in ... etc., ceases to believe in reason. They even say straight out, one ought not to believe in reason.

3) ....

A very interesting letter from Holland, about what a youth is to do who is called to military service, when he is the sole supporter of his mother. 18

November 10. Y. P.

Slept with difficulty. Weakness both physical and intellectual and for which I am at fault also moral. Rode horseback. Posha 19 arrived. ... A wonderful French pamphlet about war. 20 Yes, 20 years are needed for that thought to be-come a general one. My head aches and seems to crackle and rumble. Father, help me when I am most weak that I may not fall morally. It is possible.

Nov. 11. Y.P.

If I live.

I write and think: it is possible that I won’t be. Every day I make attempts, and I get more accustomed to it.

To-day November 75.

I have been so weak all the time I could write nothing except a few letters. A letter to Shkarvan. There have been here, Dunaiev, Posha, Maria Vasilievna. 21 They left yesterday. Yes-terday also I went to see Maria Alexandrovna ; she is ill. To-day Aunt Tanya 22 and Sonya came.

I didn’t sleep at night and therefore didn’t work. But I wrote on the girl Konefsky 23 and a little in my journal. I am reading Schopen-hauer’s 24 “Aphorisms.” Very good. Only put “ The service of God “ instead of “ The recogni-tion of the vanity of life,” and we agree.

Now 2 o’clock, I shall write out later what I have noted down. 25

December

1898

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December

December 7. Moscow.

Almost a month since I have made any entries. During this time we moved to Moscow. The weakness has passed a little, and I am working earnestly, though with little success, on the Declaration of Faith. 26 Yesterday I wrote a little article on whipping. 27 I lay down to sleep in the day and had just dozed off I felt as if some one jerked me; I got up, began to think about whipping, and wrote it out.

During this time, I went to the theatre 28 for the rehearsals of the Power of Darkness. Art, be-ginning as a game, has continued to be the toy of adults. This is also proved by music, of which I have heard much. It is ineffectual. On the contrary, it detracts when there is ascribed to it the unsuitable meaning which is ascribed to it. Realism, moreover, weakens its significance . . .

N. refused to serve in the military. I called on him. 29 Philosophov 30 died. . . . Wrote several worthless letters.

I have thought during this time much in meaning. Much of it I could not understand and have forgotten.

1) I have often wanted to suffer, wanted persecution. That means that I was lazy and didn’t want to work, so that others should work for me, torturing me, and I should only suffer.

2) It is terrible, the perversions ... of the mind to which men expose children for their own purposes during the time of their education. The rule of conscious materialism is only explained by this. The child is instilled with such nonsense that afterwards the materialistic, limited, false conception, which is not developed to the conclusions which would show its falsity, appears like an enormous conquest of the intellect.

3) I made a note, “Violence frees,” and it was something very clear and important, and now I don’t remember what it was at all.

I have remembered. December 23. Violence is a temptation because it frees us from the strain of attention, from the work of reasoning: one must labour to undo a knot; to cut it, is shorter.

4) A usual perversion of reason, which is made through a violently enforced faith, is to make men satisfied either with idolatry or with materialism, which at bottom is one and the same thing. Faith in the reality of our conceptions is faith in an idol, and the consequences are the same; one must bring sacrifices to it.

5) I can imagine consciousness transferred to the life of the spirit to such a degree that the sufferings of the body would be met gladly.

6) A beautiful woman smiles, and we think that because she smiles she says something good and true when she smiles. But often the smile seasons something entirely foul.

7) Education. It is worth while occupying oneself with education, in order to find out all one’s shortcomings. Seeing them, you will begin to correct them. But to correct oneself is indeed the best method of education for one’s children and for others’ and for grown-up people.

Just now I read a letter from Shkarvan 31 that medical help does not appear to him like a boon, that the lengthening of many empty lives for many hundred years is much less important to him than the weakest blowing, as he writes, (a puff) on the spark of divine love in the heart of another. Here then in this blowing, lies the whole art of education. But to kindle it in others, one must kindle it in oneself.

8) To love means to desire that which the beloved object desires. The objects of love de-sire opposing things, and therefore, we can only love that which desires one and the same thing. But that which desires one and the same thing is God.

9) Man beginning to live, loves only himself, and separates himself from other beings in that he constantly loves that which alone constitutes his being. But as soon as he recognises himself as a separate being, he recognises also his own love, and he is no longer content with this love for himself and he begins to love other beings. And the more he lives a conscious life, the greater and greater number of beings he will begin to love, though not with such a stable and unceasing love as that with which he loves himself, but nev-ertheless, in such a way that he wishes good to everything he loves, and he rejoices at this good, and suffers at the evil which tries the beloved beings, and he unites into one all that he loves.

As life is love, why not suppose that my “self,” that which I consider to be myself and love with a special love, is perhaps the union I made in a former life of things which I loved, just as I am making a union of things now. The other has already taken place and this one is taking place.

Life is the enlargement of love, the widening of its borders, and this widening is going on in various lives. In the present life, this widening appears to me in the form of love. This widening is necessary for my inner life and it is also necessary for the life of this world. But my life can manifest itself not only in this form. It manifests itself in an innumerable quantity of forms. Only this one is apparent to me.

But in the meantime, the movement of life un-derstood by me in this world, through the enlarge-ment of love in myself and through the union of beings through love, produces at the same time other effects, one or many, unseen by me. As for instance, I put together 8 toy cubes to make a picture on one side of them, not seeing the other sides of the constructed cubes, but on the other sides are being formed pictures just as regular, though unseen by me.

(All this was very clear when it came into my head, and now I have forgotten everything and the result is nonsense.)

10) I have thought much about God, about the essence of my life, and it seemed I only doubted one and the other and believed in my own conclusions; and then, one time, not long ago, I simply had the desire to lean upon my faith in God and in the indestructibility of my soul, and to my astonishment I felt so firm and calm a confidence, as I have never felt before. So that all my doubts and scrutinisings have evidently, not only not weakened my faith, but have strengthened it to an enormous degree.

11) Reason is not given that we should recognise what we ought to love; this it won’t disclose; but only for this: to show what we ought not to love.

12) As in each piece of handiwork, the prin-cipal art lies not in the regular making of certain things anew, but in the ever bettering of the in-evitable faults of a wrong and ruined work, so even in the business of life, the principal wisdom is not how to begin to act and how to lead life correctly, but how to better faults, how to liberate oneself from errors and seductions.

13) Happiness is the satisfaction of the re-quirements of a man’s being living from birth to death in this world only; but the good is the satis-faction of the requirements of the eternal essence living in man.

14) The essence of the teachings of Christ consists in this, that man ought to know who he is; that he should understand, like a bird which does not use its wings and runs on the land, that he is not a mortal animal, dependent on the conditions of the world, but like a bird which has understood that it has wings and has faith in them, he should understand that he himself was never born and never died and always is, and passes through this world in one of the innumerable forms of life to fulfil the will of Him who sent him into this life.

Dec. 8. Moscow. If I live.

Mascha 32 is with Ilia, 33 a loving letter from her to-day.

To-day December 23. Moscow.

It is long since I have made an entry. On the 3Oth, the Chertkovs 34 came. It is two days since Kenworthy arrived. He is very pleasant. . . .

Have continued to write the Declaration am progressing. Off and on, I think out the drama, 35 and yesterday I raved about it all night. I am not well; a bad cold in the head, influenza. Be-cause of the letter to the Englishman, I began also a letter on the collision between England and America. 36

Have been thinking during this time :

i) I have been thinking especially clearly of that which I have already said many times; that all the evil in the world comes only from this, that people look upon themselves, upon their own personality, as a worthy object of their conscious life upon themselves or upon a group of personalities, it is all the same.

As long as a man lives for himself unconsciously, he does no harm. If there is a struggle, then the struggle is an unconscious one which is ended at once when the struggle with surroundings is ended ; man adjusts himself to it or he goes under, and this struggle is neither cruel nor is it an evil one. The struggle begins to be cruel only when man directs his consciousness upon it, prepares it, strengthens and multiplies its energy tenfold and hundredfold.

As Pascal says: there are three kinds of people; one kind know nothing and sit quietly, and just as quiet are those who know; but there are a middle kind who don’t know but believe they do; from them comes all the evil in the world. They are the people in whom consciousness has awakened, but they don’t know how to use it.

2) The whole thing lies in this that you should always remember who you are. There is no situation so difficult, from which the way out would not immediately offer itself, if you only would remember that you are not a temporary, material manifestation, but an eternal omnipresent being. “ I am the resurrection and the life : he that believeth in me shall never die, and though he were dead yet shall he live. Believest thou this?”

I walked on the street. A wretched beggar approached me. I forgot who I was and passed by. And then suddenly I remembered, and just as naturally as the hungry begin to eat and the tired

1895

sit down, I turned back and handed him some-thing. It is the same with the temptation to quarrel, to insult, to be vain.

3) One can not voluntarily cease to remain awake, i. e. to fall asleep. Just as little can one voluntarily cease to live. Life is more important than the will, than desire. (Unclear.)

4) Receive with thankfulness the enjoyments of the flesh all that you meet on the way, if they are not sinful in short, if they do not go against your consciousness, if they do not make it suffer. But use the efforts of your will, your liberty, only to serve God.

I just wrote a letter to Crosby. 37 He is work-ing in America. Dec. 24. Moscow. If I live.

Yesterday I received the “ Open Letter “ of Spielhagen, the Socialist, which appeared in the newspapers with regard to Drozhin. 38

1896

January 23. Moscow.

Just a month that I made no entries. During this time I wrote a letter about patriotism 39 and a letter to Crosby 40 and here now for two weeks I have been writing the drama. I wrote three acts abominably. I thought to make an outline so as to form the charpente. I have little hope of suc-cess.

Chertkov and Kenworthy went away the 7th. Sonya went to Tver to Andrusha. 41 To-day Na-gornov 42 died. I am again a little indisposed.

I jotted down during this time :

1 ) A true work of art a contagious one is produced only when the artist seeks, strives. In poetry this passion for representing that which is, comes from the fact that the artist hopes that hav-ing seen clearly and having fixed that which is, he will understand the meaning of that which is.

2) In every art there are two departures from the way, vulgarity and artificiality. Between them both there is only a narrow path. And this narrow path is outlined by impulse. If you have impulse and direction, you pass by both dangers. Of the two, the more terrible is artificiality.

1896

3) It is impossible to compel reason to exam-ine and clarify that which the heart does not wish.

4) It is bad when reason wishes to give the meaning of virtue to selfish efforts.

Kudinenko 43 was here. A remarkable man. N. took the oath and is serving. 44 A letter from Makovitsky 45 with an article on the Naz-arenes. 46 Jan. 24. Moscow. If I live.

Jan. 25. Moscow.

During these two days the chief event was the death of Nagornov. Always new and full of meaning is death. It occurred to me : they repre-sent death in the theatre. Does it produce Koooooo of that impression which the nearness of a real death produces?

I continue writing the drama. I have written four acts. All bad. But it is beginning to re-semble a real thing. Jan. 26. Mosc. If I live.

January 26. Moscow.

I am alive, but I don’t live. Strakhov to-day I heard of his death. 47 To-day they buried Nagornov and that is news. I lay down to sleep, but could not sleep, and there appeared before me so clearly and brightly, an un-derstanding of life whereby we would feel

February

ourselves to be travellers. Before us lies a stage of the road with the same well-known conditions. How can one walk along that road otherwise than eagerly, gaily, friendly, and ac-tively together, not grieving over the fact that you yourself are going away or that others are going ahead of you thither, where we shall again be still more together.

To-day I wrote a postscript to the letter to Crosby. A good letter from Kenworthy. Un-pleasantness with N. He is a journalist. Jan. 26 . Moscow. If I live.

Almost a month that I have made no entries. Today, Feb. 13, Moscow.

I wanted to go to the Olsuphievs. 48 .... There is much bustle here and it takes up much time. I sit down late to my work and there-fore write little. I finished somehow the fifth act of the drama and took up Resurrection. I read over eleven chapters and am gradually ad-vancing. I corrected the letter to Crosby.

An event an important one Strakhov’s death, and something else Davydov’s conversa-tion with the Emperor. 49

The article by Ertel 50 that the efforts of the lib-erals are useful, and also the letter by Spielhagen on the same theme, 51 provoke me. But I can not, I must not write. I have no time. The letters

1896

from Sopotsko 52 and Zdziekhovsky 53 on the Orthodox Church and on the Catholic, provoke me on the other hand. However, I shall hardly write. But here yesterday I received a letter from Grinevich’s 54 mother on the religious bringing up of children. That I must do. At least I must use all my strength to do this.

Very much music it is useless. ... As re-gards religion, I am very cool at present.

Thought during this time (much I have forgot-ten and have not written down) :

i ) Oh, not to forget death for a moment, into which at any moment you can fall! If we would only remember that we are not standing upon an even plain (if you think we are standing so, then you are only imagining that those who have gone away have fallen overboard and you yourself are afraid that you will fall overboard), but that we are rolling on, without stopping, running into each other, getting ahead and being got ahead of, yonder behind the curtain which hides from us those who are going away, and will hide us from those who remain. If we remember that always, then, how easy and joyous it is to live and roll together, yonder down the same incline, in the power of God, with Whom we have been and in Whose power we are now and will be after-wards and forever. I have been feeling this very keenly.

February

2) There is no more convincing proof of the existence of God, than the faculty of the soul by which we can transport ourselves into other be-ings. Out of this faculty flows both love and rea-son, but neither one nor the other is in us, but they are outside of us and we only coincide with them. (Unclear.)

3 ) The power to kill oneself is free play given to people. God did not want slaves in this life, but free workers. If you remain in this life, then it means that its conditions are advantageous to you. If advantageous then work. If you go away from the conditions here, if you kill yourself, then the same thing will be put before you again there. So there is nowhere to go.

It would be good to write the history of what a man lives through in this life who committed sui-cide in a past life; how, coming up against the same requirements which were placed before him in the other life, he comes to the realisation that he must fufil them. And in this life he is more intelligent than in the others, remembering the lesson given him.

4) How does it happen that a clever, educated man believes in the nonsensical? Man thinks that which his heart desires. Only if his heart desires the truth, and only if it does, will he think the truth. But if his heart desires earthly pleasures and peace, he will think of that which will bring

1896

him earthly pleasures and peace or still something else. But as it is not an attribute of man to have earthly pleasures and peace, he will think falsely; and to be able to think falsely he will hypnotise himself.

(Unclear, not good.) Feb. 14. M. If I live.

To-day February 22. Nicholskoe, at the Olsu-phievs. 55

It is already more than a week that I feel de-pressed in spirit. No life; I can not work on any-thing. Father of my life and of all life ! If my work is already finished here, as I am beginning to think, and the ending of my spiritual life, which I am beginning to feel, means a transfer into that other life that I am already beginning to live there and that here these remnants are being taken away little by little then show it to me more clearly that I may not seek and weary myself. Otherwise it seems to me that I have many well-thought plans, yet I have no means, not only for carrying them through this I know, I ought not to think of but even to do something good, something pleasing to Thee as long as I live here. Or give me strength to work with the consciousness of serving Thee. Still, Thy will be done. If only I always felt that life consisted only in the ful-

February

filment of Thy will, I would not doubt. But doubt comes because I bite the bit and don’t feel the reins.

It is now 2 o’clock. I am going to dinner. I took a walk, slept in the morning, read Trilby. And I want to sleep all the time.

During this time, what has happened? Almost nothing. I thought on the Declaration of Faith. // / live. February 23. Nicholskoe.

To-day February 27. Nicholskoe.

Am writing the drama, it moves very stiffly. Indeed I don’t even know if I am progressing or not. ... I am very comfortable here ; the impor-tant thing it is quiet.

Read Trilby poor. Wrote letters to Chert-kov, Schmidt, 56 Kenworthy. Read Corneille instructive.

Have been thinking:

i) I made a note that there are two arts. Now thinking it over, I don’t find a clear expres-sion of my thought. Then I thought that there was an art, as they rightly characterise it, which grew from play, from the need of every creature to play. The play of the calf is jumping, the play of man is a symphony, a picture, a poem, a novel.

This is one kind of art, the art of play, of 25

1896

thinking out new plays, producing old ones and inventing new. That is a good thing, useful and valuable because it increases man’s joys. But it is clear that it is possible to occupy oneself with play only when sated. Thus society can only oc-cupy itself with art, when all its members are sated. But as long as all its members are not sated, there can not be real art, there will be an art of the overfed, a deformed one, and an art of the hungry ones rough and poor, just as it is now. And therefore, in the first kind of art of play only that part is of value which is at-tainable to all, which increases the joys of all.

If it is like this, then it is not a bad thing, espe-cially if it does not demand an increase of toil on the part of the oppressed, as happens now.

(This could and should be expressed better.)

But there is yet another art which calls forth in man better and higher feelings. I wrote this just now something I have said many times and I think it isn’t true. Art is only one and con-sists in this: to increase the sinless general joys accessible to all the good of man. A nice build-ing, a gay picture, a song, a story give a little good; the awakening of religious feelings, of the love of good brought forth by a drama, a picture, a song give great good.

The 2nd thing that I have been thinking about art, is that nowhere is conservatism so harmful

February

as in art. Art is one of the manifestations of the spiritual life of man, and therefore, as when an animal is alive, it breathes and discharges the prod-ucts of its breathing, so when humanity is alive, it manifests activity in art. And therefore, at every given moment it must be contemporaneous the art of our time. One ought only to know where it is (not in the decadence of music, poetry, or the novel) ; and one must seek it not in the past, but in the present. People who wish to show them-selves connoisseurs of art and who therefore praise the past classic art and insult the present, only show by this, that they have no feeling for art.

3) Rachinsky 57 says: “Notice that contem-poraneous with the spread of the use of narcotics, since the ryth century, the astounding progress of science began, and especially of the natural ones.” Is it not because of this, I say to him, that the false direction of science has come, the studying of that which is not necessary to man, but is only an object for idle curiosity, or when useful, is not the only thing really necessary? Is it not because of this that from that time on there was neglected the one thing that was necessary, i.e. the settling of moral questions and their application to life?

4) What is the good? I only know a word in Russian which defines this idea. The good is the real good, the good for all, le veritable bien, le bien de tous, what is good for everybody. 58

1896

5) Men, in struggling with untruth and super-stition, often console themselves with the quantity of superstition they have destroyed. This is not right. It is not right to calm oneself until all that is contradictory to reason and demands credulence is destroyed. Superstition is like a cancer. Everything must be cleaned out if one under-takes an operation. But if a little bit is left, every-thing will grow from it again.

6) The historic knowledge of how different myths and beliefs arose among peoples in differ-ent places and in different times ought to, it seems, destroy the faith that these myths and beliefs which have been inoculated in us from our infancy, con-stitute the absolute truth; but nevertheless, so-called educated people believe in them. How superficial then, is the education of so-called edu-cated people !

7) To-day at dinner there was talk about a boy with vicious inclinations who was expelled from school, and about how good it would be to give him over to a reformatory.

It is exactly what a man does who lives a bad life, harmful to his health, and who, when he be-comes ill, turns to the doctor so that the latter may cure him, but has no idea that the illness was given to him as a beneficial indicator that his whole life is bad and that he ought to change it. The

March

same thing is true with the illnesses in our society; every ill member of society does not remind us that the whole life of our society is irregular and that we ought to change it. But we think that for every such ill member, there is or ought to be, an institution freeing us from this member or even bettering him.

Nothing hampers the progress of humanity so much as this false conviction. The more ill the society, the more institutions there are for the healing of symptoms and the less anxiety for changing the entire life.

It is now 10 o’clock in the evening. I am go-ing to supper. I want to work very much, but am without intellectual energy; a great weakness, yet I want to work terribly. If God would only give it to-morrow. Feb. 28. Nicholskoe. If I live.

To-day March 6. Nicholskoe.

All this time I have felt weakness and intel-lectual apathy. I am working on the drama very slowly. Much has become clear. But there isn’t one scene with which I am fully satisfied.

To-day I was about to plan something silly: to write out an outline of the Declaration of Faith. Of course it didn’t go. In the same way I began and dropped a letter to the Italians. 59

1896

During this time I jotted down:

1) Corneille writes in his Preface to Menteur on art, that its aim is a diversion, “divertir” but that it must not be harmful, and if possible, it ought to be educationally enlightening.

2) At supper there was a discussion on hered-ity: they say vicious people are born from an alcoholic . . . (I can’t clearly express my thought and will put it by.)

3) Something very important. I lay and was almost asleep, suddenly something seemed to tear in my heart. It occurred to me: that is the way death comes from heart failure; and I remained calm I felt neither grief nor joy, but blessedly calm whether here or there, I know that it is well with me, that things are as they ought to be, just like a child, tossed in the arms of its mother, does not stop smiling from joy for it knows that it is in her loving arms.

And the thought came to me : why is it so now and was not so before? Because before, I did not live the whole of life, but lived only an earthly life. In order to believe in immortality, one must live an immortal life here. One can walk with one’s feet and not see the precipice before one, over which it is impossible to cross, and one can rise on one’s wings. . . . 60

(It isn’t going and I don’t feel like thinking.) March 7, 1896. Nicholskoe. If I live.

May

To-day May 2. Yasnaya Polyana.

It is almost two months since I have made an entry. All this time I lived in Moscow. Of im-portant events there were : a getting closer to the scribe Novikov 61 who changed his life on account of my books which his brother, a lackey, received from his mistress abroad. A hot-blooded youth. Also his brother, a working man, asked for u What is my Faith?” and Tania 62 sent him to Mme. Kholevinsky. 63 They took Mme. Kholevinsky to prison. The prosecuting attorney said that they ought to go after me. All this together made me write a letter to the ministers of Justice and the Interior in which I begged them to transfer their prosecution to me. 64

All this time I wrote on the Declaration of Faith. I made little progress. Chertkov, Posha Biriukov were here and went away. My rela-tions with people are good. I have stopped rid-ing the bicycle. I wonder how I could have been so infatuated.

I heard Wagner’s Siegfried. 65 I have many thoughts in connection with this and other things. In all I have jolted down 20 thoughts in my note-book.

Still another important event the work of African Spier. 66 I just read through what I wrote in the beginning of this notebook. At bottom, it is nothing else than a short summary of all of

1896

Spier’s philosophy which I not only had not read at that time, but about which I had not the slight-est idea. This work clarified my ideas on the meaning of life remarkably, and in some ways strengthened them. The essence of his doctrine is that things do not exist, but only our impressions which appear to us in our conception as objects. Conception (Vorstellung) has the quality of be-lieving in the existence of objects. This comes from the fact that the quality of thinking consists in attributing an objectivity to impressions, a sub-stance, and a projecting of them into space.

May 3. Y. P.

Let me write down anything. Am indisposed. Weakness and physical apathy. But think and feel keenly. Yesterday at least, I wrote a few letters: to Spier, 67 Shkarvan, Myasoyedov, 68 Perer, Sverbeev. 69

I am reading Spier all the time, and the reading provokes a mass of thoughts.

Let me write out something at least from my 2 1 notes.

To-day I worked on the Declaration of Faith.

i) Come and dwell in us and cleanse us of all evil” ... On the contrary: Cleanse thy soul of evil thyself and He will come and dwell in thee. He only waits for this. Like water he flows into

May

thee in the measure as room is freed. “ Dwell in us.” How agonisingly lonely it is without Thee this I experienced these days and how peaceful, firm and joyous, needing nothing and no one when with Thee. Do not leave me !

I can not pray. His tongue is different from that which I speak, but He will understand and translate it into His own when I say : “ Help me, come to me, do not leave me ! “

And here I have fallen into a contradiction. I say you have to cleanse yourself, then He will come. But I, not yet having cleansed myself, call upon Him. May 4. If I still live here, Y. P.

May 5. 7. P.

The same general despair. And I am sad. There is one cause; the higher moral requirement that I put forward. In its name I have rejected everything that is beneath it. But it was not fol-lowed. Fifteen years ago I proposed giving away the greater part of the property and to live in four rooms. Then they would have an ideal. . . .

To-day I rode past Gill. 70 I thought: no un-dertaking is profitable with a small amount of capital. The more capital, the more profits; the less expenses. But from this it in no way follows that, as Marx says, capitalism will lead to social-

1896

ism. Perhaps it will lead to it, but to one with force. The workingmen will be compelled to work together, and they will work less and the pay will be more, but there will be the same slav-ery. It is necessary that people work freely in common, that they learn to work for each other, but capitalism doesn’t teach them that; on the con-trary, it teaches them envy, greed, selfishness. Therefore, through a forced uniting brought about by capitalism, the material condition of the workers can be bettered, but their contentment can in no way be established. Contentment can only be established through the free union of the workers. And for this it is necessary to learn how to unite, to perfect oneself morally, to will-ingly serve others without being hurt when not re-ceiving a return. And this can’t in any way be learned under the capitalistic, competitive system, but under an entirely different one.

I sleep alone downstairs. To-morrow, May 6th, Y. P.

To-day, May 9, Y. P.

Up to now, I haven’t yet written out all that I had to. Have been continually indisposed. Notwithstanding this, I work in the mornings. To-day, it seemed to me I advanced very much. Our people have gone away, some to the corona-

May

tion, others to Sweden. 71 I am alone with Masha ; she has a sore throat. I am well. May w, If Hive. Y.P.

To-day, May u, Y.P.

Sonya arrived from Moscow. I continue to write the Declaration of Faith. It seems as if I were weakening. To-day I received a letter from N, a tangled up revolutionist. In the evening I rode horseback to Yasenki 72 and thought:

I have not yet written out everything from my notebooks. I will jot down at least this, the more so since, when it came into my head it seemed to me very important. Namely:

i) Spier says we know only sensations. It is true, the material of our knowledge is sensations. But one must ask; why variation of sensations (even of one and the same sense of sight or touch). He (Spier) insists too much that cor-poreality is an illusion, and does not answer the question: why variation of sensations? It is not bodies that make variation of sensations, I agree to this, but it is just such beings as we, who must be the cause of these sensations.

I know that what he recognises as our being he recognises as a unit. Good. Admitting it is a unit, then it is a divided off, broken off unit, and I am a unit being only within certain limits. And

1896

these limits of my being are the limits of other beings. Or, one being is outlined by limits and these limits create sensations, i. e., the material of knowledge. There are no bodies, bodies are illu-sions, but other beings are not illusions and I recognise them through sensations. Their activ-ity produces sensations in me and I conclude that the same effect is produced in them by my activity. When I receive sensations from a man with whom I come in contact, it can be understood; but when I receive sensations from the earth upon which I fall, from the sun which warms me, what is it that produces these sensations in me? Probably the activities of beings whose life I do not understand; but I recognise only a part of them like the flea on my body. Touching the earth, feeling the warmth of the sun, my limits come in contact with the limits of the sun. I am in the world (I pro-ject this into space. I can not do it otherwise though it is not so in reality) like a cell, not an immovable one, but one wandering and touching by his limits, not only the limits of other cells of the same kind, but other enormous bodies.

Better still, not to project this into space; I act and am acted upon by the greatest variety of be-ings; or, my division of a unit being associates with other divisions of the most various kinds.

(What a lot of nonsense!)

May

May 12, Y. P. If I live.

Pentecost. It is cold, damp, and not a leaf on the trees.

To-day already, May 1 6, Y. P. Morning.

I can not write my Declaration of Faith. It is unclear, metaphysical, and whatever good there is in it, I spoil. I am thinking of beginning it all from the beginning again or to call a stop and get to work on a novel or a drama.

N. 73 was here; it was a difficult love test. I passed it only outwardly and even then badly. If the examiner had gone along thoroughly, skip-ping about, I would have failed shamefully.

A beautiful article by Menshikov, “ The Blun-ders of Fear.” 74 How joyous ! I can almost die, even absolutely, and yet it always seems as if there is something still to be done. Do it and the end will take care of itself. If you are no longer fit for the work, you will be changed and a new one will be sent and you will be sent to another work. If only one rises in work!

Strakhov Th. A. 75 was here. The other one, N., 76 came to me in my sleep. I had a talk with him 77 about the Declaration of Faith. In speak-ing to him I felt how hazy was the desire for the good in itself. And I corrected it this way:

i) A man at a certain period of his develop-ment awakens to a consciousness of his life. He

1896

sees that everything about him lives (and he him-self lived like that before the awakening of his reason) without knowing its life. Now that he has learned that he lives, he understands that force which gives life to the whole world and in his consciousness he coincides with it, but being limited by his separate being (his organism), it seems to him that the purpose of this force which gives life to the world, is the life of his sepa-rate being.

(/ thought that I would write it clearly and again I am confused; evidently I am not ready.}

Life is the desire for the good. (Everything that lives, lives only because it desires the good; that which does not desire the good, does not live. )

Man, when awakened to a reasoning conscious-ness, is conscious of life in himself, i. e. of the desire for the good. But since this consciousness is engendered in the separate bodily being of man, since man learns that life is the desire for the good when he is already separated from others by his bodily being, therefore, in the first awakening of man to a reasoning consciousness, it seems to him that life, i. e. the desire for the good which he recognises in himself, has for its object his sep-arate bodily being. And man begins to live con-sciously for the good of his separate being, be-

May

gins to use that reason of his which revealed to him the essence of all life ; the desire for the good, in order to secure the good for his own separate being.

But the longer a man lives, the more obvious it becomes to him that his purpose is unattainable. And therefore, while he has not yet made clear to himself his error, even before he recognises by reason the impossibility of the good for a sepa-rate personality, man knows by experience and feeling the error of activity which is directed to the good of his own separate personality and he naturally strives that his life, his desire for the good, be drawn away from his own personality and brought over to other things; to comrades, friends, family, society.

This same reason which he desires to use for the attainment of the good for his own separate being, shows man that this good is unattainable, that it becomes destroyed by the struggle between the separate beings for the desired good, destroyed by the unpreventable, innumerable disasters and sufferings which threaten man, and above all, by the unavoidable illnesses, sufferings, old age and death which occur in the individual life of man. No matter how man might expand his desire for the good to other beings, he can not but see that all these separate beings are like him, subject to unavoidable sufferings and death and therefore,

1896

they, just as he, can not have real life by them-selves.

And it is just this error of men who have awak-ened to the consciousness of life that the Christian teaching dissipates, in showing to man that as soon as a consciousness of life has awakened in him, i. e. the desire for the good, then his being, his “ self “ is no longer his separate bodily being, but that same consciousness of life, the desire for the good not for himself, which was born in his separate being. The consciousness, therefore, of the desire for the good, is the desire for the good for everything existent. And the desire for the good for everything existent, is God.

The Christian teaching teaches just this, that His son, who resembles God, and who was sent by the Father into the world that the will of the Father be fulfilled in him, lives in man with an awakened consciousness (the conversation with Nicodemus.)

The Christian teaching reveals to man with an awakened consciousness, that the meaning and the aim of his life does not consist, as it seemed to him before, in the acquiring of the greater good for his own separate personality or for other such personalities like him, no matter how many they are, but only in the fulfilment in this world of the will of the Father who has sent man into the

May

world it reveals also to man the will of the Father in regard to the son. The will of the Father in regard to the son is that there should be manifested in this world that desire for the good which forms the essence of his life, so that man living in this world should wish the good to a greater and greater number of beings and con-sequently he should serve them as he serves his own good. (Confused.)

May 77, Y. P.

Again I am dissatisfied with what I wrote yes-terday and which seemed to me true and full. Last night and this morning I thought about the same thing. Here are the new things which have become clear to me :

1) That the desire for the good is not God, but only one of His manifestations, one of the sides from which we see God. God in me is manifested by the desire for the good;

2) That this God which is enclosed in man, begins to strive to free Himself in broadening and enlarging the being in whom He dwells ; then, see-ing the impassable limits of this being, He tries to free Himself by going outside of this being and embracing other beings;

3) That a reasoning being cannot find room for

1896

himself in the life of an individual, and that as soon as he becomes reasoning he tries to go out of it;

4) That the Christian teaching reveals to man that the essence of his life is not his separate being, but God, which is enclosed in his being. This God, therefore, becomes known to man through reason and love . . .

I can not write any farther; weak, sleepy.

5) And above all, that the desire for the good for oneself, love for oneself, could exist in man only up to the time when reason had not yet awak-ened in him. But as soon as reason had wakened in him, then it became clear to man that the de-sire for the good for himself a separate being was futile, because the good is not realisable for a separate and mortal being. Just as soon as reason appeared, then there became possible only one kind of desire for the good; the desire for the good for all, because with the desire for the good for all, there is no struggle but union, and no death but the transmission of life. God is not love, but in living, unreasoning beings He is mani-fested through a love for oneself, and in living, reasoning beings, through love for everything that exists.

I am now going to write out the 2 1 points from my notebooks.

i) In order to believe in immortality one has 42

May

to live an immortal life here, i. e. to live not to-wards oneself but towards God, not for oneself, but for God. Man, in this life, seems to be stand-ing with one foot on a board and the other on the earth; and as soon as his reason has awakened, he sees that that board upon which he was just about to step lies over an abyss and it not only bends and creaks, but is already falling and man transfers his weight to that foot which stands on the earth. How not be afraid if one stands on that which bends and creaks and falls; and how be afraid, and of what to be afraid, if you stand on that upon which everything falls and below which it is impossible to fall?

2) Read about Granovsky. 78 In our litera-ture it is customary to say, that during the reign of Nicholas conditions were such that it was im-possible to express great thoughts. (Granovsky complains of this and others too.) But the thoughts there were not real. It is all self-decep-tion. If all those Granovskys, Bielinskys, 79 and others had anything to say, they would have said it, no matter what the obstacles. The proof is Herzen. 80 He went away abroad and despite his enormous talent, what did he say that was new, necessary? All those Granovskys, Bielinskys, Chernishevskys, 81 Dobroliubovs, who were raised to great men, ought to be grateful to the govern-ment and the censorship without which they would

1896

have been the most unnoticed of sketch-writers.

Perhaps the Bielinskys, Granovskys, and the other unimportant ones might have had something real within them, but they stifled it, imagining they had to serve society with the forms of social life and not to serve God by professing the truth and by preaching it without any care about the forms of social life. Let there be contents and the forms will shape themselves.

People acting thus, i. e. adapting their striving for truth to the existing forms of society, are like a being to whom wings have been given to fly, without knowing obstacles, and who used these wings in order to help itself in walking. Such a being would not attain its ends every obstacle would stop it and it would spoil its wings. And then this being would complain that it had been held back and would tell with sorrow (like Gran-ovsky) that it would have gone far if obstacles had not held it back.

The quality of real spiritual activity is such, that it is impossible to hold it back. If it is held back, then it means only one thing: it is not real.

3) Man dying little by little (growing old) experiences that which a sprouting seed ought to experience which has not yet transferred its con-sciousness from the seed to the plant. He feels

May

that he grows less, but he is not conscious of him-self there where he increases; in another life. I am beginning to experience this.

4) I wrote down: “-Reason is a tool for the recognition of truth, verification, criticism.” I can’t remember very well. It seems to me, and I am even certain of it, that it is this :

Under reason is understood many different in-tellectual activities and very complex ones, and therefore the correctness of the solutions of reason is often doubted. As an answer to this doubt, I say, that there is an activity of the reason which is not to be doubted, namely, the critical activity, the activity of verifying what is told me. They tell me that God . . . etc. I submit this to the verification of reason and decide without doubt that that which is not reasonable does not exist for me. It is wrong to say that everything which exists is reasonable, or that everything which is reasonable exists, but it is wrong not to say that that which is unreasonable does not exist for me.

5) It seems to man that his animal life is his real essence and that the spiritual life is the prod-uct of his animal one, just as it seems to a man rowing in a boat that he is standing still and that the banks, and the whole earth, are running past him.

6) There is a goodness which wants to make

1896

use of the advantages of goodness and does not want to bear the disadvantages of it. That is animal goodness.

7) Christian truth, they say, can not be proved; it must be believed. As if it were easier to become convinced of the truth of the nonsensi-cal than of the reasonable. Why deprive Chris-tianity of the power of convincing? Why?

8) Nature, they say, is economical of its own forces; by the least effort, it attains the greatest results. So is God. To establish the Kingdom of God on earth, of union, of serving one an-other and to destroy hostility, God does not have to do it himself. He has placed His reason in man, which frees love in man and everything which He desires will be done by man. God does His work through us. And there is no time for God or there is infinite time. When he has placed reasoning love in man, he has already done everything.

Why has He done this in this way through man, and not by Himself? The question is stupid and one which never would have entered one’s head if we were all not spoilt by absurd supersti-tion. . . .

9) One of the most torturing spiritual suffer-ings is the not being understood by people when you feel yourself hopelessly alone in your thoughts. There is consolation in this, that you

May

know that that very thing which people do not understand in you, God understands.

10) To carry over one’s “self” from the bodily to the spiritual, that means to consciously wish only the spiritual. My body can uncon-sciously strive for the fleshly, but I consciously desire nothing of the fleshly, as when I do not de-sire to fall, but can not but submit to the law of gravitation.

1 1 ) If you have transferred your “ self “ to your spiritual being, you will feel the same pain in violating love as you will feel physical pain when you violate the good of the body. The indicator is just as direct and true. And I already feel it.

12) Sin is the strengthening of the conscious-ness of life in one’s separate being, or the weak-ening of one’s reasoning consciousness, which shows the inconsistency of animal life. For the first end, the activity of reason is directed to the strengthening of the delusion of a separate life: i, food; 2, lust; 3, vanity, strengthened by reason. For the second end, are used the means of weak-ening reason : tobacco, opium, wine.

13) Temptation is the assertion that it is per-mitted to violate love for the greater good: I, to oneself; it is necessary to feed, cure, educate, calm oneself, in order to be in condition to serve men, and for this it is permitted to violate love; 2, one must secure, preserve, and educate the family, and

1896

for this it is permitted to violate love; 3, one has to organise, secure, protect the community, the state, and for this it is permitted to violate love; 4, one has to contribute to the salvation of the souls of people by violent suggestion, through edu-cation, and for this it is permitted to violate love.

14) The essay on art has to be begun with a discussion of the fact, that for the picture here, which it has cost the master 1000 working days, he is given 40 thousand working days: for an opera, a novel, still more. And then, some say of these works, that they are beautiful; others, that they are absolutely bad. And there is no incontestable criterion. There is no such argu-ment about water, food, and good works. Why is that so?

15) What is the result of a man recognising as his “ self “ not his own separate being, but God living in him? In the first place, not con-sciously desiring the good for his own separate being, that man will not, or will less eagerly, take the good away from others; in the second place, having recognised as his “ self “ God, who desires the good for all that exists, man also will desire it.

16) Why do people hold on so passionately to the principle of family, the producing and bringing up of children? Because to a man who has not yet transferred his consciousness from his separate being to that of God, it is the only seem-

May

ingly satisfactory explanation of the meaning of life.

17) The meaning of life becomes clear to man when he recognises as himself, his divine essence which is enclosed in his bodily envelope. The meaning of this lies in the fact that this being, striving for its emancipation, for the broadening of the realm of love, accomplishes through this broadening the work of God, which consists in the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth.

18) Violence can neither weaken nor strengthen a spiritual movement. To act on spiritual activity by force is just like catching the rays of the sun no matter how you cover them, they will always be on top.

19) I have noted down: “Do you imagine your life in the wood which is being burned down or in the fire which burns? “

It is this way: you get the wood ready, and then you are sorry to use it; in the same way you get yourself ready and then you are sorry. But the comparison is not good, because fire comes to an end. A better comparison would be with food; do you imagine your life in food or in that which is being fed? Is not that the meaning of the words of St. John about “ my body “, which ought to be food? Man is food for God if he gives himself to God.

(Unclear; nonsense.) 49

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20) The principal aim of art, if there is art, and if it has an aim, is to manifest and to express the truth about man’s soul, to express those mys-teries which it is impossible to express simply by speech. From this springs art. Art is a micro-scope which the artist fixes on the mysteries of his soul and shows to people those mysteries which are common to all.

21 ) Love, enclosed in man and freed by reason, manifests itself in two ways: I, by its expansion, and 2, by the establishment of the Kingdom of God. It is steam which, in spread-ing, works.

22) Lately, I have begun to feel such firm-ness and strength, not my own, but that of that God’s work which I wish to serve, that the irrita-tion, the reproaches, the mocking people hostile to the work of God, is strange to me; they are piti-able, touching.

23) The world, living unconsciously, and man, in the period of his childhood, performed unconsciously the work of God. Having awak-ened to consciousness, he does it consciously. In the collision between the two methods of serving, man ought to know that the unconscious passes and will pass into the conscious and not the oppo-site and that therefore it is necessary to give one-self over to the future and not to the past. (Stupid.)

May

24) The delusion of man who has awakened to consciousness and who continues to consider his own separate being as himself, is that he con-siders a tool as himself. If you feel pain at the disturbing of the good of your separate being, it is as if you felt on your hand the blows on the tool with which you work. The tool has to be taken care of, ground, but not to be considered as oneself.

25) God Himself is economical. He has to penetrate all with love. He has fired man alone with love and has placed him in the necessity of firing all the rest.

26) Nothing affects the religious outlook so much as the way we look upon the world ; whether with a beginning and an end, as it was looked upon in antiquity, or infinite as it is looked upon now. In a finite world, one can construct a reasonable role for separate mortal man, but in an infinite world the life of such a being has no meaning.

27) (For Kortevsky] It happens to Katiu-sha after her resurrection, that she has certain periods in which she smiles slyly and lazily as if she had forgotten all which she considered true before; she is merely joyous and wants to live.

28) To him who lives a spiritual life entirely, life here becomes so uninteresting and burden-some that he can part with it easily.

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29) Natasha Strakhov 82 asks her father, when he speaks of something which happened when she was not yet born : “ Where was I then? “ I would have answered : ‘ You were asleep and had not yet waked up here.” Conception, birth, childhood are only a preparation to an awaken-ing, which we see, but not the sleeping ones.

30) The error in which we find ourselves when we consider our separate beings as ourselves is the same as when a traveller counts only one stage as the whole road, or a man, one day as his whole life.

31) Read about . . . and was horrified at the conscious deception of men . . .

32) “An eraser.” I have forgotten. I shall recall it.

Have written up to dinner. It is now 2 o’clock and I am going to dine.

May 28, Ysn. Pol. 12 o’c. noon.

It is already several days that I am struggling with my work 83 and am making no progress. I sleep. I wanted to scribble it somehow to the very end, but I can’t possibly do it. Am in a wretched mood, aggravated by the emptiness, by the poor, self-satisfied, cold emptiness of my sur-rounding life.

In. the meantime I have been to Pirogovo. 84 I have a most joyous impression; my brother Ser-

May

gei 85 has undoubtedly had a spiritual transforma-tion. He himself has formulated the essence of my faith (and he evidently recognises it as true for himself) ; to raise in oneself the spiritual es-sence and to subject to it the animal element. He has a miraculous ikon and he was tortured by his undefined attitude to it. The little girls 86 are very good and live seriously. Masha has been infected by them. Later there were at our house : Salamon, 87 Tanyee. 88 . . .

A terrible event in Moscow the death of three thousand 89 I somehow can not express myself as I ought to. I am indisposed all the time, getting weaker. In Pirogovo, there was the harnessmaker, an intelligent man. Yesterday a working-man came from Tula, intelligent. I think a revolutionist. To-day a seminary student, a touching case.

I am advancing very, very badly in my work. Rather boring letters because they demand polite answers. I have written to Bondarev, 90 Posha, and to some one else. O yes; Officer N. was here too. I think I was useful to him. Splendid notes by Shkarvan. 91

Yesterday there was a letter from poor N. 92 , whom they have driven off to the Persian frontier, hoping to kill him. God help him. And don’t forget me. Give me life, life, i. e. a conscious, joyful serving of Thee.

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In the meantime, I thought,

1) It is remarkable how many people see some insoluble problem in evil. I have never seen any problem in it. For me it is now altogether clear that that which we call evil is that good, the action of which we don’t yet see.

2) The poetry of Mallarme, 93 and others. We who don’t understand it, say boldly that it is humbug, that it is poetry striking an impasse. Why is it that when we hear music which we don’t understand and which is just as nonsensical, we don’t say that boldly, but say timidly : yes, perhaps one ought to understand it or prepare oneself for it, etc. That is silly. Every work of art is only a work of art when it is understandable, I do not say for all, but for people standing on a certain level of education, on the same level as the man who reads poetry and who judges it.

This reasoning leads me to an absolutely cer-tain conclusion that music before any other art (decadence in poetry and symbolism and other things in painting) has lost its way and struck an impasse. And he who has turned it from the road was that musical genius Beethoven. The principal factors are the authorities and people deprived of aesthetic feeling who judge art.

Goethe ? Shakespeare ? 94 Everything that goes under their names is supposed to be good and on se bat les flancs in order to find something

May

beautiful in the stupid and the unsuccessful, and taste is entirely perverted. And all these great talents Goethe, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Mich-ael-Angelo side by side with exquisite things, produced not only mediocre ones, but disgusting ones. The mediocre artists produce a medioc-rity as regards value and never anything very bad. But recognised geniuses create either really great works or absolute stuff and nonsense ; Shakespeare, Goethe, Beethoven, Bach, and others.

3) To place before myself the most complex and confused thing which demands my partici-pation. On all sides it seems there exist insolu-ble dilemmas; it is bad one way and worse the other. And it is only necessary to carry over the problem from the outer realm into the inner, into one’s own life, to understand that this is only an arena for my inner perfection, that it is a test, a measure of my moral development, an experiment as to how much I can and want to do the work of God, the enlargement of love, and everything re-solves itself so easily, simply, joyously.

4) A mistake (sin) is the use of reason, given me to recognise my essence in the love for every-thing which exists, in acquiring the good for my separate being. As long as man lived without a reasoning consciousness, he fulfilled the will of God in acquiring the good for himself and in

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struggling for it and there was no sin; but as soon as reason had awakened, then there was sin.

5) The harness-maker, Mikhailo, says to me that he does not believe in a future life, that he thinks that when a man dies, his spirit will leave him and will go away. But I say to him: “ Well, go off then with this spirit; then you won’t die.” May 29, Ysn. Pol. If I live.

It seems to me, June 6, Ysn. Pol.

The principal thing is that during this time I have advanced in my work, 95 and am advancing. I write on sins and the whole work is clear to the end.

Finished Spier splendid.

The economic movement of humanity by three means: the destruction of ownership of land ac-cording to Henry George 98 ; the inheritance which would give over accumulated wealth to society, if not in the first generation, then in the second; and a similar tax on wealth on an excess of over 1000 rubles income for a family or 200 for each man.

To-day the Chertkovs arrived. Galia 97 is very good.

The day before yesterday a gendarme came, a 56 ‘

June

spy, who confessed that he was sent after me. It was both pleasant and nasty. 98

During this time have thought principally the following :

1) When a man lives an animal life, he does not know that God lives through him. When reason awakens in him, then he knows it. And knowing it, he becomes united with God.

2) Man in his animal life has to be guided by instinct; reason directed to that which is not sub-ject to it, will spoil everything.

3) Is not luxury a preparing for something better, when there is already a sufficiency?

Yesterday was not the 6th, but the 8th. To-day, June 9, Y. P.

I have written little and not very well. It seems to me that it is getting clearer. In the morning I had a conversation with the working-men who came for books. I remembered the woman who asked to write to John of Kronstad.”

The religion of the people is this : there is a God and there are gods and saints. (Christ came on earth, as a peasant told me to-day, to teach people how and to whom to pray.) The gods and the saints perform miracles, have power over the flesh and perform heroic deeds and good works, and the people have only to pray, to know how

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and to whom to pray. But people can not per-form good works, they can only pray. Here is their whole faith.

I bathed and don’t feel well.

June 19, Y. P.

Have been feeling weak all this time and sleep badly. Posha came yesterday. He spoke about the Khodinka accident well, but wrote it badly. Our very idle, luxurious life oppresses me. N. came. A stranger. He is young and he does not understand in the same way as I do, that which he understands, although he agrees with every-thing. Finished the first draft 10 on the I3th of June. Now I am revising it, but am working very little.

. . . Struggled with myself twice and success-fully. Oh, if it were always so !

Once I passed beyond Zakaz 101 at night and wept for joy, being grateful for life. The pic-tures of life in Samara stand out very clearly be-fore me; the steppes, the fight of the nomadic, patriarchic principle with the agricultural civil-ised one. 102 It draws me very much. Konef-sky was not born in me; that is why it moves so awkwardly.

Have been thinking :

i) Something very important about art: what is beauty? Beauty is that which we love. “ He

June

is not dear because he is good, but good because he is dear.” Here is the problem; why dear? Why do we love? And to say that we love, be-cause a thing is beautiful, is just the same as saying that we breathe because the air is pleasant. We find the air pleasant, because we have to breathe; and in the same way we discover beauty, because we have to love. And he who hasn’t the power to see spiritual beauty, sees at least a bodily one and loves it.

June 26, Y. P. Morning.

All night I did not sleep. My heart aches without stopping. I continue to suffer and can not subject myself to God. ... I have not mas-tered pride and rebellion and the pain in my heart does not stop. One thing consoles me; I am not alone but with God, and therefore no matter how painful it is, yet I feel that something is taking place within me. Help me, Father.

Yesterday I walked to Baburino 103 and unwil-lingly (I rather would have avoided than sought it), I met the 8o-year-old Akime ploughing, the woman Yaremichov who hasn’t a coat to her household and only one jacket, then Maria whose husband was frozen and who has no one to gather her rye and who is starving her child, and Tro-phime and Khaliavka, and the husband and wife were dying as well as the children. And we study

1896

Beethoven. And I pray that He release me from this life. And again I pray and cry from pain. I am entrapped, sinking, I cannot alone, only I hate myself and my life.

June 30, Ysn. Pol.

Continued to suffer and struggle much, and have conquered neither one nor the other. But it is better. Mme. Annenkov 104 was here and put it very well . . , 105 They have spoiled for me even my diary which I write with the point of view of the possibility of its being read by the living 106

Just now upstairs they began to speak about the New Testament and N. en ricanant proved that Christ advised castration. I became angry, shameful.

Two days ago I went to those who had been burned out; had not dined, was tired and felt well. . . . Yesterday I visited the lawyer who wanted to snatch a hundred rubles from a beggar-woman to decorate his own house with. It is the same everywhere.

During this time I have been in Pirogovo. My brother Serezha has entirely come over to us. The journey with Tania and Chertkov was joy-ous. To-day in Demenka m I gave the last words for his journey to a dying peasant.

I am advancing much on the work. 108 I will 60

July

try to write out now what I have jotted down in the book.

To-day, July /p, 109

I am in Pirogovo. I arrived the day before yesterday with Tania and Chertkov. In Serez-ha no there has certainly taken place a spiritual change; he admits it himself saying that he was born several months ago. I am very happy with him.

At home, during this time, I lived through much difficulty. Lord, Father, release me from my base body. Cleanse me and do not let your spirit perish in me and become overgrown. I prayed twice beseechingly; once that He let me be His tool; and second that He save me from my ani-mal “ self.”

During this time I progressed on the Declara-tion of Faith. It is far from what has to be said and from what I want to say. It is entirely in-accessible to the plain man and the child, but, nevertheless I have said all that I know coherently and logically.

In this time also I wrote the preface to the reading of the Gospels m and annotated the Gos-pels. Had visitors. Englishmen, Americans no one of importance.

I will write out all that I jotted down:

i) Yesterday I walked through a twice 61

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ploughed, black-earth fallow field. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but black earth not one green blade of grass, and there on the edge of the dusty grey road there grew a bush of burdock. There were three off-shoots. One was broken and its white soiled flower hung; the other also broken, was bespattered with black dirt, its stem bent and soiled ; the third shoot stuck out to the side, also black from dust, but still alive and red in the centre. It reminded me of Hadji-Murad. 112 It makes me want to write. It as-serts life to the end, and alone in the midst of the whole field, somehow or other has asserted it.

2) He has a capacity for languages, for math-ematics, is quick to comprehend and to answer, can sing, draw correctly, beautifully, and can write in the same way; but he has no moral or artistic feeling and therefore nothing of his own.

3) Love towards enemies. It is difficult, seldom does it succeed as with everything ab-solutely beautiful. But then what happiness when you attain it ! There is an exquisite sweet-ness in this love, even in the foretaste of it. And this sweetness is just in the inverse ratio to the attractiveness of the object of love. Yes, the spiritual voluptuousness of love towards enemies.

4) Some one makes me suffer. As soon as I think about myself, about my own suffering, the suffering continues to grow and grow and terror

July

overcomes me at the thought to where it might lead. It suffices to think of the man on account of whom you are suffering, to think about his suffer-ing and instantly you are healed. Sometimes it is easy when you already love your torturer; but even when it is difficult, it is always possible.

5) Yesterday in walking I thought what are those boundaries which separate us, one being from another ? And it occurred to me. Are not space and time the conditions of these divisions, or rather, the consequences of these divisions? If I were not a separated part, there would be neither space nor time for me, as there is not for God. But since I am not the whole, I can understand myself and other beings through space and time only.

(I feel that there is something in this, but I can not yet express it clearly.)

6) There was an argument about whether be-ing in love was good. For me the conclusion was clear; if a man already lives a human, spiritual life, then being in love love, marriage would be a downfall for him, he would have to give a part of his strength to his wife, to his fam-ily, or even at least to the object of his love. But if he is on the animal plane, if he eats, drinks, labours, holds a post, writes, plays then to be in love would be an uplift for him as for animals, for insects, in the time of . . , 113

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7) To pray? They say that prayer is neces-sary, that it is necessary to have the sweet feeling of prayer which is called forth by service, singing, reading, exclamations, ikons. But what is prayer ? A communion with God, a recognition of one’s relation to God, the highest state of the soul. Is it possible that this state of the soul can be at-tained by an action upon the outer senses. ... Is it not more probable that the prayerful state might be reached only in rare exceptional moments and necessarily in isolation, as even Christ said and as Elijah saw God, not in a storm but in a tender breeze?

8) Yesterday I looked through the romances, novels, and poems of Fet. 114 I recalled our in-cessant music on 4 grand-pianos in Yasnaya Poly-ana and it became clear to me that all this the romances, the poems, the music was not art, something important and necessary to people in general, but a self-indulgence of robbers, para-sites, who have nothing in common with life; ro-mances, novels about how one falls in love dis-gustingly, poetry about this or about how one lan-guishes from boredom. And music about the same theme. But life, all life, seethes with its own problems of food, distribution, labour, about faith, about the relations of men ... It is shameful, nasty. Help me, Father, to serve Thee by showing up this lie.

July

9) I was going from the Chertkovs on the 5th of July. It was evening, and beauty, happiness, blessedness, lay on everything. But in the world of men? There was greed, malice, envy, cruelty, lust, debauchery. When will it be among men as it is in Nature ? Here there is a struggle, but it is honest, simple, beautiful. But there it is base. I know it and I hate it, because I myself am a man.

(I have not succeeded.)

10) When I suffered in my soul, I tried to calm myself with the consciousness of serving. And that used to calm me, but only then when there happened to be an obvious instance of serv-ing, i. e. when it was unquestionably required and I was drawn to it. But what is to be done when it happens neither one way nor the other? Give myself to God, negate myself. Do as Thou wilt, I consent.

(Again, not what I want to say.) I am going to dinner.

1 1 ) Kant, 115 they tell us, made a revolution in the thought of men. He was the first to show that a thing in itself is inaccessible to knowledge, that the source of knowledge and life is spiritual. But is not that the same which Christ said two thousand years ago, only in a way understand-able to men? Bow in spirit and in truth; the

1896

spirit is life creating, the letter, the flesh, is bene-ficial in no way.

12) Balls, feasts, spectacles, parades, pleas-ure-gardens, etc., are a dreadful tool in the hands of the organisers. They can have a terrible in-fluence. And if anything has to be subjected to control, it is this.

13) I walked along the road and thought, looking at the forests, the earth, the grass, what a funny mistake it is to think that the world is such as it appears to me. To think that the world is such as it appears to me, means to think that there can be no other being capable of knowledge ex-cept myself with my six senses. 116 I stopped and was writing that down. Sergei Ivanovich 117 ap-proached me. I told him what I was thinking. He said:

“ Yes, one thing is true, that the world is not such as we see it and we don’t know anything as it is.” I said:

‘ Yes, we know something exactly as it is.” “What is it?”

1 That which knows. It is exactly such as we know it.”

14) One is often surprised that people are un-grateful. One ought to be surprised at how they could be grateful for good done them. How-

July

ever little good people do, they know with certainty that the doing of good is the greatest happi-ness. How then can people be grateful to others that these others have drunk themselves full, when that is the greatest enjoyment?

15) Only he is free whom nothing and no-body can hinder from doing what he wants. There is only one such work to do to love.

1 6) Prayer is directed to a personal God, not because God is personal (I even know as a matter of fact that He is not personal, because the per-sonal is finite and God is infinite), but because I am a personal being. I have a little green glass in my eye and I see everything green. I can not help but see the world green, although I know that it is not like that.

17) The aesthetic pleasure is a pleasure of a lower order. And therefore the highest aes-thetic pleasure leaves one unsatisfied. In fact, the higher the aesthetic pleasure, the more unsatisfied it leaves one. It always makes one want something more and more. And so without end. Only moral good gives full satisfaction. Here there is full satisfaction. Nothing further is wished for or needed.

18) A lie to others is by far neither as im-portant nor as harmful as a lie to oneself. A lie to others is often an innocent play, a satisfying of

1896

vanity. A lie to oneself is always a perversion of the truth, a turning aside from the demands of life.

19) Although seldom, yet it has happened to me that I have done good from pity, a real good. In that case you never remember what you really have done and under what circumstances. You remember only that you were with God (this oc-curred to me in regard to my favourite boots which I remember I gave away out of pity and for a long time I could not remember where they had gone). It is the same way with all those mo-ments when I was with God, whether in prayer or in the business of life. Memory is a fleshly affair, but .here, the thing is spiritual.

20) Man can not live a fleshly life, if he does not consider himself in the right and he can not live a spiritual life if he does not consider him-self sinful.

21) . . .

I am going to sleep. It is 12:30 in the morn-ing, July 30th. July 3 r, Y. P. If Hive.

Random break

July 31, Y. P.

I am alive. It is evening now. It is past four. I am lying down and can not fall asleep. My heart aches. I am tired out. I hear through the window they play tennis and are laughing. S.

July

went away to the Shenshins. 118 Every one is well, but I am sad and can not master myself. It is like the feeling I had when St. Thomas 119 locked me in and I heard through my prison how every one was gay and was laughing. But I don’t want to. One must suffer humiliation and be good. I can do it.

I continue to copy :

1) The disbelief in reason is the source of all evil. This disbelief is reached by the teaching of a distorted faith from childhood. Believe in one miracle and the trust in reason is destroyed.

2) ...

3) Christianity does not give happiness but safety; it lets you down to the bottom from which there is no place to fall.

4) I rode horseback from Tula and thought about this ; that I am a part of Him, separated in a certain way from other such parts, and He is everything, the Father, and I felt love, just love, for Him. Now, especially now, I not only can not reproduce this feeling, but not even recall it. But I was so joyful that I said to myself: Here I was thinking that I can not learn anything new and suddenly I acquired a wonderful blessed new feeling, a real feeling.

5 ) What humbug 12 beauty, truth, good-ness! Beauty is one of those attributes of outer objects, like health, an attribute of the living body.

1896

Truth is not the ideal of science. The ideal of science is knowledge, not truth. The good can not be placed on the plane with either of these, because it is the goal of life.

(It is unclear, but it was clear and will be.) 6) I do not remember good works, because they are outside of the material man of mem-ory. August i f Ysn Pol If I live. which is doubtful. My heart aches very much. . . .

It is dreadful to think how much time has elapsed; a month and a half. To-day, Sept. 14, Y.P.

During this time I took a trip to the monastery with Sonya. 121 . . . I wrote on Hadji-Murad 122 very poorly, a first draft. I have continued my work on the Declaration of Faith. The Chert-kovs have gone away. . . . All three sons are here now with their wives. 123

There was a letter from the Hollander who has refused to serve. 124 I wrote a preface to the letter. 125 I wrote a letter also to Mme. Kalmi-kov 126 with very sharp statements about the Gov-ernment. The whole month and a half has been condensed in this. Oh, yes; I have also been ill from my usual sickness and my stomach is still not strong.

One thing more. During this time there was a 70

September

letter from the Hindu Tod and an exquisite book of Hindu wisdom, loga’s Philosophy. 12 ‘ 1 In the meantime I thought :

1 ) There are many people, especially Euro-peans and especially women, who not only talk but who write things that appear intelligent, in the same way as dumb people speak; as a matter of fact, it isn’t any more natural for them to think than for a dumb person to speak, but both one and the other, both the stupid and the dumb, have been taught.

2) To love an individual man, one has to be blinded. Without being blinded one can love only God, but people can be pitied, which means to love in a Godly way.

3) To get rid of an enemy, one must love him, as it is also said in the “ Teaching of the twelve apostles.” 128 But to love one has to put to one-self the task for all one’s life of love towards an enemy, to do him good through love and to per-fect oneself in love for him.

4) At first, one is surprised that stupid peo-ple should have within them such an assertive convincing intonation. But it is as it should be. Otherwise no one would listen to them.

5) I find this note: “A decoration for peas-ants, our happiness “ I can not remember what that means, but it is something that pleased me.

1896

I think it means that to a poor man looking on the life of the rich, it appears as happiness. But this happiness is as much happiness, as card-board made into a tree or a castle is a tree or a castle.

6) We are all attracted to the Whole and one to another, like particles of one body. Only our roughness, the lack of smoothness, our angles, in-terfere with our uniting. There is already an attraction, there is no need of making it, but one must plane oneself, wipe out one’s angles.

7) One of the strongest means of hypnotism, of exterior action on the spiritual state of man, is his dress. People know that very well; that is why there is a monastic garb in monasteries and a uniform in the army.

8) I was trying to recall two excellent sub-jects for novels, the suicide of old Persianninov and the substitution of a child in an orphan asy-lum.

9) When my weakness tortured me, I sought means of salvation, and I found one in the thought that there is nothing stationary, that everything flows, changes, that all this is for a while, and that it is only necessary to suffer the while while we live I and the others. And some one of us will go away first. (The while does not mean to live in any way, but means, not to despair, to suffer it through to the end.)

September

10) I wanted to say that I was grateful, so as to make the other one well disposed, and later to tell the truth. No, I thought, that is not per-mitted. He will ascribe it to his virtues and the truth will be accepted even less. Man, not ac-knowledging his sins, is a vessel hermetically closed with a cover which lets nothing enter. To humble oneself, to repent, that means to take off the cover and to make oneself capable of perfec-tion, of the good.

1 1 ) Barbarism interferes with the union of people, but the same thing is done by a too great refinement without a religious basis. In the other, the physical disunites, and in this, the spir-itual.

12) Man is a tool of God. At first I thought that it was a tool with which man himself was called to work; now I have understood that it is not man who works, but God. The business of man is only to keep himself in order. Like an axe, which would have to keep itself always clean and sharp.

13) Why is it that scoundrels stand for des-potism? Because under an ideal order which pays according to merit, they are badly off. Un-der despotism everything can happen.

14) I often meet people who recognise no God except one which we ourselves recognise in our-selves. And I am astonished; God in me. But

1896

God is an infinite principle; how then, why then, should He happen to be in me ? It is impossible not to question oneself about this. And as soon as you question yourself, you have to acknowledge an exterior cause. Why do people not feel them-selves in need of answering this question? Be-cause for them, the answer to this question is in the reality of the existing world, whether accord-ing to Moses or to Darwin it is all the same. And therefore, to have a conception of an ex-terior God, one has to understand that that which is actually real, is only the impression of our senses, i. e. it is we ourselves, our spiritual “ self.”

15) In moments of passion, infatuation, in or-der to conquer, one thing is necessary, to destroy the illusion that it is the “ self “ who suffers, who desires, and to separate one’s true “ self “ from the troubled waters of passion. Sept. 15. Y. P. If I live.

To-day October 10. Y. P.

It is almost a month that I have made no en-tries and it seemed to me it was only yesterday. During this time, though in very poor form, I finished the Declaration of Faith. During this time there were some Japanese with a letter from Konissi. 129 They, the Japanese, are undoubt-edly nearer Christianity than 6ur church Chris-

October

tians. I have learned to love them very much. . . .

I want to write out the whole Declaration of Faith from the beginning again. Yesterday there was a good letter from Verigin, Peter. 130

All last night I thought about the meaning of life and though there are other things to note down, I want to note down this :

The whole world is nothing else than an in-finite space filled with infinitely small, colourless, silently moving particles of matter. At bottom, even this is not so; I know that they are particles of matter only through their impenetrability, but the impenetrability I know only through my sense of touch and my muscle sense. If I did not have this sense, I would not know about impenetrability or about matter. As to motion, also, I, strictly speaking, have no right to speak, because if I did not have the sense of sight or again muscle sense, I would not know anything about motion either.

So that all that I have the right to assert about the outer world is that something exists, some-thing entirely unknown to me, as it was said long ago both by the Brahmins and by Kant and by Berkeley. There is some kind of occasion, some kind of grain of sand which causes irritation in the shell of the snail and produces a pearl (secretion, secretion in the snail). This is our whole outside world.

1896

What is there then ? There is myself with my representations of myself, of the sun, trees, ani-mals, stones. But what then is it that I call my-self? Is it something arbitrary depending on my-self? No, it is something independent of myself, predetermined. I can not not be myself, and not have that representation which I have, namely, that I include in myself a small part of these moving atoms and call them myself. And all the other remaining atoms I see in the form of be-ings .more or less like myself. The world ap-pears to me to consist entirely of beings which are like me or resemble me. 131

(I have become confused, yet have something to say. I am going to try when I have the strength. )

I am continuing to write out what I had to say and what I dreamt of all night, namely :

People think that their life is in the body, that from that which takes place in the body; from breathing, nutrition, circulation of the blood, etc., life flows. And this seems unquestionable; let nutrition, breathing, circulation of the blood cease and life will end. But what ends is the life of the body, life in this body. . . .

And in fact if you consider that life comes from the process of the body and only in the body then as soon as the processes of the body are ended, then life ought to be ended. But certainly this is an arbitrary assertion. No one has proven and

October

can prove that life is only in the body and can not be without the body. To assert this, is all the same as asserting that when the sun has set then the sun has come to an end. One must first de-cide what is life. Is it that which I see in the others as it begins and stops, or is it what I know in myself? If it is what I know in myself, then it is the only thing that is and therefore it can not be destroyed. And the fact that in bodies before me processes end which are connected with life in me and in other beings, shows me only this, that life goes away somewhere from my sensual eyes. To go away entirely, to be destroyed, it absolutely can not be, because outside of it there is nothing in the world. The problem, then, might be this : Will my life be destroyed, can it be destroyed? And the destruction of the body of a man, is that a sign of the destruction of his life? In order to answer this question one must first decide what is life ?

Life is the consciousness of my separateness from other beings, of the existence of other beings and of those limits which separate me from them. My life is not bound up with my body. There may be a body, but no consciousness of separate-ness like for a sleeping one, an idiot, an embryo or for those who have fits.

It is true that there can be no life without the consciousness of the body; but that is because life

1896

is the consciousness of one’s own separateness and of one’s own boundaries. But the consciousness of one’s own separateness and of one’s own bound-aries happens in our life in time and space, but it can happen in any other way and therefore the destruction of the body is not the sign of the de-struction of life.

(Not clear and not what I want to say.) Oct. u. Y. P. If I live.

To-day October 20. Y. P. Morning.

I feel like writing down three things.

i) In a work of art the principal thing is the soul of the author. Therefore among medium productions the feminine ones are the better, the more interesting. A woman will push her-self through now and then, speak out the most inner mysteries of her soul; and that is what is needed. You see what she really loves, although she pretends that she loves something else. When an author writes, we the readers place our ears to his breast and we listen and say, “ Breathe. If you have rumblings, they will appear.” And women haven’t the capacity of hiding. Men have learned literary methods and you can no longer see him behind his manner, except that you know he is stupid. But what is in his soul, you don’t see.

(Not good; malicious.) 78

October

The 2nd thing I wanted to write was that yes-terday, in blowing out my candle, I began to feel for matches and did not find them, and an un-easiness came over me. “And you are getting ready to die ! What, then, are you also going to die with matches?” I said to myself. And I at once saw in the dark my real life and became calm.

What is this fear of the dark? Besides the fear at the incapability of meeting whatever ac-cident might happen, it is the fear at the ab-sence of the delusion of our most important sense, that of sight. It is fear before the contemplation of our true life. I now no longer have that fear on the contrary, that which had been fear is now peace; there only has remained the habit of fear; but to the majority of people the fear is exactly of that which alone can give them peace.

The 3rd thing I wanted to write was that when a man is put in the necessity of choosing between an act which is clearly beneficial to others, but with the thwarting of the demands of conscience (the will of God), then the problem is only one of short-sightedness, because the man sees in the immediate future the good which will arise from his act, if he thwarts the will of God, but he does not see in the more remote future the other good, which is an infinite number of times greater, which

1896

will come from the abstention of this act and the fulfilment of the will of God. It is the same kind of thing that children do, destroying the gen-eral order of a house which is necessary for their own happiness, for the sake of the immediate pleasure of play.

The fact is that for the work of God and for man accomplishing the work of God, time does not exist. Man can not but represent to himself everything in time, and therefore in order to cor-rectly judge of the importance of the work of God, he has to represent it to himself in the very re-mote future, even in infinite time. The fact, that I will not kill the murderer and will forgive him, that I shall die unseen by any one, fulfilling the will of God, will bear its own fruit ... if I in-sist upon thinking in terms of time in infinite time. But it will bear its fruit surely.

I have to finish the former :

4) Refinement and power in art are almost always diametrically opposed.

5) Is it true that works of art are obtained by assiduous work? That which we call a work of art yes. But is it real art?

6) The Japanese sang and we could not re-strain ourselves from laughter. If we had sung before the Japanese they would have laughed. The more so had Beethoven been played for them. Indian and Greek temples are understood by all.

October

And Greek statues are understood by all. And our best painting is also understandable. So that architecture, sculpture, painting, having reached their perfection, have reached also cosmopolitan-ism, accessibility to all. To the same point in some of its manifestations has the art of speech reached; in the teaching of Buddha, of Christ, in the poetry of Sakia-Muni, Jacob, Joseph. In dramatic art; Sophocles, Aristophanes did not reach it. It is being reached in the new ones. But in music they have been lagging behind en-tirely. The ideal of all art to which it should strive is accessibility to all but it, especially music to-day, noses its way into refinement.

7) The principal thing which I wanted to say about art, is that it does not exist in the sense of some great manifestation of the human spirit as it is understood now. There is play, consisting in the beauty of construction, in sculpting figures, or in representing objects, in dancing, in singing, in playing on various instruments, in poetry, in fables, in stories, but all this is only play and not an important matter to which one could con-sciously devote his strength.

And so it was always understood and is under-stood by the working, unspoiled people and every man who has not gone away from labour, from life, can not look upon it in any other way. It is necessary, one must, say it out loud how much

1896

evil has come from this importance attributed by the parasites of society to their plays !

8) The whole outer world is formed by us, by our senses. We know nothing and can know noth-ing about it. All that we can know, in studying the outer world is the relation of our senses (sens) among themselves and the laws of these relations. There is no question but that this is very interest-ing, and from the study of these relations are opened many new situations which we can make use of and which increase the comforts of our life, but this is not only not everything, not all of science as people busying themselves with this study are now asserting, but it is only one minute particle of science.

Science is the study of the relation of our spirit-ual “ self “ that which masters the outer senses and uses them to our outer senses or to the outer world, which is the same thing. This re-lation has to be studied, because in this relation is accomplished the movement of humanity as a whole to perfection and the good, and the move-ment of each individual man to the same goal. This relation is the object of every science; but to-day the study of this relation is called Ethics by our present-day scholars, and is considered as a science by itself, and a very unimportant one from out the great mass of other sciences. It is all topsy-turvy; the whole of science is considered

October

as a small part and a small part is considered as the whole. From this comes the brutalisation of men.

This arises out of the astonishing ignorance of most of the so-called learned. They are naively convinced that the outer world is an actual real-ity, just in the same way as the peasants are con-vinced that the sun and the stars move around the earth. Just as the peasants know nothing of the work of Galileo, Copernicus and Newton, or if they have heard of it do not believe so the materialist scholars have never heard, do not know or do not believe what has been done as to criti-cism of knowledge by Descartes, Kant, Berkeley and even before, by the Hindus and by all re-ligious doctrines.

9) When you suffer, you must enter into your-self not seek matches, but put out that light which is there, and which interferes with the see-ing of your true “ self.” You must turn upside down the toy which stood on the cork and place it on the lead and then everything will become clear and the greatest part of your suffering will cease all that part which is not physical.

10) When you suffer from passion, here are some palliative prescriptions:

(a) Remember how many times you have suf-fered before because in your consciousness you have connected yourself to your passion; lust,

1896

greed, desire, vanity, and remember how every-thing passed away and you have still not found that “ self “ which suffered then. And so it is now. It is not you who are suffering, but that passion which you wrongly joined to yourself.

(b) Again, when you suffer, remember that the suffering is not something disagreeable which you can wish to get rid of, but it is the very work of life, that very task which you have been desig-nated to do. In wanting to get rid of it, you are doing that which a man would do who lifts the plough there where the earth is hard, just where, in fact, it has to be ploughed up.

(c) Then remember, at the moment when you suffer, that if there is anger in the feelings you have, the suffering is in you. Replace the anger with love, and the suffering will end.

(d) Also this is possible ; love towards enemies, which is indeed the one real love. You must strug-gle for it, struggle with toil, with the conscious-ness that in it is life. But when you have at-tained it, what relief!

(e) The principal thing is to turn the toy upside down, find your true “ self “ which is only visible without matches, and then anger will van-ish by itself. That “ self “ is incapable of, can-not, and has no one to be angry with loving, it can only pity.

October

During these latter days I didn’t feel like writ-ing. I merely wrote letters to every one and sent to Schmidt an addition to the letter about the incompatibility . . . with Christianity. 132 I have begun the Declaration of Faith anew. I am going to continue.

Went to Pirogovo with Masha. Serezha 133 is very good. . . . October 2 1. Y. P. If I live.

To-day probably October 23. Y. P.

All these days I have been out of tune with my work. Wrote a letter yesterday to the com-mander of the disciplinary battalion in Irkutsk about Olkhovik. 134

It is evening now, I am sitting down to write because I feel the special importance and serious-ness of the hours of life which are left to me. And I do not know what I have to do, but I feel that there has ripened in me an expression of God’s will which asks to be let out.

Have re-read Hadji Murad it isn’t what I want to say. As to Resurrection I can’t even get hold of it. The drama interests me.

A splendid article by Carpenter on science. 135 All of us walk near the truth and uncover it from various sides.

1896

October 26. Y. P.

I am still just as indisposed and don’t feel like writing. My head aches. Serezha came yester-day. 136 Wrote a letter to Sonya and to Andrusha.

But it seems to me that during this time of doubt, I arrived at two very important conclu-sions :

i ) That, which I also thought before and wrote down ; that art is an invention, is a temptation for amusement with dolls, with pictures, with songs, with play, with stories and nothing more. But to place art as they do ( and they do the same with science), on the same level with the good is a horrible sacrilege. The proof that it is not so, is that about truth also (the right) I can say that truth is a good (as God said, great good, teib, i.e., good) , and about beauty one can say that it is good; but it is impossible to say about good that it is beautiful (at times it is homely), or that it is true (it is always true).

There is only one good; good and bad; but truth and beauty are good qualities of certain ob-jects.

The other very important thing, is that reason is the only means of manifesting, and freeing love. It seems to me that this is an important thought, omitted in my Declaration of Faith.

November

To-day November I. Y. P.

All this time I have felt neither well nor like working. I have written letters only, among the number was one to the Caucasian disciplinary battalion. 137 Yesterday, walking at night on the snow, in the blizzard, I tired my heart and it aches. I think I am going to die very soon. That is why I am writing out the notes. I think I am going to die without fear and without re-sistance.

Just now I sat alone and thought how strange it was that people live alone. People ; I thought of Stasov; 138 how is he living now, what is he thinking, feeling. Of Kolichka, 139 too. And so strange and new became the knowledge that they, all of them, people are living, and I do not live in them; that they are closed to me. November 2. Y. P. If I live.

November 2nd. Y. P.

Am alive. Am a little better. Have written on the Declaration of Faith. I think it is true that it is cold because it endeavours to be infallible. 140 A blizzard. Sent off the letters to Schmidt and Chertkov. Did not send the letter to Mme. Kalmikov.

To-day I thought about art. It is play. And when it is the play of working, normal people it is good, but when it is the play of corrupted para-

1896

sites, then it is bad and here now it has reached

to decadence.

November 3. Y. P. If I live.

To-day November 5. Y. P. Morning.

Yesterday was a terrible day.

... At night I hardly slept and was depressed. I just now found the prescriptions 141 in my diary, looked them over and began to feel better; to separate one’s true “ self “ from that which is of-fended and vexed, to remember that this is no hindrance, no accidental unpleasantness, but the very work predestined me, and above all to know that if I have a dislike for any one, then as long as there is that dislike in me then I am the guilty one. And as soon as you know you are guilty, you feel better.

To-day, lying on the bed, I thought about love towards God ... I wish I could say, the love of God, i.e., divine love that the first and prin-cipal commandment is divine love, but that the other resembling it and flowing from it, especially flowing from it, is the love for neighbour.

Yesterday I wrote 18 pages of introduction to Art. 142

It is wrong to say of a work of art, “ You don’t yet understand it.” If I don’t understand it, that means that the work of art is poor, because its

November

task is in making understandable that which is not

understandable.

November 6. Y. P. If I live.

November 6. Y. P.

Am alive. It is the third day that I continue to write on art. It seems to me it is good. At least I am writing willingly and easily.

. . . Have received a good letter from Vander-veer. Wrote another letter to the commander of the battalion in the Caucasus. Chertkov sent me his copy of a similar letter.

To-day I rode horseback to Tula. A marvel-lous day and night. I am just now going to take a walk to meet the girls.

Have been thinking.

1) Natural sciences, when they wish to deter-mine the very essence of things, fall into a crude materialism, i.e., ignorance. Such, besides Des-cartes’ whirlwinds, are atoms and ether and the origin of species. All that I can say, is that it appears to me so, just as the heavenly vault ap-pears round to me, while I know that it is not round and that it appears to me so, only because my sight for all directions extends on only one radius.

2) The highest perfection of art is its cosmo-politanism. But on the contrary, with us at pres-

1896

ent it is becoming more and more specialised, if not according to nations, then according to classes.

3) The refinement of art and its strength are always in inverse proportion.

4) “ Conservatism lies in this “... That is the way I have it noted, but further I can’t remem-ber now.

5) Why is it pleasant to ride? Because it is the very emblem of life. Life you ride.

I wanted to take a walk. . . . November 7. Y. P. If I live.

To-day November 12. Y. P.

I haven’t noted down anything during this time. I was writing the essay on Art. To-day a little on the Declaration of Faith. A weakness of thought and I am sad. One must learn to be satisfied with stupidity. If I do not love, at least not not to love. That, thank the Lord, I have attained.

November 16. Y. P. Morning.

I still work just as badly and am therefore de-pressed. The day after to-morrow I am going to Moscow, if God commands. 143

... In the meantime I received a strange let-ter from the Spaniard Zanini, with an offer of 22,000 francs for good works. I answered that

November

I would like to use them for the Dukhobors. What is going to happen? 144 I wrote to Kuzmin-sky on Witte and Dragomirov 145 and the day be-fore yesterday I wrote diligently all morning on War. 146 Something will come of it.

I am thinking continually about art and about the temptations or seductions which becloud the mind, and I see that art belongs to this class, but I do not know how to make it clear. This occu-pies me very, very much. I fall asleep and wake up with this thought, but up to now I have come to no conclusion.

The notes during this time about God and the future life are:

i) They say that God must be understood as a personality. In this lies great misunderstand-ing; personality is limitation. Man feels himself a personality, only because he comes in contact with other personalities. If man were only one, he would not be a personality. These two con-ceptions are mutually determined ; the outer world, other beings, and the personality. If there were not a world of other beings, man would not feel himself, would not recognise himself as a person-ality; if man were not a personality he would not recognise the existence of other beings. And therefore man within this Universe is inconceiv-able otherwise than as a personality. But how

9i

. The Journal of Leo Tolstoi [1896

can it be said of God, that He is a personality, that God is personal? In this lies the root of anthropomorphism.

Of God it only can be said what Moses and Mohammed said, that he is one, and one, not in that sense that there is no other or other gods (in relation to God there can be no notion of num-ber and therefore it is even impossible to say of God that he is one (i in the sense of a number), but in that sense that he is monocentric, that he is not a conception, but a being, that which the Greek Orthodox call a living God in opposition to a pantheistic God, i.e., a superior spiritual being living in everything. He is one in that sense that He is, like a being to whom one can address one-self, i.e., not exactly to pray, but that there is a relationship between me, something which is limited, a personality, and God something in-conceivable but existing.

The most inconceivable thing about God for us consists exactly in this, that we know Him as a one being, can know him in no other way, and at the same time it is impossible for us to understand a one being who fills up everything with himself. If God is not one, then He is scattered and He does not exist. If He is one, then we involuntar-ily represent him to ourselves in the shape of a personality and then He is no longer a higher be-

November

ing, no longer everything. But, however, in or-der to know God and to lean on Him one must un-derstand Him as filling everything and at the same time as one.

2) I have been thinking how obviously mis-taken is our conception of the future life in bodies either more or less similar to ours. Our bodies as we know them are nothing but the products of our outer six senses. How then can there be life for that spiritual being who is separated from his body how can it be in that form which is deter-mined and produced by that body through its senses? November //. Y. P. If I live.

November 77. Y. P.

Yesterday I hardly wrote anything.

. . . There is a fight in the papers over Repine’s m definition of art as amusement. How it fits into my work. The full significance of Art has still not been made clear. It is clear to me, and I can write and prove it, but not briefly and simply. I cannot bring it up to that point.

Yesterday there was a letter from Ivan Mi-chailovich 148 and from the Dukhobors.

Amusement is all right, if the amusement is not corrupted, is honest, and if people do not suffer from that amusement. I have been thinking just

1896

now; the aesthetic is the expression of the ethical, i.e., in plain language ; art expresses those feelings which the artist feels. If the feelings are good, lofty, then art will be good, lofty, and the re-verse. If the artist is a moral man, then his art will be moral, and the reverse. (Nothing has come of this.)

I thought last night :

We rejoice over our technical achievements steam, . . . phonographs. We are so pleased with these achievements that if any one were to tell us that these achievements are being attained by the loss of human lives we would shrug our shoulders and say, “ We must try not to have this so; an 8-hour day, labour insurance, and so forth; but because several people perish, is no reason to renounce those achievements which we have attained.” I. e., Fiat mirrors, phonographs, etc., pereat several people.

It is but sufficient to admit this principle and there will be no limit to cruelty, and it will be very easy to attain every kind of technical im-provement. I had an acquaintance in Kazan who used to ride to his estate in Viatka, 130 versts away, in this fashion: he would buy a pair of horses at the market for 20 roubles (horses were very cheap) and would hitch them up and drive 130 versts to the place. Sometimes they would reach the place, and he would have the horses

November

plus the cost of the journey. Sometimes they would not cover a part of the road and he would hire. But nevertheless it used to cost him cheaper than hiring stage horses. Even Swift proposed eating children. And that would have been very convenient. In New York, the railroad compan-ies in the city crush several passers-by every year and do not change the crossings to make the dis-asters impossible, because the change would cost dearer than paying to the families of those crushed yearly. The same thing happens also in the technical improvements of our age. They are accomplished by human lives. But one has to value every human life not to value it, but to place it above any value and to make improve-ments in a way that lives should not be lost and spoilt, and to stop every improvement if it harms human life. November 18. If I live, then Moscow.

November 22. Moscow.

The fourth day in Moscow. Dissatisfied with myself. No work. Got tangled up in the article on art and have not moved forward.

. . . There were here; the Gorbunovs, 149 Boul-anger, 150 Dunaev. I called on Rusanov myself. 151 Received a very good impression.

Read Plato; embryos of idealism.

I recalled two subjects which were very good: 95

1896

1 ) A wife’s deception of her passionate, jealous husband; his suffering, his struggle and the en-joyment of forgiveness, and

2) A description of the oppression of the serfs and later the very same kind of oppression by land property, or rather by being deprived of it.

Just now Goldenweiser 152 played. One thing a fantasy fugue : 153 an artificiality ; studied, cold, pretentious; another “ Bigarrure “ by Arensky; 154 sensual, artificial; and a third a ballad by Chopin; sickly, nervous, not one or the other or the third can be of any use to the people.

The devil who has been sent to me is still with me, and tortures me. November 23. Moscow. If I live.

To-day November 25. Moscow.

Am very weak. My stomach isn’t working. I am trying to write on art but it doesn’t go. One thing is good; have found myself, my heart. . . . A letter from Zanini with an offer of 31,500 francs. 155 Tischenko, a good novel on pov-erty. 166 It is now past two, am going for a walk.

To-day November 27. Moscow.

Very weak, poor in all respects. And feel as if I had only just now awakened. Have been thinking :

i ) We are all in this life workers placed at the work of saving our souls. It can be com-pared to keeping up the fire given from heaven and lighted on the hearth of my body. My work lies in this, to keep up and feed this fire in myself (not to spend the material of this fire as I have done lately, except in burning it) and not to think how and what gets lighted from this fire. It is not a difficult matter to thresh with several flails, but to keep in order, not to get confused (and not only to thresh, but not to interfere with the oth-ers), one has only to remember oneself, one’s own tempo while beating. But as soon as you have begun to think of others, to look at them, you get confused.

The same thing happens in life. Remember only yourself, your own work and this work is one : to love, to enlarge love in yourself not to think of others, of the consequences of your labour and the work of life will go on fruitfully, joyously. Just as soon as you begin to think of that which you are producing, about the results of your labour, just as soon as you begin to modify it in accordance with its results your work be-comes confused and ceases, and there comes the consciousness of the vanity of life. The master of life gave to each one of us separately such a labour, that the fulfilment of that labour is the most fruitful work. And He himself will use and guide this work, give it a place and a meaning.

But as soon as I try to find and fix a place for it, and in accordance with this, to modify it then I become confused, see the vanity of labour and I despair. My task is to work and He already knows for what it is needed and will make use of it. “ Man walks, God leads.” And the work is one; to enlarge love in oneself.

I am a self-moving saw or a living spade and its life consists in this, to keep its edge clean and sharp. And it will work well enough, and its work will be useful. To keep it sharp, and to sharpen and sharpen it all the time, that is to make oneself always kinder and kinder.

2) Once more I wrote to N that she is wrong in thinking that it is possible for one to renounce oneself from the exploit of living. Life is an ex-ploit. And the principal thing is, that that very thing that pains us and seems to us to hinder us from fulfilling our work in life is our very work in life. There is some circumstance, a condi-tion in life which tortures you; poverty, illness, faithlessness of a husband, calumny, humiliation, it suffices only to pity yourself and you become the unhappiest among the unhappy. And it suf-fices only to understand that this is the very work of life which you are called to do; to live in pov-erty, in illness, to forgive faithlessness, calumny, humiliation and instead of depression and pain there is energy and joy.

3) Art becoming all the time more and more exclusive, satisfying continually a smaller and smaller circle of people, becoming more and more selfish, has gone crazy, since insanity is only self-ishness reaching to its last degree. Art has reached the last degree of selfishness and has gone out of its mind.

I have felt very badly and depressed these days. Father, help me to live with Thee, not to wander from Thy will. November 28. Moscow. If I live.

December

Today December 2. Moscow.

Five days have passed and very torturing ones. Everything is still the same.

. . . My feeling; I have discovered on myself a terrible putrefying sore. They had promised me to heal it and have bound it. The sore was so disgusting to me, it was so depressing for me to think that it was there, that I tried to forget it, to convince myself that it was not there. But some time has passed they unbound the sore and though it was healing, nevertheless it was there. And it was torturingly painful to me and I began to reproach the doctor and unjustly. That is my condition. The principal thing is the devil that has been sent me. Oh, this luxury, this richness, this absence of care about the material life 1 Like an over-fertilised soil. If they do not cultivate good plants on it, weeding it, cleaning everything around them, it will become overgrown with horrible ugliness and will become terrible. But it is difficult I am old and am almost unable to do it. Yesterday I walked, thought, suffered and prayed and it seems to me not in vain.

Yesterday I went to Princess Helen Ser-geievna. 157 It was very pleasant. I still cannot work. I shall try to in a minute. I have written nothing in the note book. Letters from Koni, 158 from Mme. Kudriavtsev. 159 Yesterday the fac-tory hands came and a new one, Medusov, I think.

Dec. 12. Moscow.

I have suffered much during these days and it seems I have advanced towards peace, towards the good towards God. Am reading much on art. It is becoming clear. I am not even sit-ting down to write. Masha went away. The Chertkovs came.

To-day I wrote the appendix to The Appeal.

Dec. 75. Moscow.

Now 2 o’clock in the morning. Have done nothing. My stomach ached. Am calm; have no desire to write.

... I have made some notes. I don’t write out everything. Something struck me forcibly it is my clear consciousness of the weight of the oppressiveness from my personality, from the fact that I am I. This gives me joy because it means that I understood, that I recognised as myself, at least partly, a “ self “ that was not per-sonal. December 16, Moscow. If I live.

To-day December ig or 20.

Five days have passed and I feel the oppressive-ness, the weight of my body and therefore the consciousness of the existence of that which is not the body has strengthened terribly. I want to throw off this weight, free myself from these chains and nevertheless I feel them. I am sick of my body.

All this time I have not worked at all and I feel heavy melancholy. I am fighting against it by seeking in my life a task which is beyond this life. There is only one such: an approach to the per-fection of God, to love. Yesterday it became so clear to me that life here is nothing else than a manifestation in these forms of the greatest per-fection of God. “ To live an age and unto the night “ that is in terms of time. To live for a universal life and for this one that is in terms of space.

1896

I have done nothing during this time and am unable to. I am living badly. I have noted a few trifles on Art :

1 ) They bring as a proof that art is good, the fact that it produces a great impression on you. Yes, but who are you? On the decadents, their works produce a great impression on them. You say that they are spoilt. But Beethoven, who does not produce an impression on the working man, produces such an impression on you, only because you are spoilt. Who then is right ? What music is beyond question as to its value? That kind which produces as impression on a decadent and on you and on the working man; simple, under-standable, popular music.

2) What relief all would feel who are locked up in a concert-room listening to Beethoven’s last works, if a jig or a cherdash or something similar would be played for them.

3) N. was here and said that he recognised only sensation, that man himself, the “ self “ was only a sensation. Sensation receives sensation. He reached this nonsense because of the scientific method; the limiting of the field of research, the non-recognition of anything else than sensation, is very good and profitable for the practical ends of the science of experimental psychology, but it is good-for-nothing as far as a living universal point of view is concerned. And this error is often

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made by people; they transfer to life the method which is suitable to science.

4) Nothing so confuses the conception of art as the acceptance of authorities. Instead of de-termining by a clear concise conception of art whether the works of Sophocles, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Beethoven, Bach, Raphael, Michael-Angelo, come up to the conception of good art and exactly how they do so, they de-termine by the existing works of the recognised great artists, art itself and its laws. But, how-ever, there are many works of noted artists which are below every criticism and there are many false reputations, accidentally won fame ; Dante, Shake-speare.

5) I am reading the history of music: 161 out of sixteen chapters on artificial music there is one short chapter on popular music. And they know almost nothing about it. So that the history of music is not the history of how real music was born and spread and developed ; the music of mel-odies but the history of artificial music, i.e., how real melodious music was distorted.

6) Artificial, master-class music, the music of parasites, feeling its own impotence, its own hol-lowness, takes recourse, in order to replace real in-terest by artificiality, now to counterpoint, to the fugue, now to opera, to illustration.

7 ) Church music is good, therefore, because it is

1896

understood by the masses. The undeniably good is only that which is understood by all. And there-fore it is true, that the more understandable it is, the better.

8) The various characters expressed by art touch us only because in each one of us is the possi-bility of every possible character. (Forgot)

9) The history of music, like all history, is written on the plan to show how it has gradually reached that condition in which the thing is found about which the history is now being written. The present condition of music, or that about which the history is written, is supposed to be the highest. But what if it is not only a lower thing, but something entirely distorted, an accidental de-viation towards distortion.

10) Belief in authorities causes the errors of authorities to be accepted as models.

n) They say that music strengthens the im-pression of words in arias, songs. It isn’t true. Music gets ahead of impressions made by words, by heaven knows how far. An aria of Bach ; what words can rival it at the time when it is being rendered? It is a different thing the words by themselves. To whatever music you would place the Sermon on the Mount, the music would remain far behind, once you penetrated the words. “ Crucifix “ by Faure, 162 the music is pitiable com-pared to the words. They are two entirely dif-

December

ferent and incompatible feelings. In song they go along together only because the words give tone.

(Not exact. About this in another place.)

12) So vividly have I recalled Vasili Per-fileev 163 and others, whom I saw in Moscow, and so clear did it become that, although they are dead, they still are.

13) The Scylla and Charybdis of artists; either understandable, but shallow, vulgar; or pseudo-lofty, original and incomprehensible.

14) The poetry of the people always reflected and not only reflected, predicted, prepared, popu-lar movements; the Crusades, the Reformation. What could the poetry of our parasitical circle pre-dict and prepare? Love, debauchery; debauch-ery, love.

15) Popular poetry, music, art in general is ex-hausted, because all the talented have been won over by bribes to be buffoons to the rich and the titled; chamber music, opera, odes and 164 . . .

1 6) In all art, there exists the struggle between the Christian and the pagan. The Christian be-gins to conquer and the new wave of the I5th Cen-tury overflows, the Renaissance, and only now at the end of the I9th, the Christian rises again, and paganism in the shape of decadence having reached the highest degree of nonsense, is being destroyed.

17) Besides the fact that the most gifted of the

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people were won over by bribes into the camp of the parasites, the cause of the destruction of popu-lar poetry and music were: at first the serfdom of the people and later the most important one printing.

18) Chertkov said that around us there are four walls of the unknown; in front, the wall of the future, in back the wall of the past, to the right the wall of ignorance, of that which is tak-ing place there where we are not, and the fourth wall, he says, is the ignorance of that which is go-ing on in the soul of another. In my mind this is not so. The first three walls are as he says. One should not look through them. The less we look beyond them the better. But as to the fourth wall of the ignorance of that which is going on in the souls of other people, this wall we ought to break down with all our strength, striving for a fusion with the souls of other people. And the less we will look beyond those three other walls, the closer we will get to others in this respect.

19) After death in importance, and before death in time, there is nothing more important, more irrevocable, than marriage. And just as death is only good then when it is unavoidable, but every death on purpose is bad, so it is with marriage. Only then is marriage not evil, when it is not to be conquered.

20) Apostasy comes from a man professing

December

what he professes not for himself, not for God, but for people. He betrays his professions, either because he has become convinced that more people, or better people according to his mind, do not profess the same thing as he, or because that which he did before, he did for human fame and now he wants to live for himself, before God.

21 ) If I believed in a personal God to whom one could turn to with questions, I would say, Why, for what has God made it so, that some, knowing the undoubted truth, burn wholly with its fire, while others do not want it, cannot under-stand or accept it, and even hate it.

It is now past one. The same weakness, but keen in spirit, when I remember the significance of the whole of life, and not only this one which I have lived through as Leo Nicholaievich (Tol-stoi). Help me, Lord, to do always, everywhere Thy will, to be with Thee. But not my will, but Thine, be done. December 21, Moscow, if I live.

I am still writing December the 20th, Moscow.

Still the same depression. Father, help me. Relieve me. Strengthen Thyself in me, vanquish, drive forth, destroy, the foul flesh and all that I feel through it.

. . . Father, help me. Moreover, I feel better already. What is especially calming is the task, the test of humility, of humiliation, an entirely

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unexpected, exceptional humiliation. In chains, in a prison, one can pride oneself on one’s humili-ation, but here it is only painful, unless one accepts it as a trial sent by God. Yes, learn to bear calmly, joyfully and to love.

December 21. Moscow.

I am learning badly. I continually suffer, help-lessly, weakly. Only in rare moments do I rise to the consciousness of the whole of my life (not only this one) and my duties in it.

I thought (and felt) : There are people lack-ing both in aesthetic feeling and in the ethical (es-pecially the ethical), to whom it is impossible to instil that which is good the less so when they do and love that which is bad, and think that the bad is good . . .

December 22, Moscow, if I live, which is get-ting to be very doubtful; my heart does not stop aching. Almost nothing gives me rest. To-day Posha alone refreshed me. It is so disgusting I want to cry over myself, over the remnant of my life which is being futilely ruined. But per-haps it must be so, yes, in fact, it must be so ...

December 25, Moscow.

9 o’c. at night. Spiritually I feel better. But I have no intellectual, artistic work, and I am mel-ancholy. Just now I felt that particular Christ-

December

mas softening and gentleness, and poetical im-pulse. My hands are cold, I want to cry and to love . . .

December 26, Moscow.

I am still not writing anything, but I feel my thoughts revive. The devil still does not leave me.

I thought to-day about The Diary of a Mad Man. 16 * The principal thing is that I have un-derstood my filial relation to God, brotherhood, and my attitude to the whole world has changed.

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Jan. 5, Moscow.

There is still nothing good to write about my-self. I feel no need of working and the devil does not leave me. Have been ill for about 6 days.

Began to reread Resurrection and reached up to his decision to marry and threw it away with disgust. It is all untrue, invented, weak. It is hard to repair a spoiled thing. In order to re-pair it, there is necessary: i) alternately to describe his feeling and life, and hers, 168 and 2) sympathetically and seriously hers, and critically and with a smile, his. I shall hardly finish it. It is all very spoilt.

Yesterday I read Arkhangelsky’s 16T article “ Whom to Serve “ and was very delighted.

Have finished the notebook. And here I am writing from it:

1 ) My article on ... must be written for the people . . .

2) (For The Notes of a Madman or for The Drama). Despair because of madness and wretchedness of life. Salvation from this despair in the recognition of God and one’s filial-ity to Him. The recognition of filiality is the

“3

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recognition of brotherhood. The recognition of the brotherhood of man and the cruel, brutal, un-brotherly arrangement of life which is justified by people leads inevitably to a recognition of one’s own insanity or that of the whole world.

3) I read Nakashidze’s 188 letter about the Congress of the Dukhobors, where they dis-cussed social questions. Here is an instance of the possibility of administration without violence. One condition is necessary no, two conditions: the respect of the youth and of the spiritually weak in general, to the resolutions of the elected elders, the spiritually stronger the “ little old men “ as the Dukhobors call them; and the second condition that these “ little old men “ be rational and loving. At this Congress the question of uniting property (in common), was discussed and the “ little old men “ were in favour of it, but con-stantly repeated : “ Only let there be no violence, let things be done voluntarily.”

Among the people and the Dukhobors this re-spect and recognition of the necessity of fulfilling the resolutions of the old men exist. And all this without forms; the election of the elders and the methods of agreement.

4) No matter how you grind a crystal, how you dissolve it, compress it, it will mould itself again at the first opportunity into the same form. And so the structure of society will be always the

January

same, no matter to what changes you submit it. The form of a crystal will only then be changed when chemical changes occur in it, inner ones; the same with society.

5) It would be good to write a preface to Spier 169 containing the following :

The world is such as we see it, only if there do not exist any other beings differently built from us and endowed with other senses than ours. If we see not only the possibility, but the necessity, of the existence of other beings endowed with other senses than ours, then the world is in no case, merely such as we see it. Our imagination of the world shows only our attitude to the world, just as the visual picture which we form for our-selves from what we see as far as the horizon and the sky represents in no way the actual outlines of the objects seen. The other senses, hearing, smell, principally touch, in verifying our visual impressions give us a more definite conception of the seen objects; but that which we know as broad, thick, hard or soft or how the things seen by us sound or smell, do not prove that we know these things fully and that if a new sense (above the five) were given us, it would not disclose to us that our conception of things formed by our five senses was not just as deceptive as that conception of the flatness of objects and their diminishing in perspective which sight only gives us.

Random break

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I see a man in the mirror, hear his voice and am fully convinced that he is a real man; but I ap-proach, I want to grasp his hand and I touch the glass of the mirror and see my delusion. The same thing must come to pass in a dying man; a new feeling is born which discloses to him (through his new feeling and the new knowledge it gives him) the delusion of recognising his body as himself, and of all that he recognised as exist-ing through the means of the senses of this body.

So that the world is certainly not such as we know it to be: let there be other instruments of knowledge and there will be another world.

But no matter how that which we consider as the world, our attitude to the world, should change one thing is unalterably such as we know it and is always unchanging, it is that which knows. And it knows not only in me, but in everything which knows. This thing which knows is the same everywhere and in everything and in itself. It is God, and it is that for some reason limited particle of God which composes our actual “ self.”

But what then, is this God, i. e., something eter-nal, infinite, omnipotent, which has become mor-tal, finite, weak? Why did God divide himself within himself? I do not know, but I know that this is so, and that in this is life. All that we know is nothing else than just such divisions of

February

God. All that we know as the world is the knowl-edge of these divisions. Our knowledge of the world (that which we call matter in space and time) is the contact of the limits of our divinity with its other divisions. Birth and death are the transitions from one division into another.

6) The difference between Christian happiness and pagan is this, that the pagan seeks happiness, prepares it for himself, awaits it, demands it the Christian seeks, prepares, awaits and demands the kingdom of God and accepts happiness when it comes as something unexpected, undeserved, unprepared. And it is no less.

Jan. 18. Moscow.

Dismal, horrid. Everything repels me in the life they lead around me. Now I free myself from sadness and suffering, then again I fall into it. In nothing is it so apparent, as in this, how far I am from what I want to be. If my life were really entirely in the service of God, there would be nothing which could disturb it.

I am still writing on art. It is bad. A Duk-hobor was here.

Feb. 4. Nicholskoe with the Olsuphievs.

I am already here the 4th day and am inexpress-ibly sad. I am writing badly on art. I just now prayed and became horrified at how low I have

1897

fallen. I think, I ask myself, what am I to do ; I doubt, I hesitate, as if I did not know or had for-gotten who I was and therefore what I was to do. To remember that I am not master, but servant and to do that to which I have been put. With what labour have I struggled and attained this knowledge, how undoubted is this knowledge and how I can forget it nevertheless not exactly for-get it, but live without applying it.

. . . Well, enough about this.

I am going to write out what I thought during this time :

i ) When all is said and done, it is those people over whom violence is used who always rule, i.e., those who fulfil the law of non-resistance. So women seek rights, but it is they who rule, just because they are the ones subjected to force they were and they still are. Institutions are in the power of men, but public opinion is in the power of women. And public opinion is a million times stronger than any laws and armies. The proof that public opinion is in the hands of women is that not only the construction of homes, food, are determined by women, and not only do the women spend the wealth, consequently control the labour of men, but the success of works of art, of books, even the appointment of rulers, are deter-mined by public opinion; and public opinion is determined by women. Some one well said that

February

men must seek emancipation from women, and not the contrary.

2 ) ( For The Appeal) . 17 Unmask the deceiv-ers, spread the truth and do not fear. If it were a matter of spreading deception and murder, then of course, it would be terrible, but here you would be spreading the freedom from deception and murder. Besides, there is no ground for fear. Of whom? They . . . are themselves afraid.

I remember there worked for us in our village a weak and phlegmatic 12 year-old boy who once caught on the road and brought back, an enormous healthy peasant, a thief, who had taken a coat from the hall.

3) The poets, the verse-makers torture their tongues in order to be able to say every possible kind of thought in every possible variety of word and to be able to form from all these words some-thing which resembles a thought. Such exercise can only be indulged in by unserious people. And so it is.

4) If we never moved, then everything which we saw would appear to us flat and not in perspective. Motion gives us a conception of things in three dimensions of space. The same thing is true concerning the material side of things : if we weren’t living, were not moving in life, we would see only the material side of things; but moving in life, moving our spiritual side across the material side of the world, we recognise the falseness of the idea that the material is actually such as it appears to us.

5) Twenty times I have repeated it, and 20 times the thought comes to me as new, that re-lease from all excitement, fear, suffering, from physical and especially from spiritual, lies in de-stroying in one’s self the illusion of the union of one’s spiritual “ self “ with one’s physical. And this is always possible. When the illusion is destroyed then the spiritual “ self “ can suffer only from the fact that it is joined to the physi-cal, but not from hunger, pain, sorrow, jeal-ousy, shame, etc. In the first case, as long as it is joined it does that which the physical “ self “ wants: it gets angry, condemns, scolds, strikes; in the second case, when it is separated from the physical, it does only that which can free it from the torturing union. And only the manifestations of love frees it.

6) For the article on Art. When it is beauty that is recognised as the aim of art, then every-thing will be art which for certain people will ap-pear as beauty, i.e., everything which will please certain people.

7) I have noted, “ the harm of art, especially music “ and I wanted to write that I had forgot-ten, but while I was writing, I remembered. The

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harm of art is principally this, that it takes up time, hiding from people their idleness. I know that it is harmful when it encourages idleness both for the producers and those who enjoy it, but I cannot see a clear definition of when it is permis-sible, useful, good. I should like to say only then when it is a rest from labour, like sleep, but I do not yet know if that is so.

8 ) ( For The Appeal) . You are mistaken, you poor, if you think that you can shame or touch or convince the rich man to divide with you. He cannot do that because he sees that you want the same thing that he wants and that you are fighting him with the same means with which he fights you. You will not only convince him, but you will com-pel him to yield to you only by ceasing to seek that which he seeks, ceasing to struggle with him, but if you cease to struggle you will cease also . . . (very important).

9) If the end of art is not the good, but pleas-ure, then the distribution of art will be different. If its end is the good, then it will inevitably be spread among the greatest number of people; if its end is pleasure, then it will be confined to a small number (not exact and still unclear).

10) Art is I was going to write food, but it is better to say sleep, necessary for the sus-tenance of the spiritual life. Sleep is useful, nec-

1897

essary after labour. But artificial sleep is harm-ful, does not refresh, does not stimulate, but weakens.

1 1 ) I heard counterpoint singing and . . . 171 This is the destruction of music, a means of per-verting it. There is no sense to it, no melody, and any first senseless sequence of sounds are taken and from the combination of these insignificant sequences is formed some kind of a tedious resem-blance to music. The best is when the last chord is finished.

12) The most severe and consequential agnos-tic, whether he wants it or does not want it, recog-nises God. He cannot but recognise that in the first place, in the existence both of himself and of the whole world, there is some meaning inac-cessible to him ; and in the second, there is a law of his life, a law to which he can submit or from which he can escape. And it is this recognition of the highest meaning of life, inaccessible to man but inevitably existing, and of the law of one’s life, which is God and His will. And this recognition of God is immensely stronger than the recognition of ... etc. To believe like this means to dig to bedrock, to the mainland, and to build the house on that.

13) Stepa 172 related the physiologic process which takes place in the infant when it separates from its mother. Truly it is a miracle.

February

This thought occupied me in relation to the doc-trine that everything material is illusion. How can illusion take place there where I do not see it? As you see it, so it takes place. You see every-thing through your glasses. That is well enough as regards all other phenomena, but here the most fundamental thing is taking place, that from which the whole of my life and of everything living is composed: the detachment from the world. And here right in front of my eyes this detachment is taking place; there was one and there became two, like among the first cells, (unclear.)

14) Every living being carries within himself all the possibilities of its ancestors. Having been detached, he manifests several of them, but car-ries in himself the remaining ones and acquires new ones. In this lies the process of life; to unite and to separate. (Still more unclear.)

I have decided no matter what happens, to write every day. Nothing strengthens one so much for the good. It is the best prayer.

Evening, February 4. Nicholskoe.

In the morning I wrote this diary and later tried to write, but could do nothing; had no desire. Undoubtedly if there be strength and capacity to write, then one ought to serve God.

It is just as gloomy. I do not pray enough, hourly.

1897 February 5, Nicholskoe. If I live.

February 5, Nicholskoe.

Still the same intellectual, creative, weakness. But I think it is almost hopeless. There was a search at Chertkov’s. S. arrived.

I thought: I, a worker, am I doing the work commanded? In this is everything. Lord, help me.

Feb. 6. Nicholskoe.

In the morning Gorbunov arrived ; in the even-ing a telegram that the Chertkovs are leaving on Thursday. 173 I prepared to go with Sonya. 174 Am just going. Health better.

Feb. 7. Petersburg.

Went to Chertkov. It is joyous there. Then to Yaroshenko. 175

... I pray that I do not abandon here or any-where the consciousness of my mission, to be ful-filled by kindness. Feb. 8. Petersburg. If I live.

I was alive, but made no entries the two days. To-day, Feb. 10.

It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, silence. I was at Stasov’s and Tolstoi’s. 178 Did nothing

February

bad, but nothing good either. Rather some good. Lord keep me from a spell, but I am better. Have thought nothing.

Again at the Olsuphievs in Nicholskoe, Feb. 16.

I returned on the morning of the day before yesterday, and fell ill. Yesterday I was better, wrote on art. Good.

. . . Women do not consider the demands of reason binding upon themselves and cannot pro-gress according to them. They haven’t got this sail spread. They row without a rudder. 177

I am again feeling unwell and very sweetly sad. Wrote a letter to the Chertkovs and to Posha. Am not working.

Feb. 17. Nicholskoe.

I do not feel well. I tried to write on art. . . .

. . . Received letters; an adaptation of On Life from the American. 178 Wrote two letters to Sonya yesterday and sent them to-day. 179

Having been thinking even before Petersburg:

1) (For The Appeal) : To describe the con-dition of the factory workers, the servants, sol-diers, agricultural labourers in comparison with the rich, and show that it all comes from. . . .

2) In the Middle Ages, in the Xlth Century, poetry was general the people and the masters, les courtois et les vilains; then they separated and

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les vilains began to mimic the masters’ and the masters the people’s. A union ought to take place again.

3) A hundred times I have said it to myself and have written it down : the real and only salva-tion from all sorrow is the knowledge of one’s mission, the anxiety whether you have done that for which you were sent.

4) Nearly every husband and wife reproach each other for things for which they do not con-sider themselves guilty. But on the one side there is no ceasing to accuse, nor on the other to vindi-cate.

5) They do not run after a poet or a painter so much, as after an actor, and especially after a musician. Music calls forth a direct physical effect, sometimes acute, sometimes chronic.

6) We absolutely falsely ascribe intelligence and goodness to talent, and the same to beauty. In this lies great self-delusion.

7) It came into my head with remarkable clear-ness that in order to always feel good, it is neces-sary always to think of others, especially when you speak with some one.

8) The movement of life, the broadening of a separate being gives time. If there would be no movement, no enlarging of love, then there would be no time; as to space, it is the representation of other beings. If there were no other beings,

February

there would be no space. (All nonsense, un-thought).

9) Women are deprived of a moral sense for a motor. They haven’t got this sail spread and therefore it does not carry. Feb. 18, Nicholskoe. If I live.

Feb. 18. Nicholskoe.

Forty-five years ago I was in battle. 180 I feel a great sinking in energy. I am very weak, cannot work. But is it not possible to live unceasingly before God, doing His work in pro-portion to His strength. I shall try. Help me, Lord. I shall take up the letters. Here de-mands are made, and it is possible to fulfil His work.

Evening. Indisposed. Apathy, weakness. Am not taking up the essay, 181 wrote letters. Just now a letter from Biriukov. I answered it.

February ig. Nicholskoe.

I am just as apathetic, but am not worried. Wrote letters. Wrote to every one. I am going to bed, it is past twelve.

To-day, Feb. 20, Nicholskoe. Seven o’clock in

the evening.

I still feel just as badly; constipation and heart-burn. I fell asleep in the morning. Then, not

1897

trying to work, I took a walk. Extreme weak-ness. My soul is calm, only it is a bore that I am unable to work. The house is full of peo-pie.

. . . Yesterday I wrote many letters.

I walked and thought:

There is no greater cause for error and confu-sion of ideas, the most unexpected ones, and inexplicable in any other way, than the recognition of authorities, i.e., the infallible truthfulness or beauty of certain persons, of books or of works of art. M. Arnold 182 was a thousand times right when he said that the business of criticism lies in detaching the good from the bad, from all that has been written and done, and mainly the bad from that which is recognised as splendid, and the good from that which is recognised as bad, or is not recognised at all. The most striking instance of this error and its terrible consequences, holding back for ages the forward movement of Christian mankind, is the authority of the Holy Scriptures and the Gospels. How many of the most unex-pected and remarkable absurdities, sometimes necessary for its own justification, sometimes not necessary for anything, are said and written in the text of the Holy Scriptures. . . . The same thing happens in the Greek Tragedies, in Vergil, Shakespeare, Goethe, Bach, Beethoven, Raphael and in the new authorities.

February

Perhaps I omitted the 2 1st. To-day,-perhaps the 22nd. February, Saturday. Nicholskoe.

Yesterday I did not work. I read through the first draft on art pretty good. I went for Yushkova’s 183 dress. It was a nice trip. In the evening they spoke about Art and then I heard the brothers Konius 184 who arrived. . . .

To-day I am a little better in my health, I went on skiis and felt weak at heart and uneasy when I went far. It is evening now. I feel like writ-ing letters.

I thought for The Appeal when I looked at the numberless sons of N. in their overcoats : He is bringing them up, “ making “ men of the world of them. What for?

You will say : you live as you do for the sake of the children. What for ? Why bring up another generation of the same cheated slaves, not know-ing why they live, and living such a joyless life? Feb. 23. Nicholskoe. If I live.

February 23, Nicholskoe.

To-day I wrote willingly and eagerly all morn-ing and it seems to me I advanced on the essay on art. Then I took a walk before dinner. There is still a pile of people. No serious talk. Yes-terday there was music. . . . To-day an amateur theatrical. Tania and Michail Adamovich

1897

played very well. 185 It is now evening. The day has passed almost without heart-burn.

February 24. Nicholskoe.

To-day I arose apathetic and fell asleep again right after luncheon. After one, I went to meet the riders. Came home, dined. Am struggling successfully with heart-burn. Went for a walk in the evening.

Read and am reading Aristotle (Benard) on aesthetics. Very important.

Thought during these days :

1) Thought; why is it impossible to even speak to some people . . . about truth and good so far are they away from it. This is so, because they are surrounded by such a thick layer of temp-tations that they have become impenetrable. They are unable to struggle with sin, because they do not see the sin for the temptations. In this lies the principal danger and all the horror of tempta-tions.

2) They say to me when I condemn religious propaganda: You also are preaching. No, I do not preach mainly because I have nothing to preach. Even to atheists I am not going to preach God (if I preached, I erred) . I only draw conclusions from what people accept, pointing out the contradictions which are enclosed in what they accept, and which they do not notice.

February

3) ... a general, respectable, clean, correct, with thick eye-brows and important mien ( and un-commonly good-natured, but deprived of every moral motive sense) gave me the striking thought, as to how and by what means those most indiffer-ent to social life, to the good of society as to how just those people rise involuntarily to the po-sition of rulers of people. I see how he will man-age institutions upon which a million lives depend, and just because he likes cleanliness, elegance, re-fined food, dancing, hunting, billiards and every possible kind of amusement, and not having the means to keep himself in those regiments, or in-stitutions, or societies where all this exist, is ad-vanced little by little as a good and harmless man and made a ruler of people. All are like N. and their name is legion.

4) I am reading Aristotle. He says in Pol-itics (Book VII, Chapter VIII): “Dans cette republique parfaite, ou la vertu des citoyens sera reele, ils s’abstiendront de toute profession me-chanique, de toute speculation mercantile, travaux degrades (degradants?) 186 et contraires a la vertu. Ils ne se livreront pas davantage a 1’agricul-ture. II faut du loisir pour acquerir la ver-tu “.. . m

All his aesthetics has for its end ( ) 188

virtue. And we with the Christian understanding of the brotherhood of man want to be guided by

1897

the ethical and aesthetical conception of the an-cients ! 1 Feb. 25. Nicholskoe. If I live.

February 25. Nicholskoe.

I am alive. I have written a little not as easily as yesterday. The guests have departed. Went for a walk twice. Am reading Aristotle. To-day I received letters . . .

Yesterday, while walking, I prayed and exper-ienced a remarkable sensation which is perhaps similar to that which the mystics excite in them-selves by spiritual works; I felt myself to be a spiritual, free being bound by the illusion of the body. Feb. 26. Nicholskoe. If I live.

Feb. 26, Nicholskoe.

I am alive. I am writing, so as to keep my resolution. To-day I wrote letters all morning, but I had no energy for work.

Went to Mme. Shorin. 189 I had a good talk with her. Perhaps even to some purpose. Just as Anna Michailovna 19 said to-day, that I helped her. And thanks be.

I copied the letter to Posha.

February

Feb. 27. Nicholskoe.

Wrote this morning poorly, but cleared up something or other. Am well. Took a walk. Spoke with Tania. And that is all.

Yesterday was Feb. 28. Nicholskoe.

I have written nothing. In the morning I worked badly. Received a letter from Chertkov and Ivan Michailovich and wrote to both. Walked and went to Safonovo. 191

This morning I thought of something which seemed to me important, namely:

i) I wiped away the dust in my room and walking around, came to the divan and could not remember whether I had dusted it or not. Just because these movements are customary and un-conscious I could not remember them and I felt that it was impossible to. So that if I dusted and forgot it, i.e., if I did an act unconsciously; then it is just the same as if it never existed. If some one conscious saw it, then perhaps it could be re-stored. But if no one saw it, or saw it uncon-sciously ; if the whole complex life of many people pass along unconsciously, then that life is as if it had never existed. So that life life only ex-ists then, when it is lit by consciousness.

What, then, is this consciousness? What are the acts which are lit by consciousness? The acts which are lit by consciousness are those acts which

1897

we fulfil freely, i.e., fulfilling them we know that we might have acted otherwise. Therefore, con-sciousness is freedom. Without consciousness there is no freedom and without freedom there can be no consciousness (if we are subjected to violence and we have no choice as to how we should bear that violence, we do not feel the vio-lence).

Memory is nothing else than the consciousness of the past, of the past freedom. If I were un-able to dust or not to dust, I would not be con-scious of dusting, if I were not conscious of dust-ing, I would not have the choice of dusting or not dusting. If I did not have consciousness and free-dom, I would not remember the past, I would not unite it into one. Therefore the very basis of life is freedom and consciousness a freedom-con-sciousness.

(It seemed to me clearer when I was thinking.)

March i, Nicholskoe.

. . . To-day I could not write anything in the morning at all fell asleep. I took a walk both in the morning and in the evening. It was very pleasant.

I thought two things :

i) That death seems to me now just as a change: a discharge from a former post and an

March

appointment to a new one. It seems that I am all worn out for the former post and I am no longer fit.

2) I thought about N as a good character for a drama ; good-natured, clean, spoilt, loving pleas-ure but good, and incapable of conceiving a radi-cal moral requirement.

I also thought:

3) There is only one means for steadfastness and peace : love, love towards enemies.

Yes, here this problem was presented to me from a special, unexpected angle and how badly I was able to solve it. I must try harder. Help me, Father. March 2, Nlcholskoe. If I live.

March 2, Nicholskoe.

I am alive. Entirely well. To-day I wrote pretty well. In the evening after dinner I went to Shelkovo. It was a very pleasant walk in the moonlight.

Wrote a letter to Posha. Received a letter from Tregubov. He is irritated because they in-tercept the letters. But I am not vexed. I have understood that one has to pity them, and I pity truly. To-morrow we go. We have been here a whole month.

1897

Yesterday was March $rd. Moscow.

In the morning I did almost nothing. I stum-bled up against the historic course of art. I took a walk. After dinner I left. I arrived at 10.

March 4, Moscow.

Got up late. Handled my papers, wrote let-ters to Posha, Nakashidze. Went to the public library, took books. In the evening Dunaev and Boulanger were here. It is now late. I am go-ing to bed. S. is at a concert. March 5. Moscow. If I live.

Heavens, how many days I have skipped : To-day, March g. Moscow.

Out of the four days, I wrote two days on art and to-day pretty much. I wanted to write Hadji Murad very much and thought out something pretty well touching. A letter from Posha. Wrote to Chertkov and Koni about the terrible thing that happened to Miss Vietrov. 192 I am not going to write out what I have noted.

I am still in the same peaceful, because loving, mood. As soon as I feel like being hurt or wear-ied I remember God and that my work is only one, to love, not to think of that which will be and I feel better right away.

Tania is going to Yasnaya.

April

To-day, March 15, Moscow.

Lived not badly. I see the end of the essay on art. Still the same peace. I thank God. I have just now written letters. It is evening. I am going into the tedious drawing-room.

To-day, April 4, Moscow.

Almost a month I have not written (20 days), and I have lived the time badly, because I worked little. Wrote all the time on art, became con-fused these last days. And now for two days I haven’t written.

I have not lost my peace, but my soul is troubled, still I am master of it. Oh, Lord! If only I could remember my mission, that through oneself must be manifested (shine) divinity. But the difficulty is, that if you remember that alone you will not live ; and you must live, live energetically, and yet remember. Help me, Father.

I have prayed much lately that my life be bet-ter. But as it is, the consciousness of the lawless-ness of my life is shameful and depressing.

Yesterday I thought very well about Hadji Murad that in it the principal thing was to ex-press a deception of trust. How good it would have been, were it not for this deception. Also I am thinking more and more often of The Ap-peal.

I am afraid that the theme of art has occupied

1897

me lately for personal, selfish and bad reasons. Je m* entends.

During this time I made few notes and if I had been thinking about anything I have forgot-ten it.

1) The world which we know and represent for ourselves, is nothing else than laws of co-relation between our senses (sens), and there-fore, a miracle is a violation of these laws of co-relation, it therefore destroys our conception of the world. In the crudest form, it is thus : I know that water (not frozen) is always liquid. And its specific gravity is less than that of my body. My eyes, hearing, touch, demonstrate to me liquid water; and suddenly a man walks on this water. If he walked on the water, then it proves nothing, but only destroys my conception of water.

2) A very common mistake: To place the aim of life in the service of people and not in the service of God. Only in serving God, i.e., in do-ing that which He wants, can you be certain that you are not doing something vain and it is not impossible to choose whom you are to serve.

3) Church Christians do not want to serve God, but want God to serve them.

4) Shakespeare began to be valued when the moral criterion was lost.

5) (For The Appeal.) We are so entangled that every one of our steps in life is a participa-

May

tion in evil : in violence, in oppression. We must not despair, but we must slowly disentangle our-selves from those nets in which we are caught; not to tear ourselves through, that would en-tangle us worse but to disentangle ourselves carefully.

6 )193

I am in a very bad physical condition, almost fever, and the black gloom that comes before, but up to now the spiritual is the stronger. Escorted Maude’s colony. 194 Ivan Michailovich is still free. 195 Everything is all right.

Apr. g. Moscow.

Have been ill. With calmness I thought that I would die. To-day I wrote well on Art. They have taken Ivan Michailovich. There was a search at Dunaev’s. 196 It is all right with the exiles. 197

Outwardly I am entirely calm, inwardly not en-tirely. It is enough to bear in mind that every-thing is for the good, and when I bear that in mind as I do now it is good.

To-day May 3. Yasnaya Polyana.

Almost a month I have made no entries. A bad and sterile month.

I cut out and burned that which I wrote in heat. 198

1897

To-day July 16. Y. P.

It is not one month that I have made no entries, but two and a half. I have lived through much, both the difficult and the good. 199 Have been ill. Very severe pains I think in the beginning of July. 200

I worked all this time on the essay on art, and the farther I get the better. I finished it and am correcting it from the beginning.

Masha married. 201 . . .

We do not quiet, moderate passion, the source of the greatest calamities, but kindle it with all our strength and then we complain that we suf-fer. . . .

Good letters from Chertkov. A Kiev peasant was here, Shidlovsky. 202

I feel that I am alone that my life not only does not interest any one, but that they are bored and ashamed that I continue to occupy myself with such trifles.

I thought during this time :

i) A type of woman there are men such also, but mostly it is women who are incapable of seeing themselves, as if their necks were station-ary and they could not look back at themselves. It isn’t exactly that they don’t want to repent : but they can’t see themselves. They live as they do and not in another way, because this way seems good to them. And therefore if they do any-

July

thing it is because it seems good to them. Such people are terrifying. And such people may be intelligent, stupid, good, wicked. When they are stupid and wicked it is terrible.

2) With a low moral standard, a firmness of judgment. The acts of all the best people are explained by what / would have done. Christ preached out of vanity, condemned the Pharisees from envy, etc.

3 ) The second condition of art is novelty. To a child everything is new and therefore it has many artistic impressions. The new for us, is a certain depth of feeling, that depth in which a man finds his separate individuality from all. That is for indifferent art. For the highest, novelty lies only in religion, as religion is the most advanced world point of view.

4) (For the drama.) They bring to the table a man in tatters and they laugh at the inconsistency of it and at his awkwardness. Revolt.

5) When it happens that you thought of some-thing and then forgot what you thought, but you remember and know the character of your thoughts: sad, dismal, oppressive, joyous, keen and even remember their order: first it was sad, and then it became calm, etc., when you remem-ber things that way, then it is exactly what music expresses.

1897

6) A theme: A passionate young man in love with a mentally diseased woman.

7) God gave us His spirit love, reason in order to serve Him; but we use His spirit to serve ourselves we use the axe to plane the handle.

I feel fully well and strong physically, but morally, weak. I feel like working and am able. I am going to make notes. 203 July 17. Yasn. Pol. If I live.

July 17. Y. P.

Got up late, worked badly. There is neither concentration nor capacity to embrace everything. Nevertheless I have advanced. Masha came with Kolia . . .

Yesterday I talked about love with N: that we madly kindle this passion and then we suffer from its exaggerations and excesses.

Went on my bicycle to Yasenki. I love this motion very much. But I am ashamed.

A letter from Chertkov ; he is very ill. I value him very much. And how not value him.

It is now 10 o’clock. The Shenshins have left just now. I feel solemn and gloomy. July 18, 1897. Y. P. If I live.

July

I skipped three days. To-day July 21. Y. P.

I am working well enough. I am even satis-fied with my work. Though I change much. Everything has come to a head and has gained much. I have been reviewing everything again from the beginning.

The life around me is very wretched. . . .

I do not know why : whether from the stomach or the heat or from excessive physical exercise but in the evenings I feel very weak.

A good speech by Crookes as to how a micro-scopic man would look upon the world. 204

Yesterday Novikov was here and he brought splendid notes by Michael Novikov. 205 Wrote letters: to Carus, 206 Ivan Michailovich. A let-ter from Evgenie Ivanovich. 207 July 22. Y. P. If I live.

July 28. Y. P.

Six days that I haven’t written. Three or four days ago at night, I had an attack of cholera morbus and the day after I was absolutely ill and for two days I have been very weak and have written very poorly. To-day I am a little better.

The children were here: Iliushin’s family. 208 They are sweet grandchildren, especially Andru-sha. Whatever notes I made, I will not write

1897

out to-day. Longinov 209 was here, a friend of

Mme. Annenkov’s and to-day Maude and Bou-

langer.

July 2g. Y. P. If I live.

To-day Aug. 7. Y. P.

During this time a pile of guests 21 . . . two Germans, decadents; a naive and a somewhat stupid one. . . . There were here: Novikov, the scribe, a very powerful man, and Bulakhov, 211 also a powerful one morally and intellectually. I live very badly, weakly. Very little goodness. To-day the Stakhoviches 212 and the Maklakovs 213 ar-rived also.

I continue to work on my essay on art and, strange to say, it pleases me. Yesterday and to-day I read it to Ginsburg, Sobolev, Kasatkin 214 and Goldenweiser. The impression it produces on them is exactly the same as it produces on me.

A letter from Crosby with a joyful letter from a Japanese. 215 From Chertkov good letters. The correspondence has been very neglected.

I am entirely alone and I weaken. I often say to myself that one must live serving, but when I enter life, though I do not exactly forget, yet I scatter myself.

I have written down much, but to-day I have no time to write it out.

August

Father, help me. I weaken.

I am going to write absolutely every day. Aug. 8. Y. P. If I live.

A peasant was here who had his arm torn by a tree and amputated. He ploughs with a loop attached.

Aug. g.

Stakhovich arrived. Read the essay. The tenth chapter is bad. I worked pretty much. Have written poor letters. I must write to Posha and to Ivan Michailovich.

There is noted in the book:

1 ) A servant makes life false and corrupt. As soon as you have servants, then you increase your wants, complicate life and make it a burden. In-stead of joy when you do things yourself, you have vexation and the principal thing, you re-nounce the main duty of life : the fulfilment of the brotherhood of man.

2) The aesthetic and the ethical are two arms of one lever: to the extent that you lengthen and lighten one side, to that extent you shorten and make heavier the other side. As soon as a man loses his moral sense, he becomes particularly re-sponsive to the aesthetic.

3) People know two Gods: one whom they want to force to serve them, demanding from

1897

him by prayers the fulfilment of their desires, and another God, one whom we ought to serve, to the fulfilment of whose will, all our desires ought to be directed.

4) It is a common phenomenon that old people love to travel, to go far and to change places. Is it not a foreseeing and a readiness for the last journey?

Aug. 15. Y. P.

I am continuing to work. Am advancing.

Lombroso was here a limited, naive little old man. The Maklakovs. Leo arrived with his wife. 216 Boulanger a nice man. Wrote letters to everybody: Posha and Ivan Michailo-vich and Van-der-Veer. The oppressive Leon-tev 217 was here.

There was something I wanted to write very much, but have forgotten. . . .

A revolting report concerning the missionary congress in Kazan. 218

There is noted: “Woman’s character” and I remember that it was something very good. Now I have forgotten. It seems to me that it was that the peculiarity of woman’s character is that her feeling alone guides her life, and that reason only serves her feeling. She cannot even understand that feeling can be made subservient to reason.

August

2) But there are not so many women as there are such men who do not hear, do not see, the unpleasant, do not see it just as if it didn’t exist

3) When people haven’t the power to get rid of superstition and they continue to pay tribute to it, and at the same time when they see that others have freed themselves, they grow angry at those who have freed themselves. “ But I suffer when I commit stupidities and he is free.”

4) Art, i.e., artists, instead of serving people, exploit them.

5 ) From the time I became old, I began to con-fuse people, . . . belonging or being marked in my mind as one type. So that I do not know N, N N, but I know a collective personality to which N, N N, belong.

6) We are so accustomed to the thought that everything is for us, that the earth is mine, that when we have to die, we are surprised that my earth, something belonging to me, will remain and I won’t. Here the principal mistake is in thinking the earth as something acquired and com-plementary to me, when it is I who am acquired by the earth, an appendage to it.

7 ) How good it would be if we could live with the same concentration, do the work of life principally; communion among people with

1897

that concentration with which we play chess, read

music, etc.

Aug. 16. Y, P. If I live.

To-day Sept. ig. Y. P.

More than a month I have made no entries. Things are the same and the work has been ad-vancing all the time. And it could advance still more as to form, but there is absolutely no time. Such an amount of work ! A typist is making the final copy on a Remington. I have reached the 1 9th chapter, inclusive.

During this time the important thing was the expulsion of Boulanger. 219

My work has been interrupted occasionally only by a letter to the Swedish papers about the Duk-hobors 22 on the occasion of the Nobel prize.

Also ill health interrupted: a terrible boil on the cheek. I thought it was a cancer, and I am happy that it was not very unpleasant to think that: I am receiving a new appointment; one which in any case, isn’t slipping past me.

St. John was here. 221

My work was interrupted also by the arrival of the Molokans from Samara in reference to their children which were taken away. 222 I wanted to write abroad and even wrote a very violent, and what seemed to me, strong letter, but

September

changed my mind. It was not to be done before God. I have to try again.

To-day I wrote letters: to the Emperor, 223 to Olsuphiev, 224 to Heath, 225 and to E. I. Chert-kov, 226 and saw the Molokans off.

I wanted to write from my notebooks, but it is late. I am going to bed. Sept. 20. Yasn. P. If I live.

Sept. 20. Y. P.

Let me write even a few words. The boil still bothers me very much. I have no full liberte d f esprit. I wrote the Swedish letter to-day, and in the evening translated it into Swedish 227 with the Swede.

I am not writing from the notebook, but I will note that which entered my head with special vividness.

Our life is so arranged that all our care for ourselves, the use of our reason (our spiritual forces) for the care of ourselves, brings only un-happiness. And yet this egotism is necessary in order to live a separate life. That is His mysteri-ous will. As soon as you live for yourself, you perish; when you live beyond yourself, there is peace and joy both for yourself and for others. Sept. 20. Y.P. If I live.

1897

To-day Sept. 22. Y. P.

. . . Yesterday I finished the translation with Langlet.

To-day I was busy with Art, but it didn’t go at all, and therefore the preceding did not please me.

S. arrived to-day.

At night I thought of the separation of lust from love, and that ether is a conception outside of the senses.

It is now past twelve in the morning. I am waiting for Ilya and Andrusha. I have just now written a letter to the editor of the Tagblatt Stockholm, and to Chertkov.

September 23. Y. P. If I live.

i

Oct. 2. Y. P.

I am working all the time on Art. The abscess is going away. I should have liked more peace. Yes . . .

To-day Oct. 14. Y. P.

... I am still writing on art. To-day I cor-rected the loth chapter. I cleared up the vague parts.

I must write out the notebooks; I am afraid I have forgotten much.

i ) There is no greater prop for a selfish, peace-ful life, than the occupation of art for art’s sake.

October

The despot, the villain, must inevitably love art. (I have jotted down something on this order, but I can’t recall it now.)

2) I imagined clearly to myself how joyous, peaceful, and fully free a life could be, if one gave oneself entirely to God, i.e., in every instance in life to seek only one thing: to do that which He wants to do that in sickness, in offence, in humiliation, in suffering, in all temptations and in death which would then be only a change in appointment. Weakness, the non-fulfilment of that which God wants what happens then? Nothing: There is a return to the consciousness that only in its fulfilment is life. The moments of weakness they are the intervals between the letters of life, not life. Father, help me.

3) I saw in my sleep how I think, I say, that the whole matter lies in making an effort, that very effort which is spoken of in the Gospels: “ The Kingdom of God is attained by effort.” Everything that is good, everything that is real, every true act of life is accomplished through ef-forts; make no effort, swim with the current and you do not live. But, however, the . . . doc-trine preaches that effort is sin, it is pride, it is relying on one’s own strength: the lay doctrine says the same thing: effort by oneself is useless; organisation, surroundings do everything. What error I Effort is more important than anything.

1897

Every least little bit of effort: the conquering of laziness, greed, lust, wrath, depression is the most important of important things ; it is the mani-festation of God in life; it is Karma; it is the broadening of one’s “ self.” Whatever had been marked off is guess work. 228

4) Details for Hadji Murad: i) The shadow of an eagle over the slope of a mountain; 2) at the river, on the sands, are tracks of horses, animals, people; 3) riding into the forest, the horses snort keenly; 4) from behind a clump of trees a goat jumped out.

5) When people are enthusiastic about Shake-speare, Beethoven, they are enthusiastic about their own thoughts, dreams, which are called forth by Shakespeare, Beethoven, just as people in love do not love the object of their love, but what it calls forth in them. In this enthusiasm, there is no true reality of art, but absolute bound-lessness.

6) Only then can one understand and feel God when one has understood clearly the unreality of everything material.

7) Not long ago, in the summer, I felt God clearly for the first time ; that He existed and that I existed in Him; and that the only thing that existed was I in Him : in Him, like a limited thing in an unlimited thing, in Him also like a limited being in which He existed.

October

(Horribly bad, unclear. But I felt it clearly and especially keenly for the first time in my life.)

In general, I don’t know why, but I haven’t the same religious feeling which I had when I form-erly wrote my Journal for no one. The fact that it was read and that it can be read, kills this feel-ing. But the feeling was precious and helped me in life. I am going to begin anew from the pres-ent date, the I4th, to write again as before so that no one will read it during my life time. If there will be thoughts worth it, I can write them out and send them to Chertkov. 229

8) A man incapable of repentance has no sal-vation from his sins. Even if his sins are pointed out to him, he only gets angry at those who point them out, and a new sin is added.

9) All attempts to live on the land and feed oneself by one’s own labour have been unsuccess-ful, and could not help being unsuccessful in Rus-sia, because it is necessary for a man of our educa-tion feeding himself by his own labour, to compete with the peasant who fixes the prices, beating them down by his offer. But he was brought up for generations in stern life and stubborn work, while we were brought up for generations in lux-urious life and idle laziness. From this it does not follow that one ought not to try to feed one’s self by one’s own labour, but only that it is im-

1897

possible to expect its realisation in the first gen-eration.

10) All calamities which are born from sex relations, from being in love, come from this, that we confuse fleshly lust with spiritual life, with terrible to say love ; we use our reason not to condemn and limit this passion, but to adorn it with the peacock feathers of spirituality. Here is where les extremes se touchent. To attribute every attraction between the sexes to sex desire seems very materialistic, but, on the contrary, it is the most spiritual point of view: to distinguish from the realm of the spiritual everything which does not belong to it, in order to be able to value it highly.

n) Everything that I know is the product of my senses. My senses demonstrate to me my limits, coming in contact with the limits of other beings. This sensation, or the knowledge of limits, we recognise and cannot recognise other-wise, than as matter. And in this matter we see either only matter or beings who like us are bound by limits. The beings near to us in size, from the elephant to the insect, we know we know their limits. The beings that are far from us in size, like atoms or like the stars, we recognise as matter only. But besides these two kinds of beings which we know by our senses, we must inevitably acknowledge still other beings (not

October

spiritual beings like us, that is obvious) not recognisable by our senses, but which are material, i.e., they also form limits. Such beings are atoms, ether. The presence of these beings, the admis-sion of which is demanded by our reason, un-doubtedly proves that our senses give us only a one-sided and a very limited knowledge of other beings and of the outer world. So that we can imagine for ourselves such beings endowed with such senses (sens) for whom ether would give the very same reality, as matter for us. (It is still unclear, but understandable.)

12) If we would always remember that our tongue was given us for the transmission of our thoughts, and the capacity of thinking for the understanding of God and His law of love, and that therefore you must talk only then when you have something good to say ! But when you can-not say anything good, cannot keep back the bad then be silent, even all your life.

13) As soon as you have a disagreeable feel-ing towards a man, it means there is something you don’t know. And you ought to find out : you ought to find out the motives of that act which was disagreeable to you. And as soon as you have understood the motives clearly then it can anger you as little as a falling stone.

14) You get angry at a woman because she does not understand or she understands, but

1897

does not do that which her reason tells her. She is unable to do it. Just as a magnet acts on iron and does not act on wood, so are the conclusions of reason not binding on her have no motor power. For her feeling is binding, and the con-clusions of reasons are so only when they are transmitted by authorities, i.e., by the feeling of the desire not to remain behind others. So that she will not believe and will not follow an obvious demand of reason, if it be not confirmed by an authority; but she will believe and follow the greatest absurdity if only every one does it. She cannot do otherwise. But we get angry. There are also many men like that womanish.

15) One has to serve others, not oneself, if only for the reason that in the serving of others there is a limit and therefore it is possible here to act rationally, build a house for him who is with-out, buy cattle, clothes ; but in the serving of one-self there is no limit: the more you serve, the worse it is.

1 6) Time is only for the body: it is the rela-tionship of beings with the various limits seen by us, to beings whose limits we do not see; to the movement of the sun, the moon, the earth, to the movement of the sands in the hour-glass. And therefore time is for that which we call the body, for that which has limits ; but for that which has no limits : for the spiritual there is no time.

October

Therefore you remember only those times in which you lived spiritually. (Unclear, but was clear.)

17) We suffer from ourselves, from the de-mands of our “ self,” and we all know that the only means for not suffering from that “ self,” is to forget it. And we seek forgetfulness in dis-tractions, in occupations with art, science, in wine, in smoking and there is no real forgetfulness. But God made it so that there should be only one real forgetfulness, one that is real and always at hand in the care for others, in the serving of others.

But I forgot this and I live a terribly selfish life, and therefore I am unhappy.

1 8) I went past the out-houses. I remem-bered the nights that I spent there, and the youth and the beauty of Duniasha (I never had any re-lation with her), her strong, womanly body. Where is it? It has been long nothing but bones. What are those bones? What is their relation to Duniasha? There was a time when those bones formed a part of that separate being which had been Duniasha. Then this being changed its centre and that which had been Duniasha became a part of another being, enormous, inconceivable to me in magnitude, which I call earth. We do not know the life of the earth, and therefore we think it dead, just like an insect who lives one hour

1897

thinks my body dead, because he does not see its movement.

19) Space is the relation of various limited be-ings among themselves. It exists. But time is only the relation of the movement of living beings among themselves, and the movement of matter which we consider dead.

20) The most horrible of all is intoxication: of wine, of games, of money greed, of politics, of art, of being in love. It is impossible to speak with such people as long as they haven’t slept it off. It is terrible. 230

The letter to Stockholm has been printed. Oct. 75. Y. P. If I live.

To-day Oct. 16. Y. P.

Did not write yesterday. My health is en-tirely improved. . . . From Olga Dieterichs, a letter from Chertkov. It is evident that as a re-sult, he and she also have lived through difficult times. 231

Last night and to-day, I wanted to write Hadji Murad. Began it. It has a semblance of some-thing, but I did not continue it, because I was not in full mastery. I ought not to spoil it by forc-ing. Up to now the Peterburaskia Viedomosti has not printed it. 282

I have noted :

October

1 ) I have noted many resolutions, rules, which if I could remember, I would live well. But the rules are too many, and it is impossible to remem-ber them always. The same thing as to imitations of art: the rules are too many, and to remember them always is impossible; it ought to come from within, be guided by feeling. The same thing in life. If only you are touched by feeling, if you live in God, then you would not recede from a single rule and you would do more than is in the rules. If one could only always be in this state.

But to-day, just now, I was in the worst mood. I was angry with everything. What does it mean? How explain this state to oneself?

2) This explanation came to me: the soul, the spiritual essence, can live in its own centre or within its own limits. Living in itself, it is not conscious of its limits; living in the periphery it incessantly and painfully feels its limits. A re-lease from this state is the recognition of the illu-sion of the material world, to go away from the limits, to concentrate in oneself. (Unclear.) Oct. 17. Y. P. If I live.

Oct. 77. 7. P. 12 midnight.

. . . Help me, Lord, to act not according to my will, but according to Thine. Received a letter

1897

from N about Beller and other ministers who preach the inconsistency of military service and Christianity, 233 and about Chertkov, that he was fussy, had sinned and had fallen ill. 234

Am correcting the loth chapter, it is about to be sent off. 235 . . . My letter was printed in the Peterburgskia Fiedomosti.

I thought: The road of all evil and of all suf-fering is not so much ignorance as false knowl-edge deception. The Appeal ought to be fin-ished with an appeal for all to help towards the abolition of deception. Oct. 18. Yasn. Pol. If I live.

Yesterday I made no notes; to-day Oct. ig. Y.P.

. . . Both yesterday and to-day I felt great apathy, although I was well. I don’t feel like working. Corrected Chapters 13, 14, 15. I re-ceived the re-copied chapters from Moscow and the conclusion. Yesterday I went to Yasenki. To-day I chopped wood and carried it. Novikov was here. Viacheslav 236 spent the night. To-day a letter from Boulanger. I want to write to him right away and to my wife. I ought to write to Salomon.

Solitude nevertheless is very pleasant. Oct. 20. Y. P. If I live.

October

To-day Oct. 21. Y. P.

Received proof of the Carpenter article from Sieverni Viestnik and began to write a preface. Corrected Art, received letters from Chertkov and Boulanger.

Yesterday my work didn’t go. Went to Ya-senki.

Just now, remaining alone after my work, I asked myself what I should do, and having no personal desire (except the bodily demands aris-ing only when I want to eat or sleep) I felt so keenly the joy of the knowledge of the Will of God, that I need and want nothing but to do what He wants. This feeling arose as a result of the question which I myself put to myself when I remained alone in the silence: Who am I? Why am I ? And the answer came so clearly by itself: No matter who and what I am, I have been sent by some one to do something. Well, let me do that work. And so joyously and so well did I feel my fusion with the Will of God.

This is my second live feeling for God. Then I simply felt love for God. At this moment, I cannot remember how it was; I only remember that it was a joyful feeling.

Oh, what happiness is solitude! To-day it is so good : you feel God. Oct. 22. Y. P. If I live.

1897

Oct. 22. Y. P.

I am writing in the evening. All day I did not feel like working. I slept badly. ... I cor-rected the nth chapter in the morning, in the eve-ning I began the I2th. I was unable to do any-thing there is a boil on my head and my feet perspire. Is it from the honey? Aphanasi 887 and Maria Alexandrovna were here.

It is evening now. I am alone and horribly sad. I have neither doubts nor hurts, but am sad and want to cry. Oh, I must prepare myself more, more, for the new appointment.

A letter from Grot ; 238 I ought to give him “ Concerning Art.”

Thought only this :

In childhood, youth, the senses (sens) are very definite, the limits are firm. The longer you live, the more and more do these limits become wiped out, the senses get dulled there is established a different attitude towards the world. Oct. 23. If I live.

Oct. 26. Y. P.

A very strange thing: It is the third day that I cannot write. Am displeased with everything that I have written. There is something new and very important for Art, but I cannot express it clearly in any way.

November

A letter from Vanderveer. It is now morn-ing, will go to the post.

To-day Nov. 10. Y. P.

I have lived through much these two weeks. The work is still the same ; I think I have finished it. To-day I have written letters and among them one to Grot to be set up in type. S was here, she left for Moscow from Pirogovo, where we went together. It was good there. Since I have come home, my back has ached and in the evening I have fever. Alexander Petrovich 239 is writing in the house. . . .

To-day I wrote 9 letters. One letter to Khil-kov, 240 remained. How terrible, his affair and condition. Mikhail Novikov was here and also a peasant-poet from Kazan.

Have been thinking:

1) The condition of people who are befogged by a false religion is just the same as in blind-man’s-buff : they tie their eyes, then they take them by their arms, and then they turn them around and finally let them go. The same with every-body. Without this they do not let them go. (For The Appeal.)

2) The most usual judgment about Christian-ity, especially among the new Nietzschean reason-ers, is that Christianity is a renunciation of dignity,

1897

a weakness, a submissiveness. It is just the con-trary. True Christianity demands above every-thing else the highest consciousness of dignity, a terrible strength and steadfastness. It is just the contrary: The admirers of strength ought to debase themselves before strength.

3 ) I walked in the village, and looked into the windows. Everywhere there was poverty and ignorance. And I thought of the former slav-ery. Formerly, the cause was to be seen, the chain which held them was to be seen; but now it is not a chain in Europe they are hairs, but they are just as many as those which held Gul-liver. With us the ropes are still to be seen, well let us say the twine ; and there there are hairs, but they hold so tightly that the giant-people can-not move.

.There is one salvation : not to lie down, not to fall asleep. The deception is so strong and so adroit that you often see that those very people which it sucks and ruins, defend the vampires with passion and attack those who are against them. . . . November n, Y. P. If I live.

November n, Y. P.

Since morning I have been writing Hadji Murad and nothing has come of it. But it is becoming clear in my head and I feel like writing

November

very much. I wrote a letter to Khilkov and to others, but I shall hardly send the one to Khilkov. Maria Alexandrovna was here. My health is entirely good. November 12, Y. P. If I live.

November 12, Y. P.

To-day Peter Ossipov came : 241 “ In our place they have begun to sell indulgences.” The Vladimir-ikon was there and it was ordered through the village elder, that the people be driven to the Church. 242

N. found ore and considers it very natural that people shall live under the ground, in danger of their lives, and he will receive the income.

. . . The most important thing is that I have decided to write The Appeal; there is no time to postpone it. To-day I corrected On Science. It is evening now, have taken up two versions of The Appeal, and am going to work on it.

Nov. 14, Y. P.

. . . One thing I want: To do what is better before God. I don’t know how yet. I slept badly at night; bad thoughts, wicked ones. And I am apathetic, no desire to work. Corrected the preface On Science.

I made the following notes : 165

1897

1) I read of the behavior of the English in Africa. It is all terrible. But the thought came to my head: Perhaps it was unavoidably neces-sary in order that enlightenment should penetrate these peoples. At first I was absorbed in the thought and it occurred to me that thus it had to be done. What nonsense! Why should not people, living a Christian life, go in simply like Miklukha-Maklai, 243 live with them, but is it nec-essary to trade, make drunkards of them, kill? They say: “ If people were to live as Christians, they would have no work.” Here is the work and it is an enormous work: while the Gospels are being preached to all creation.

2) Science, losing its religious basis, has begun to study trifles in the main, it has ceased to study important things. From that time on was formed the theory of experimental science, Bacon.

3) I was thinking, pendant to Hadji Murad, of writing about another Russian brigand, Greg-ori Nicholaev. He should see the whole lawless-ness of the life of the rich, he should live as a watchman of an apple-orchard on a rich estate with a lawn-tennis?**

4) To-day I am in a very bad mood, and it is very difficult for me to remember, to imagine to myself what I am when I am in a good mood. But it is absolutely necessary, so as not to despair and not do something bad when in a bad mood,

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November

to abstain from every activity. Is it not the same in life? One ought not to believe that I am this good-for-nothing which I feel myself to be, but to make an effort, remember what I am there, what I am in spirit, and live according to that remem-bered “ self,” or do not live at all abstain.

5) “ Toute reunion d’hommes est toujours in-ferieure aux elements qui la composent.”*** This is so because they are united by rules. In their own natural union, as God has united them, they are not only not lower, but many times higher.

I read Menshikov’s article. There is much that is good in it : about one-God and many Gods, and much that is very weak; the examples. 248 Nov. 75, Y. P. If I live.

Nov. 75, Y. P.

I worked badly on the preface to Carpenter. After dinner, in the blizzard, I went to Yasenki. Took Tania’s letter. Returned and here for the first time I knew prostration. Then drank tea recovered. Read but did nothing. Wrote a letter only to Maude in answer to his re-marks. 247

I thought this trifle : that love is only good then when you are not conscious of it. It suffices to be conscious of the love, and moreover to rejoice in it and there is an end to it.

1897 Nov. 16, Y. P. If I live.

To-day, Nov. 17. Y. P.

For the second day, I have been thinking with special clearness about this:

i) My life, my consciousness of my personal-ity, gets weaker and weaker all the time, will be-come still weaker and will end in coma, and in an absolute end of the consciousness of my personal-ity. At the same time, absolutely simultaneously and in the same tempo with the destruction of my personality, that thing will begin to live, and will live ever stronger and stronger, that which my life made, the results of my thought, feelings; it is living in other people, even in animals, in dead matter. And so I feel like saying that this is what will live after me.

But all this lacks consciousness, and therefore I cannot say that it lives. But who said that it lacked consciousness? Why can I not suppose that all this will be united in a new consciousness which I can justly call my consciousness, because it is all made from my consciousness? Why can-not this other new being live among these things which live now? Why not suppose that all of us are particles of consciousness of other higher be-ings, such as we are going to be?

“ My Father has many dwellings.” 248 Not in the sense that there are various places, but that

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November

the various consciousnesses, personality, are inter-enclosed and interwoven one into the other. In fact, the whole world as I know it, with its space and time, is a product of my personality, my con-sciousness. As soon as there is another person-ality, another consciousness, then there is an en-tirely different world, the elements of which are formed by our personalities. Just as when I was a child, my consciousness awoke little by little (which made it so that even when a child, an em-bryo, I saw myself as a separate being), so it will awake and is awakening now in the conse-quences of my life, in my future “ self “ after my death.

“ The Church is the body of Christ.” 249 Yes, Christ, in his new consciousness, lives now through the life of all the living and dead and all the fu-ture members of the Church. And in the same way each one of us will live through his own church. And even the most valueless man will have his own valueless and perhaps bad church, but a church which will create his new body. But how? This is what we cannot imagine, because we cannot imagine anything which is beyond our consciousness. And there are not many dwell-ings, but many consciousnesses.

But here is the last, most terrible, insoluble problem: What is it for? For what is this movement, this passing over from some lower,

1897

more separate consciousnesses, into a more com-mon, higher one? For what that is a mys-tery which we cannot know. It is for this that God is necessary and faith in Him. Only He knows it and one must have faith that so it ought to be.

2) And again I thought to-day, entirely unex-pectedly, about the charm exactly the charm of awakening love, when against the back-ground of joyous, pleasant, sweet relationships, that little star suddenly begins to shine. It is like the perfume of the linden or the falling shadow from the moon. There is no full-blown blossom yet, no clear light and shadow, but there is a joy and fear of the new, of the charming. This is good, but only when it is for the first time and the last.

3) And again I thought about that illusion which all are subjected to, especially people whose activity is reflected on others the illusion that, having been accustomed to see the effects of your acts on others, you verify the correctness of your acts by their effect on others.

4) I thought still further: For hypnotism it is necessary to have faith in the importance of that which is being suggested (the hypnotism of all artistic delusions). And for this faith, it is nec-essary to have ignorance and cultivation of cred-ulence.

November

To-day I corrected the preface to Carpenter. Received a telegram from Grot. I want to send off the loth chapter. A sad letter from Bou-langer. Well, Nov. 18, Y. P. If I live.

To-day, Nov. 20. Evening.

Wrote the preface to Carpenter. Thought much about Hadji Murad and got my materials ready. I still haven’t found the tone.

... I think with horror of the trip to Mos-cow. 250

Last night I thought about my old triple rem-edy for sorrow and offence :

1) To think how unimportant it will be in 10, 20 years, just as is unimportant now that which tortured you 10, 20 years ago.

2) To remember what you did yourself, to re-member those deeds which were no better than those which are hurting you.

3) To think of that which is a hundred times worse, and might be.

This could be added ; to think out the condition, the soul of the man who makes you suffer, to understand that he cannot act in any other way. Tout comprendre c*est tout pardonner.

The most important and the strongest and the surest of all is to say to oneself: Let there not be my will, but Thine, and not as I wish but as

1897

Thou wilt; and not that which I wish but that which Thou wilt. My work, then, is under those conditions in which Thou hast placed me, to ful-fil Thy Will. To remember that when it is dif-ficult, it is just this very thing which has been as-signed to you, it is the very instance which will not be repeated, in which you may have the happi-ness of doing that which He wishes. Father, help me to do only Thy Will.

To-day I corrected the Carpenter translation. My stomach is not good; bad mood and weak-ness. Nov. 21, Y. P. If I live.

Nov. 21, Y. P.

I am still thinking and gathering material for Hadji Murad. To-day I thought much, read, began to write but stopped at once. Went to Yasenki, took S’s letter. 251 Received nothing.

Maria Alexandrovna was here. She is evi-dently tired, a poor girl and nice. 252

I thought and noted down:

i ) I thought about death how strange it is that one does not want to die, although nothing holds one and I thought of prisoners who have become so at home in their prisons that they do not want to leave them for freedom and are even

November

afraid to. And so we have become at home in the prison of our life and are afraid of freedom.

2) We have been sent here to do the work of God. In this sense, how good is the parable about the servants who in the absence of their master, squander his fortune away instead of do-ing his work.

3) When you are angry, when you do not love some one, know that it is not you, but a dream, a nightmare, a most horrible nightmare. As when they stop mowing in order not to spoil the grass, so it is here. One ought to pray.

Rozanov discusses Menshikov and makes fun of him. 253 How ... (I have forgotten) made fun of Nicholai, but he remained silent and smiled at me gaily. How touching this always is. Nov. 22, Y. P. If I live.

Nov. 22, Y. P.

I saw very clearly in a dream, how Tania fell from a horse, has broken her head, is dying, and I cry over her.

Nov., Y. P.

. . . Yesterday and to-day I prepared some chapters to send them off to Maude 254 and to Grot. There have been no letters for a long time either from Maude, or from Chertkov. To-day

i73

1897

there was a nice letter from Galia. Exquisite weather ; I took a walk far on the Tula road.

In the morning I worked seriously revising Art. Yesterday I worked on Hadji Murad. It seems clear.

During this time I thought:

1) What a strange fate: at adolescence anxieties, passions begin, and you think: I will marry and it will pass. And indeed it did pass with me, and for a long period, 18 years, there was peace. Then there comes the striving to change life and again the set-back. There is struggle, suffering, and at the end, something like a haven and a rest. But yet it wasn’t so. The most difficult has begun and continues and probably will accompany me unto death. . . .

2) It would be easy to treat erring people mildly, simply, patiently, with compassion, if these people would not argue and would not argue in such a truth-like fashion. One has to answer these arguments somehow or other, and this you cannot stand.

3) Each of us is in such a condition that whether he wants to or does not want to, he has to do something, to work. Every one of us is on the treadmill. The question lies only in this, on which step will you stand ?

Nov. 25. Y. P. If I live.

November

Nov. 25, Y. P.

. . . Corrected Art, it is pretty good; wrote a letter to Maude. A good letter from Galia.

Have been thinking:

1 ) It always seems to us that we are loved be-cause we are good, but it does not occur to us that we are loved because they who love us are good. This can be seen if you listen to what that mis-erable, disgusting and vain man says whom with a great effort you have pitied: he says that he is so good you could not have acted otherwise. The same thing, when you are loved.

2) “ Lobsters like to be boiled alive.” That is no joke. How often do you hear it, or have said it yourself or are saying it: Man has the capacity of not seeing the suffering which he does not want to see. And he does not want to see the suffering which he himself causes. How often I have heard it said about coachmen who are waiting, about cooks, lackeys, peasants at their work, that they are having a good time “Lob-sters like to be boiled alive.”

Nov. 26. Y. P. If I live.

To-day, Nov. 28, Y. P.

Two days I haven’t written. I am still busy with Art and the preface to Carpenter. . . .

This morning Makovitsky arrived, a nice, mild, clean man. He told me many joyful things about

1897

our friends. I went to Yasenki: a letter from Maude, a good one, and from Grot not a good

one.

All these days, have not been in a good mood. How to be in Moscow in such a state ?

Have been thinking :

1) Often it happens that you are speaking to a man and suddenly he has a tender, happy ex-pression, and he begins to speak to you in such a way that you think he is going to tell you some-thing most joyful, but it turns out he is speak-ing about himself. Zakharnin 256 about his oper-ation, Mashenka 257 about her audience with Father Ambrose 258 and his words.

When a man speaks about something which is very near to him, he forgets that the other one is not he. If people do not speak about abstract or spiritual things, they all speak necessarily about themselves, and that is terribly tedious.

2 ) You dash about, struggle all because you want to swim in your own current. But along-side of you, unceasing and near to every one, there flows the divine and infinite current of love, in one and the same eternal course. When you are thoroughly exhausted in your attempts to do some-thing for yourself, to save yourself, to secure your-self then drop all your own courses, throw yourself into that current and it will carry you

December

and you will feel that there are no barriers, that you are at peace forever and free and blessed.

3) Only not to love oneself, one’s very self, one’s own Leo Nicholaievich (Tolstoi) and you will love both God and people. You are on fire and you can’t help but burn; and burning you will set fire to others and you will fuse with that other fire. To love oneself means to be niggardly with one’s light and to put out the fire.

4) When a man says an obvious untruth or an offence to you, then certainly he doesn’t do it from joy : and both are very difficult. If he does it then evidently he can’t do otherwise, and doing it, he suffers. And you, instead of pitying him, get angry at him. On the contrary, you ought to try to help him.

5 ) The tragedy of a man kindly disposed, wish-ing only the good, when in this state and for this state, which he cannot help but count as good, he meets hissing malice and the hatred of people. Nov. 28. If I live. Y. P.

To-day, Dec. 2. Y. P.

Agonising, sad, depressed state of body and spiritual force, but I know that I am alive and in-dependent of this condition, yet I feel this “ self “ but little. . . .

I was busied all this time with corrections and 177

1897

additions to Art. The principal thing during this time, was that Dushan was here whom I love very much and learned to love still more. Together with the Slavonian Posrednik, he is forming a center of a small, but I think divine work. 259 From Chertkov there is still no news.

An anguish, a soft, mild, sweet anguish, but yet an anguish. If I were without the consciousness of life, then probably I would have had an em-bittered anguish.

Have been thinking:

1) I was very depressed at the fear of vexa-tion and severe conflicts, and I prayed God prayed almost without expecting aid, but never-theless I prayed : “ Lord, help me to go away from this. Release me.” I prayed like this, then rose, walked to the end of the room and sud-denly I asked myself: Have I not to yield? Yes, to yield. And God helped God who is in me, and I felt light-hearted and firm. I en-tered that divine current which flows there along-side of us always and to which we can always give ourselves when things are bad. 260

2) I had a talk with Dushan. He said that since he has become involuntarily my represen-tative in Hungary, then how was he to act. I was glad for the opportunity to tell him and to clarify it to myself that to speak about Tolstoyanism, to seek my guidance, to ask my decision on problems,

December

is a great and gross mistake. There is no Tol-stoyanism and has never been, nor any teaching of mine; there is only one eternal, general, uni-versal teaching of the truth, which for me, for us, is especially clearly expressed in the Gospels. This teaching calls man to the recognition of his filiality to God and therefore of his freedom or his slavery (call it what you want) : of his free-dom from the influence of the world, of his slav-ery to God, His will. And as soon as man un-derstands this teaching, he enters freely into direct communication with God and he has nothing and no one to ask.

It is like a man swimming in a river with an enormous overflow. As long as the man isn’t in the middle current, but in the overflow, he has to swim himself, to row, and here he can be guided by the course taken in swimming by other people. Here also I could direct people while I myself approach the current. But as soon as we enter the current, then there is no guide and can-not be. We are all carried along by the strength of the current, all in one direction, and those who were behind can be in front. When a man asks where shall he swim, that only shows that he has not yet entered the current and that he from whom he asks, is a poor guide if he were unable to bring him into the current, i.e., to that state in which it is impossible because it is senseless

1897

to ask. How ask where to swim, when the cur-rent with irresistible force is drawing me in a direction that is joyous to me?

People who submit themselves to a guide, who have faith in him and listen to him, undoubtedly wander in the dark together with their guide.

I think I have finished Art.

Random break

Dec. 3. Y. P. If I live.

My work on Art has cleared up much for me. If God commands me to write artistic things, they will be altogether different ones. And to write them it will be both easier and more difficult. We shall see.

To-day, Dec. 6, Moscow.

On the 4th I went to Dolgoe. 261 I had a very tender impression from the ruined house ; a swarm of memories.

Almost two days that I haven’t written. I only prepared the chapters on Art and packed my things ... I have jotted down nothing. I woke feeling badly.

Dec. 7, Moscow.

... I was at Storozhenko’s. 262 Kasatkin was here 263 in the evening. I asked for examples. In the morning I corrected Art.

I jotted down nothing: there is much bustle. Health good.

Dec. 8 t Moscow. If I live.

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To-day, nth.

I have already spent so many days in Moscow. I have done almost nothing, only corrected Art. A pile of people and letters. Thank God the most important is good, i.e., I have done nothing that I ought not to have done. To-day I wrote a letter to Gali.

It seems to me that the divisions of Art have turned out just as they were before.

A sad impression was produced by what N told about Chertkov 284 and by the letter of Ivan Mi-chailovich. Moreover, A, B, C, D, they are all suffering. Well, it is forgivable in them, but how can a Christian suffer?

During this time N N’s condition became clear. He is mentally diseased, like all people who are non-Christians.

I have consented to give to Troubetskoi by in-stalments. 265

A sad letter from Chertkov. I want to write to him. Dec. 12, Moscow. If I live.

To-day, the ijth. Morning.

I wrote a letter to the Chertkovs. It seems to me I have corrected the i6th chapter very well.

Yesterday I read the correspondence of Z on the sex-problem and I was very indignant and I spoke disagreeably to him at Rusanov’s.

1897

Rusanov has the head of Hadji Murad. This morning I wanted to write Hadji Murad I lost the outline.

I wrote down something. I now want to write out the themes which are worth while and which can be treated as they ought to be :

i) Sergius, 2) Alexander I, 3) Persianninov, 4) the tale of Petrovich the husband, who died a pilgrim. The following are worse: 5) the legend of the descent of Christ into hell and the reconstruction of hell, 6) a forged coupon, 7) Hadji Murad, 8) the substituted child, 9) the drama of the Christian resurrection and perhaps 10) Resurrection the trial of a prostitute, n) (excellent) a brigand killing the defenceless, 12) a mother, 13) an execution in Odessa. 266

It is depressing in the house, but I want to be and will be joyous.

I am going to write out only two things :

1) That the physical union with an accidental husband is one of the means established by God for the spread of His truth: for the testing and the strengthening of the stronger and for the enlightenment of the weaker.

2) For people professing filiality to God, not to rejoice in life, to yearn, is a dreadful sin, an error. If you understood that the end of life is the activity for God for no personal ends, then nothing could hinder this activity, could hold it

December

back. The main thing is that life willy-nilly goes forward to the better : one’s own life and the life of the world. How not rejoice at this movement? One has only to remember that life is movement.

I write and I sleep and therefore express myself badly. Until evening, if I live.

To-day, December 14, Moscow. Morning.

Yesterday I received an unpleasant letter from Chertkov and sent him an answer (about the pub-lications). 267

The day before yesterday, I read the corres-pondence of Z about sex relations and became vexed and went to the Rusanovs’ and met Z there and showed my condemnation of him sharply. That tortured me and I wrote him a note yesterday apologising and I received a nice answer which touched me.

I feel very ill. I am in the worst mood and therefore am dissatisfied with everything and can-not love. And just now am thinking:

We find sickness a burden; but sickness is a nec-essary good condition of life. Only it alone (per-haps not alone, but one of the most important and generally common conditions) prepares us for death, i.e., for our crossing over into another life. Therefore indeed it was sent to every one : to chil-dren, to adults, to old people, because all, at all

1897

ages, die. And we find it burdensome. The fact that we find sickness burdensome shows only that we do not live as we ought to : both a temporary and at the same time an eternal life but we live only a temporary life.

Sickness is the preparation for the crossing-over and therefore to grumble against sickness is just the same as grumbling against cold and rain. One ought to make use of them and not grumble. In fact, only those who live playing, get angry at the rain, but those who live seriously rejoice at it. The same with sickness. More than this : not only sickness but a bad mood, disappointment, sorrows, all these help to detach oneself from the worldly and facilitate the crossing-over into the new life.

I am now in such a state of crossing-over.

Evening, the

The whole day I have been ill and I am in the worst mood. I cannot master myself and every-thing is disagreeable and burdensome. I did noth-ing. I read and talked. Dec. 75, Moscow. If I live.

To-day, December if.

To-day, I am still in the very worst spirits. I am struggling with ill-will. I gave the essay away. 268 Telegraphed to England. No answer as yet. 269

December

A pile of people here, all evening. To-day I wrote twelve letters, but did not work at all.

To-day I thought the very oldest thing: That one ought to perfect oneself in love, in which no one can interfere and which is very interesting. But love is not in exclusive attachments, but in a good, not in an evil attitude to every living being.

Wrote letters: i) Posha, 2) Masha, 3) Ivan Michailovich, 4) Prince Viazemsky, 5) Bondarev, 6) Strakhov, 7) the school teacher Robinson, 8) Priest, 9) Crosby, 10) Chizhov, 270 n) Nicholaev in Kazan, and 12) 271

I am finishing the note-book in a bad mood. To-morrow I begin a new one. To-day I am also displeased with the essay on art.

The diary of the year 1897, Dec. 21, ‘97. Mos-cow.

I am beginning a new notebook, almost in a new spiritual mood. Here are already 5 days that I have done nothing. I am thinking out Hadji Mu-rad, but I have no desire or confidence. On Art is printed. Chertkov is displeased and those here also. 272

Yesterday I received an anonymous letter with a threat to kill, if I do not reform by the year 1898 ; time is given only up to 1898. I was both uneasy and pleased. 273

1897

I am skating. A sign of an inactive mood is that I have noted down nothing.

Just now I read through Chekhov’s, On a Cart. Excellent in expressiveness, but rhetorical as soon as he wants to give meaning to his story. There is a remarkable clearness in my mind, thanks to my book on art.

Dec. 26, ‘97. Moscow.

The day before yesterday I fell ill and I am still not well. 274 I am reading much. My heart is heavy. Evening. Dec. 27, ‘97. Moscow. If I live.

To-day, Dec. 29, ‘97. Moscow. Morning.

I thought of Hadji Murad. All day yesterday a comedy-drama, “ The Corpse,” 275 took shape. I am still unwell. Yesterday I was at Behrs’. 276

I have received letters with threats of killing. I regret that there are people who hate me, but it interests me little and it doesn’t disturb me at all.

Have jotted down something.

A conversation with N : what a pitiable youth : understanding everything and at the same time not having the capacity to put anything in the right place and therefore he is living in unimaginable confusion.

Have been thinking:

i ) They say usually that Christ’s teaching, the 186

December

real Christ’s teaching . . . destroys all union, that it is a disuniting “ individualism.” How false this is I Christianity only therefore preaches personal salvation, “ individualism,” as they say, because this personal salvation is indispensable, accessible, joyous to all, and therefore inevitably unites peo-ple not mechanically by the pressure of force from without or by stirring with “ culture,” but chemically by an inner, indissoluble union.

2) Sometimes you complain that they do not love your soul, but love or do not love your body, and you are angry at them, condemning them, but you do not see that they cannot do otherwise : for them your soul, the holy of holies of your soul, that which as you know is the only real thing, the only thing that acts is nothing, be-cause it is invisible, like the chemical rays of the spectrum.

3) [There are people, mainly women, for whom the word is only the means for an attainment of an end, and it is entirely devoid of its funda-mental significance which is to be an expression of reality. These people are sometimes terribly strong. [Their advantage is like that which a man would have who in fencing took off the cork from the rapier. His adversaries are bound by condi-tions that . . . No, the comparison is not good. The best of all : they are like a gambler in cards, a sharper. I will find one.

1897

The examples of this are such: a man wants, for instance, to steal; he takes other people’s money; he says that he was charged to do it, they asked him to, and he believes that he was asked to. And the proof of the untruth of his evidence he refutes with a new lie. He kills: the murdered one suffered so, that he begged him to kill him. He wants to do something nasty or something foolish. Well, to turn all the furniture upside down or to debauch and he explains in detail, how it was recognised by doctors, that it was neces-sary to do this periodically, etc. And he convinces himself that it is so. But when this proves to be not so, he does not hear, he brings forth his own arguments and then at once forgets both his own arguments and other people’s. [These people are terrible, horrible.

4) The spiritualists say that after death the soul of people lives on and communicates with them. Soloviev, the father, 277 said truly, I re-member, that this is the Church dogma of saints, of their intercession and of prayers to them. Evgenie Ivanovich also said truly that as the Pash-kov Sect is a taking out of the dogma of the Re-demption alone and the adaptation of everything to it, so spiritualism is the taking out of the dogma of saints, and the adaptation of everything to it.

5) But I say the following in regard to this dogma of the soul : What we call the soul, is the

1 88

December

divine, spiritual, limited in us in our bodies. Only the body limits this divine, this spiritual. And it is this limiting which gives it a form like a vessel gives form to a liquid or a gas which is enclosed in it. But we only know this form. Break the ves-sel and that which is enclosed in it will cease to have that form which it has and will spread out, be carried off. Whether it combines with other matter, whether it receives a new form we know nothing about this, but we know for a fact that it loses that form which it had when it was limited, because that which limited it was de-stroyed. The same with the soul. The soul af-ter death ceases to be the soul and remaining a spirit, a divine essence, becomes something other, such that we cannot judge.

I wrote the preface to Chertkov. 278 Dec. so. Moscow. If I live.

1898

Two days have passed. Jan. 1st.

I meet the new year very sad, depressed, unwell. I cannot work and my stomach aches all the time.

Received a letter from Verhkolensk from Phe-doseev about the Dukhobors, a very touching one. 279

Still another letter from the editor The Adult about free love. 280 If I had time, I would like to write about this subject. Probably I shall write. The most important is to show that the whole matter lies in appropriating to oneself possibili-ties of the greatest enjoyment without thinking of consequences. Besides, they preach something which already exists and is very bad. Why would the absence of outer restraint 281 improve the whole thing? I am, of course, against any regulation and for full freedom, but the ideal is chastity and not pleasure.

I have been thinking during this time only one thing and it seems an important thing, namely :

i ) We all think that our duty, our vocation, is to do various things: bring up children, make a

* * *

fortune, write a book, discover a law in science, etc. But for all the work is only one thing: to carry out one’s own life to act so that life would be a harmonious, good, and rational mat-ter. And the work ought to be not before people, to leave behind one a memory of a good life, but the work is before God: to present to Him one-self, one’s soul, better than it was, nearer to Him, more submissive to Him, more in harmony with Him.

To think so and principally to feel so is very difficult : One always wanders off for human praise. But it is possible and ought to be done.

Help me, Lord. I sometimes feel this and do at this moment. Jan. 2. Moscow. If I live.

To-day, already the 4th.

I am a little better. I want to work. Yester-day Stasov and Repine, 282 coffee. . . . When will I remember that much talk is much bother?

I received a pamphlet uncensored.

Only one thing has to be noted down: that all life is senseless, except that which has for its end the service of God, the service of the fulfilment of the work of God, which is unattainable to us. I shall write that out later. Now I am in a hurry.

Dear Masha arrived, later Tania with Sasha. 283 Jan. 5. Moscow. If I live.

January

To-day, Jan. 13.

It is more than a week that I haven’t written and I have done almost nothing. I have been ill all the time, and depressed. At times, I am good and calm, and at times uneasy and not good. The day before yesterday was difficult. Then the peasants arrived: Bulakhov, with St., Pet, and two from Tula. I felt so light-hearted and ener-getic. One need not yield to one’s own circle, one can always enter the circle of God and His people.

It is long since I have been so depressed. A letter from Posha. Wrote to Posha, Ivan Mic-hailovich, Chertkov, Maude and Boulanger.

I am still endeavouring to find a satisfactory form for Hadji Murad and I still haven’t it, al-though it seems I am nearing it.

. . . To-day a telegram about the work, “ What is Art? “

Have made some notes and I think important ones.

i) Something of enormous importance and ought to be expounded well. Organisation, every kind of organisation, which frees from any kind of human, personal, moral duties. All the evil in the world comes from this. They flog people to death, they debauch, they becloud their minds and no one is to blame. In the tale of the resur-rection of hell, this is the most important and new means. 284

* * *

2) Each one of us is that light, that divine essence, love, the Son of God, enclosed in a body, in limits, in the coloured lantern which’ we have painted with our passions and habits so that everything we see, we see only through this lan-tern. To raise oneself so as to see above it, is impossible; on top there is the same kind of glass through which we see even God, through the glass which we ourselves have painted. The only thing which we can do is not to look through the glasses, but to concentrate in ourselves, recognise our light and kindle it. And this is the one sal-vation from the delusions of life, from its suffer-ing, from its temptations. And this is joyful and always possible.

I do this, and it is good.

3) Dreams they are nothing else than the looking on the world not through the glasses, but only on the glasses, and on the interweaving of various designs interwoven on the glasses. In sleep you only see the glasses; when awake, the world, through the glasses.

4) A woman can, when she loves a man, see merits in him which he has not, but when she is indifferent, she is unable to see a man’s merits other than through the opinion of others. (How-ever, I think it is untrue.)

5) The following when I wrote it, seemed to me very important:

January

Christians strive to a union, and unite among themselves and with other people by the Chris-tian tool by unity, humility, love. But there are people who do not know this means of union, do not believe in it and who endeavour to unite (all people endeavour to unite) with other means, outer ones, with force, threats. It is impossible to demand of these people who do not know, who cannot understand the Christian means of union, that they do not make use of their means ; but it is absolutely unjust and unreasonable when these un-Christian people impose their own lower means of union upon people knowing and using a higher means. They say, “ You Christians, you profit by our means; if you have not been robbed and killed, it is thanks to us.” To this the Christians answer, that they don’t need anything which force gives them (as is really the fact for a Christian).

And that is why, though it is legitimate for people not knowing a higher means of union, to use a lower, it is illegitimate, that they look upon their own lower means as a general and unique one, and want to compel those for whom it cannot be necessary to use it. The principal step before humanity now consists in this, that people should not only recognise and admit the means of Chris-tian union, but that they should recognise that it is the highest, the one to which all humanity is striv-ing and to which it will inevitably reach.

1898

6) When you are full of energy, then you live, and you ought to live for this world; when you are sick, then you are dying, i.e., you begin to live for that other after-death world. So that in either phase, there is work. When you are sick, dying, then concentrate in yourself and think about death and about life after death, and stop longing for this one. Both processes are normal and in both there exists work proper to each state.

I feel somewhat fresher spiritually. Jan. 14, Moscow. If I live.

To-day, 18.

My health is a little better. It is now evening. Wrote letters, i) Chertkov; 2) Dubrovin; 3) Dubrovsky; Tver; 4) Tula: N. 1. Kh.; 5) Naka-shidze; 6) Ivan Michailovich.

To-day the plot of Hadji Murad became clearer than ever before.

Jan. 19. Moscow.

Depressing and unproductive. I cannot work. Several times a week I remember that everything disagreeable is only an Ermahnung for an advance onward towards perfection.

Help, Father. Come and dwell within me. You already dwell within me. You are already “ me.” My work is only to recognise Thee. I

February

write this just now and am full of desire. But nevertheless I know who I am.

To-day, Feb. 2. Moscow.

Very weak and apathetic. All the time I either read or corrected proofs of Art. There is much to be noted. But I have neither strength nor desire. There have been no events, no letters. Feb. 3, Moscow. If I live.

February 3, Moscow.

I am still as unproductive intellectually. In the morning it flashed across my mind that I left out the places in Art about the trinity, and doing no work, I went to Grot and from there to the pub-lishing house. I returned past two, read, lay down, dined. Tarovat 285 arrived, then Menshi-kov, Popov, Gorbunov, and then Gulenko, 286 Suller. 287

Read Liapunov’s The Ploughman. I was very touched. 288

Have noted down the following :

i) In moments of depression I want to ask heJp from God. And I may ask it. But only such help which might help me and not interfere with any one else. And such help is only one thing: love. Every other kind of help, material help, not only might, but must come in conflict

* * *

with the material good of others. Only love alone the enlargement of love in oneself satisfies everything which one can want and does not come in conflict with the good of others. “ Come and dwell within us.”

2) Women do not use words to express their thoughts, but to attain their ends, and it is this purpose they hunt in the words of others. That is why they so often understand people wrong side out. And this is very disagreeable.

3) The meaning of life is only one: self-per-fection the bettering of one’s soul. “ Be per-fect like our Father in Heaven.”

When things are difficult, when something tor-tures you, remember that in life, only you are the life and immediately it will become easier. And joyful. As a rich man rejoices when he gathers his wealth, so will you rejoice if you place your life only in this. And for the attainment of this, there are no barriers. Everything which appears like sorrow, like a barrier in life is a wide step which offers itself to your feet that you may ascend.

4) If you have the strength of activity then let it be a loving one ; if you have no strength, if you are weak, then let your weakness be a loving one.

5) Inorganic matter is simply the life of that which we do not understand. For fleas the inor-

February

ganic is my finger-nail. In the same way, evil is the non-understood good. 289

6 ) To serve God and man, but how, with what ? Perhaps the possibility doesn’t exist? It is not true : the possibility has always been given you to become better.

7) Man is an ambassador, as Christ said, an ambassador indeed for whom the important thing is only to fulfil the errand given to him, and it doesn’t matter what is thought about him. Let them think badly sometimes it is necessary. Only let the errand be fulfilled.

8) One of the most common errors consists in this, that people are considered good, malicious, stupid, intelligent. Man flows on and every pos-sibility is in him: he was stupid, and has become intelligent; he was wicked and has become good, and the reverse. In this is the greatness of man. And therefore it is impossible to judge man as he is. You have judged and he is already another. It is impossible to say I do not love him : you have said it and he is already another.

9) ...

10) The fact that the end of life is self-perfec-tion, that the perfection of the immortal soul is the only end of the life of man, is already true because every other end in the view of death, is senseless.

n) If man deliberates upon the consequences 20 1

* * *

of his act, then the motives of his act are not re-ligious.

12) The paper-knife on my knees fell over on account of its weight, and it seemed to me that it was something alive, and I shuddered. Why? Because there is a duty to everything living and I grew frightened lest I hadn’t fulfilled it, and lest I had crushed, squeezed a living be-ing.

13) ... In this lies the whole matter to destroy this hypnosis.

14) It is impossible not to wish that our acts be known and approved. For him who has no God, it is necessary that his acts be known and approved. But for him who has God, it is suf-ficient that they be known. By this can it be veri-fied if a man has God.

4th Feb. Moscow. If I live.

To-day, the >>th. Morning.

I do not feel like writing at all. All these last days, especially yesterday, I have been feeling and applying to life, the consciousness that the end of life is one: to be perfect like the Father, to do that which He does, that which He wants from us, i.e., to love; that love should guide us in the moments of our most energetic activity, and that we breathe with it alone in the moments of our greatest weakness. Whenever there is something

February

difficult, painful, then it suffices to remember this, and all this difficulty, this pain, will vanish and only the joyous will remain.

To a man who seriously, truly uses his reason, it is obvious that all ends are closed to him. One alone is reasonable: to live for the satisfaction of the demands of God, of his conscience, of his higher nature. (It is all the same thing.) If this is to be expressed in time, then to live so as to prepare one’s soul to the passing-over into a better world: if this is to be expressed accurately in terms outside of time, then it is to fuse one’s life with its timeless principle, with the Good, with Love, with God. I am afraid only of one thing, that this strong consciousness acting beneficially on me, that the only thing reasonable and free and joyous is the life in God, be not calloused, that it do not lose its effect of lifting me out of the petty annoyances of life, and of freeing me. Oh, if that could be so to every one and if it could be so for-ever! In this light last night I considered the various manifestations of life and I felt so well and joyous. I will await the examination. I shall prepare for it.

When I wrote out the notes, I forgot : i ) How absurd is the argument of the enemies of moral perfection, that a man, sacrificing him-self really, will sacrifice his perfection for the good of others, i.e., that a man is ready to become evil,

* * *

in order to act well. If one understands by this that a man is ready to act badly before people, if only he could thereby fulfil the demands of his conscience and not serve a certain cause or even certain people, then this is true. The serving of a cause and of people can sometimes coincide, and can sometime not coincide with the demands of conscience ; and not serving a certain cause or peo-ple, can sometimes coincide and can sometimes not coincide with the demands of conscience. These are individual cases.

2) To doubt that the source of all evil is false religious teaching, can only be done by a man who hasn’t thought of the causes of the daily manifesta-tions of social life. The causes of all these mani-festations are thoughts thoughts of people. How then could false thoughts not have an enor-mous influence on the social system? People, some of them, are well off in a false system based on false thoughts; it is natural that they support false thoughts, false-religious teaching.

3) I cannot write and I suffer, I force myself. How stupid! As if life lay in writing. It does not even lie in any outer activity. It is not as I will, but as Thou wilt. It is even fuller and more significant without writing. And here now I am learning to live without writing. And I am able to.

4) I see that I have made a note and have al-

February

ready said it here, namely, that to perfect oneself does not mean to prepare oneself for a future life 29 (that is said for convenience, for simplicity of speech) ; but to perfect oneself means to get nearer to that basis of life for which time does not exist and therefore no death, i.e., to carry one’s “ self “ more and more away from the bodily life into the spiritual.

5) Evgenie Ivanovich says about N: she is at peace only when one occupies oneself with her. Any occupation with anything not concerning her, does not interest her. Every such occupation with other people offends her. It seems to her that she bears the life of every one near her, that with-out her everybody would be lost. For the least reproach, she insults every one. And in 10 min-utes she forgets it, and she hasn’t the least re-morse.

This is the highest degree of egotism and mad-ness, but there are many grades approaching this. At bottom, to think that I live for myself, for my own enjoyment, for fame, is absolute potential madness. In living it is impossible not to live for oneself, impossible not to defend oneself when attacked, 291 not to fall on the food when hungry; but to think that in this is life, and to use that very thought given you to see the impossibility of such a life, to use it for the strengthening of such a separate individual life, is absolute madness.

* * *

6) A wife approaches her husband and caress-ingly speaks to him as she did not speak before. The husband is moved, but this is only because she has done something nasty.

7 ) Jean Grave, 292 “ L’individu et la Socle te” says that revolution will only then be fertile when I’individu will be strong-willed, disinterested, good, ready to help his neighbour, will not be vain, will not condemn others, will have the conscious-ness of his own dignity, i.e., will have all the merits of a Christian. But how will he acquire these virtues if he knows that he is only an acci-dental chain of atoms ? All these virtues are pos-sible, are natural, in fact, their absence is impossi-ble when there is a Christian world-point-of-view that is, that we are sons of God sent to do His Will; but in a materialistic world-point-of-view these virtues are inconsistent.

It is now past one. I am going downstairs. I am going to write to-morrow. Feb. 6. Moscow. If I live.

To-day, Feb. IQ. Moscow.

It is long since I have made any entries. 293 At first I was ill. For about 5 days I have been bet-ter. During this time I was correcting, putting in things and spoiling the last chapters of Art. I decided to send away Carpenter with the intro-duction to Sieverni Viestnik. Was correcting the

February

preface also. The general impression of this arti-cle “ On Science “ as well as that of the 2Oth chap-ter is remorse. 294 I feel that it is right, that it is necessary, but it is painful that I hurt and grieve many good people who err. It is obvious that .0999 will not understand why and in the name of what I condemn science, and will be in-dignant. I should have done that with greater kindness. And in this I am guilty, but it is now too late.

The last time I wrote, I expressed fear lest the carrying over of myself from this worldly life, the offending, the irritating one, into the life be-fore God, the eternal life (now, here) which I experienced would become lost, would become cal-loused. But here 13 days have passed and I still feel this and felt it all the time and rejoiced and am rejoicing.

Sometimes I begin to lay out patience, or hear an irritating conversation, contradiction, or am dissatisfied with my writing, with the condemna-tion of people, or I regret something and sud-denly I remember that it only seems so to me, because I am bent over searching on the floor, and it suffices to straighten up to my full height and everything that was disagreeable, irritating, not only vanishes, but helps the joys of triumph over my human weakness.

I haven’t yet experienced this in strong physical 207

* * *

suffering. Will it endure? It ought to endure. Help, Lord.

Otherwise I am very joyous.

I am joyous, that in old age there has been dis-closed absolutely a new condition of the great in-destructible good. And this is not imagination, but a change of soul as clearly perceived as warmth and cold, it is a going over from confu-sion, suffering, to a clearness and peace and a going over which depends upon myself. Here, in truth, is where wings have sprouted. As soon as it becomes difficult, painful, to walk on foot, you spread the wings. Why not always then on wings? Evidently, I am still too weak; still un-trained; and perhaps a rest is necessary.

It is interesting to find out if this state is an attribute of old age, if young people can experi-ence it also? I think that they can. One must accustom oneself to this. This indeed is prayer.

‘ You must hide something, be afraid of some-thing, something tortures you, something is lack-ing,” and suddenly: there is nothing to hide, nothing to be afraid of, nothing to be tortured over, nothing to want. The main thing is to go away from the human court into God’s court.

Oh, if this would only hold out unto death! But even for that which I have experienced, I am grateful to Thee, Father.

February

I jotted down the following:

1 ) People can in no way agree to the unreality of all that is material. “ But a table exists and always, even when I go out of the room it is there, and for all it is the same as it is for me,” they generally say. Well, and when you twist two fingers and roll a little ball under them do you not unquestionably feel two? It is certainly so, every time I take up a little ball in that way there are two and for every one who takes up a ball in that way there are two, and nevertheless there are no two little balls. In the same way, the table is a table only for the twisted fingers of my senses, but it is perhaps half a table, a thousandth of a table in fact, no part of a table at all, but something altogether different. So that what is real is only my ever recurring impression, con-firmed by the impressions of other people.

2) ... I acted badly when I gave my estate to the children. It would have been better for them. Only it was necessary to have been able to do this without violating love, and I was un-able.

3) You are often surprised how intelligent, good people can defend cruelty, violence, savage superstitions . . . ? But it is sufficient to re-member the exilings, the oppressions, the offences, which are beginning to penetrate the working-classes and you see that this is only a feeling of

* * *

self-preservation. Only by this is explained the tenacity of life. . . .

4) Pharesov told me about Malikov’s 295 teach-ing. All this was beautiful, all this was Chris-tian: be perfect like your Father; but it was not good that all this teaching had for its end influ-ence over people and not inner satisfaction, not an answer to the problem of life. Influence on oth-ers is the main Achilles’ heel.

So that my condition, which is false for people, is perhaps the very thing necessary.

5) ... In order to wipe out one’s sin, one ought to ... repent before all the people for the deception, to say: forgive me that I have deceived you . . . What a strong scene ! And a true one.

6) Our art with its supplying of amusement for the rich classes, is not only similar to prostitu-tion, but it is nothing else than prostitution.

Feb. 20. Moscow.

To-day, Feb. 25. Moscow.

Have made no entries; corrected something. Wrote letters to-day, more than 7 letters. But I can’t write anything, although I haven’t stopped thinking about Hadji Murad and The Appeal. Feb. 26. Moscow. If I live.

Have made no entries for more than three weeks. To-day March ig. Moscow.

February

Finished all my letters. During this time wrote serious letters :

i) To the American colony, 296 2) Peter-burgskia Fiedomosti about the Dukhobors; 297 3) to the English papers also about the Dukhobors, and 4) a preface to the English edition What is Art about the censor distortions. 298

My inner life is the same. As I foresaw, the new consciousness of life for God, for the perfec-tion of love, has become dulled, weakened, and when I needed it, these days, it proved itself to be, if not exactly ineffectual, yet less effectual than I expected.

The principal event during this time was the permission to the Dukhobors to emigrate.

What is Art? seems to me to be entirely finished now.

I have worked very little during all this time.

I made rather many notes; I shall try to write them out:

i ) One of the greatest errors in summing up a man, is that we call, we define a man as intelli-gent, stupid, good, evil, strong, weak. But man is everything, all possibilities, is a flowing mat-ter. 299 This is a good theme for an artistic work and a very important one and a good one, because it destroys malicious judging “ the can-cer “ and assumes the possibility of everything

* * *

good. The workers of the devil, convinced of the presence of bad in man, achieve great results : su-perstition, capital punishment, war. The work-ers of God would attain greater results, if they believed more in the possibility of good in people.

2) They want to become the masters of China the Russians, Japan, England, the Germans: there are quarrels, diplomatic struggles, there will even be military ones. And all this is only for the mixing of the yellow race into one Christian batter, the propagating and the assimilating of ideas like the Crusades and the Napoleonic wars.

3) Lebon writes: “Not only are they going to make food in laboratories, but there will be no need for labour.” People have so badly distrib-uted their two functions, food and labour, that instead of joy, these functions are a torture to them and therefore they want to be freed from them. It is just the same as if people would so pervert their functions of perspiration and breath-ing, that they would seek a way of changing them by an artificial method.

4) The longer you live, the less time there re-mains for life. For an endless duration of life, there would then be absolutely no life.

5 ) Only when you live without consideration of time, past or future, do you live a real, free life for which there are no obstacles. You are only then dissatisfied, in straits, when you remember

March

the past (the offences, the contradictions, even your own weaknesses) and when you think of the fu-ture: will something be or will it not be? Only at one point, do you fuse with God and live your divine essence: in the present (even when you live your animal life). Whenever you use your reason to consider what will be, then you are weak, insignificant; but whenever you use it to do the will of Him who sent you, then you are omnipo-tent, free. You can even see this in the way you immediately weaken, become deprived of strength, when you consider the consequences of your act.

To-day, March 21. Moscow.

I continue copying. I am very indisposed, weak, but thank God, in peace, I live in the pres-ent. Just now I put in order the papers on Art.

6) Socialists will never destroy poverty and the injustice of the inequality of capacities. The stronger, the more intelligent, will always make use of the weaker, the more stupid. Justice and equality of goods will never be attained by any-thing less than Christianity, i.e., by negating one-self and by recognising the meaning of one’s life in the service to others.

7) I have written down the same as in the 5th, but differently. In order to live with God, by God and in God, it is necessary not to be guided

1898

by anything from without. Neither by that which was nor by that which can be; to live only in the present, only in this, to fuse with God.

8) Intelligent Socialists understand that for the attainment of their ends the principal thing is to lift the working men intellectually and physically. This is possible to be done only by religious edu-cation, but they do not understand this and there-fore all their work is in vain.

9) “ Seek the Kingdom of God and His Right, the rest will follow you “ this is the only means of attaining the ends of Socialism.

10) For The Appeal:

All are agreed that we live not as we ought to or as we could. The remedy of some is this: a religious fatalism and, still worse, a scientific, evo-lutionary one. Others comfort themselves by the gradual bettering and bettering of things by them-selves : the step by step people. The third assert that everything will establish itself when things will reach their very worst (Socialism), when the Government and the rich classes will control every-body fully, i.e., the working-men, and then the power will somehow or other make a somersault not only to working-men, but to unerring disinter-ested self-sacrificing working-men, who will then direct all affairs without error and without sin. The fourth say that to improve the whole matter, it is possible only by the destruction of evil people,

March

the bad ones. But there is no indication where the bad people end and where the harmless ones, if not the good ones, begin. Either they will de-stroy every one as bad or as in the big revolution they will catch the good ones with the bad. As soon as you begin to judge strictly, no one will remain in the right. What is to be done? But there is only one instrument : a religious change in the soul of people. And it is this change which is interfered with, by all imaginary remedies.

n) My body is nothing else than that piece of everything existing which I am able to govern.

12) The whole world is that which I sense. But what am I? It is that which acts.

13) How good it would be to write a work of art, in which there would be clearly expressed the flowing nature of man: that he, one and the same man, is now a villain, now an angel, now a wise man, now an idiot, now a strong man, now the most impotent being.

14) Every man, as all people, being imperfect in everything, is nevertheless more perfect in some one thing than in another. And these perfections, he puts over another human being as a demand, and condemns him.

15) It is impossible to serve, not “God and mammon,” but “ mammon and God.” The service of mammon every kind of vanity is a hindrance to the service of God. Peace, soli-

* * *

tude, even boredom, is a necessary condition to the service of God. In Moscow religiously they are the most savage of people. In Paris they are still more savage.

1 6) There is a kind of English toy called peepshow: behind a little glass, now one thing is shown, now another. This is the way one ought to show man Hadji Murad: a husband, a fanatic, etc.

17) Not long ago I experienced a feeling, not exactly a reasoning, but a feeling that every-thing that is material, and I myself with my own body, is only my own imagination, is the creation of my spirit and that only my soul exists. It was a very joyous feeling.

18) . . . does on the other hand the same thing that a false religious education does; it ac-customs people to deny their reason.

19) There are two points of view of the world : I ) the world is something definitely existing, that is, existing in definite forms, and 2) the world is something continually flowing, being formed, go-ing towards something. In the first point of view, the life of humanity also appears as some-thing definite, consisting in the peaceful use of the goods of the world. In this point of view there is a continuous dissatisfaction, and dis-content with the construction of the world. It does not fulfil the demands which are presented.

March

In the second point of view, the life of humanity is conceived as something which in itself changes and helps to the change and the attainment of the ends of the world. And in this point of view there is no dissatisfaction or discontentment with the construction of the world. And if there is discontent, it is only with one’s self, for one’s in-sufficient harmony to the movement of the world and in not helping this movement. (Unclear.)

20) Administrative ambition and greed of misers are therefore alluring, because they are very simple. For every other end of life one has to reflect much, to think, and often you do not see the results clearly. And here it is so simple: where there was one decoration there will be two: where there was one million there will be two, etc.

21 ) I spoke to Evgenie Ivanovich and said to him that I envy his freedom; but he said to me that things are very difficult for him just on ac-count of this freedom and even on account of the authority and the responsibility which is con-nected with it. So that it only seems to me, that some one is better off and that another is worse, as the strong man to the weak, the healthy to the sick, the rich to the poor. And it became sud-denly clear to me that all the differences in our conditions in the world are as nothing compared with our inner conditions. It is just the same, as

* * *

it would be a matter of indifference if a man fell from a boat into the Azov Sea, the Black, the Mediterranean or into the ocean, in comparison with whether he was able to swim or not.

22) I spoke with P about the woman question. There is no woman question. There is the ques-tion of freedom of equality for all human beings. The woman question is only quarrel hunting.

23) The more one is guilty before his own conscience, though hidden, the more willingly and involuntarily he seeks the guilt of others and es-pecially those before whom he had been guilty.

24) As soon as you go away into the past or the future, you go away from God and then you immediately become lonely, deserted, unfree.

25) I began to think about myself, about my own hurts and my own future life and I came to my senses. And it was so natural to say to myself: and you, what business is Leo Nicholaie-vich (Tolstoi) of yours? And I felt better. Thus there is the one who is hindered by the base, stupid, vain, sensual, Leo Nicholaievich.

26) As soon as you begin to think of the fu-ture, you begin to guess. If the patience comes out, then this will happen. But this is madness! And it is bound to come, because to think of the future is the beginning of madness.

I have finished everything. It is now past one, the 2 1 st.

March 22. Moscow. If I live.

April 12. Moscow.

Among the events during this time was the arrival of the Dukhobors, 300 the cares for their emigration, the death of Brashnin. 301 Occupa-tions: Carthago delenda est so2 and Hadji Murad. Worked rather little. The spiritual state rather good. Visitors most of them peasants, young, good ones.

Since yesterday have been in a very depressed mood. I am not surrendering, I do not disclose myself to any one, but to God. I think that is very important. It is important to keep silent and to suffer a thing through. Otherwise the suffer-ing will go over to others and will make them suffer, but here it will burn itself down in yourself. That is the most precious of all.

This thought helps very much, that in this lies my task, in this is my opportunity to elevate my-self, to approach perfection somewhat. Come and dwell within me so that my baseness will be stifled. Awake in me.

I want to cry all the time.

Thought and noted :

i ) I found jotted down : “ Every victory over the enemy is an enlargement of one’s own strength.” I ought to remember that now espe-cially. There is a struggle going on between my

* * *

spiritual and animal self, and all that I gain for the former, by all this will I weaken the latter. I carry over from one scale of the weights to an-other. If I fall into temptation, it means a roll-ing down the road to evil; if I resist, it is the be-ginning of a rolling on a new road towards the good.

2) It is astonishing how we get accustomed to the illusion of one’s own individuality, separate-ness from the world. We see, we feel that life compels us every minute to feel our union and de-pendence on the world, makes us feel our incom-pleteness ; and we nevertheless believe that we our-selves, our very selves, is something in the name of which we can live. However, when you under-stand this illusion clearly, then you are surprised, how you could not have seen that you are not a piece of a whole, but a manifestation in time and space, of something timeless and infinite.

Women have always recognised the power of men over them. And it could not have been otherwise in an unchristian world. Men are the stronger and men have ruled. It was the same in all the worlds (with the exception of the doubt-ful Amazons and the law of maternity), and it is the same now among .0999 of mankind. But Christianity has appeared and has recognised per-fection not in strength but in love, and by this all the subjected, the captive, the slaves and the

April

the women have been freed. But that the free-dom of slaves and women be not a calamity, it is necessary that the freed be Christians, i.e., that they affirm their life in the service of God and people, and not in the service of themselves. Slaves and women are not Christians, and never-theless they are freed. And they are terrible. They act as the main-spring of all the calamities of the world.

What must be done ? Bring slaves and women back again into slavery? That is impossible to do, because there is no one who will do it: Chris-tians cannot subject. And non-Christians will no longer surrender themselves into slavery, but will fight. They will fight among themselves and one or the other will subject and hold the Christians in slavery. What must be done? One thing must be done : attract people to Christianity, turn them into Christians. It is possible to do this only by fulfilling in life the law of Christ.

Help me, Lord. Help me. Come into me, awake in me. Apr. 13. Moscow. If I live.

To-day April 27. Grinevka 3

The 3rd day here. I am all right. A little in-disposed. . . .

The latter days in Moscow I spent finishing Carthago delenda est. I am afraid I have not

* * *

finished it, and that it is still before me. Still I did quite a lot. Here I have not worked at all.

The misery of the famine is by far not as great as it was in 1891. There are so many lies in all the affairs among the upper classes, everything is so tangled up with lies that it is never possible to answer any question, simply for instance, is there a famine? I am going to try to distribute as well as I can the money which has been con-tributed.

Yesterday there was a conversation about the same thing: Is exclusive love good? The resume is this : a moral man will look on exclusive love, it is all the same whether he be married or single as on evil and will fight it ; the man, who is little moral, will consider it good and will encourage it. An entirely unmoral man does not even understand it and makes fun of it.

The Russkia Viedomosti was suspended be-cause of the Dukhobors and of me ; that is too bad and I am grieved. 304

1) The proverb: for a good son you do not have to make a fortune, for a bad one, do not leave one.

2) I have made the following note: “God doesn’t know when the awakening of people will take place.” This is what it means : I think that the life of humanity consists in a greater and

April

greater awakening, in an enlightening. And this awakening, this enlightening, will be done by peo-ple themselves (by God in people). And in this is life, in this is the good, and therefore this life and this good cannot be taken away from peo-ple.

3) My awakening consisted in this, that I doubted the reality of the material world. It lost all meaning to me.

To-morrow Apr. 28. Grinevka. If I live, I’ll finish.

To-day Apr. 29. Morning. Grinevka.

Felt great weakness. Am better since yester-day. But unable to write anything. Went to Lopashino, 305 took notes. 306

Read Boccaccio it is the beginning of the master-class, immoral art.

No letters. Serezha was here. 807

Random break

I continue. Thought:

i) You look deeply into the life of man, es-pecially of women, and you see from what world point of view their acts flow, and you see, principally, how inevitably all argument against this world point of view recoils and you cannot imagine how this world point of view will be changed in the same way as how a piece of a date-stone has grown through a date. But there are conditions when a change is produced

* * *

and accomplished from within. Live man can al-ways be born, from seeds there are sprouts.

2) I look into the future, and ask: were I to act as I ought to, would everything then be all right, would all obstacles then be destroyed? This question is pleonism. The question is this, whether, were I to act in a realm where there were no obstacles, would there then be any ob-stacles ?

3) It is remarkable how we are without under-standing and without gratitude. God arranged our life so, that he forbade us all false paths, that everything drives us from these false, harmful paths, impoverishing us to ruination, and making us suffer, onto the only free, always joyous path of love but we nevertheless do not go on this path and we complain that we suffer from the at-tempts of going on the false, ruinous paths.

4) One of the most urgent needs of man, equal with and even more urgent than eating, drinking, sex desire, and the existence of which we often for-get, is the need to manifest oneself, to know that it is I who have done a thing. Very many acts which are otherwise inexplicable, are explained by this need. One ought to remember this both in their bringing up, and in dealing with men. The main thing is that one has to try to make this an activity and not a boast.

5) Why is it that children and simple people

April

are by such an awful height higher than the major-ity of people? Because their reason is not per-verted by the deception of faith or by temptations or by sins. Nothing stands on their road to per-fection, while adults have sin and temptation and deception on theirs. The former have only to walk forward, the latter must struggle.

6) They spoke about love and falling in love, and I made the following conclusion for myself : a moral man fights falling in love and exclusive love, an unmoral man condones it.

7) Children are selfish without lies. All of life teaches the aimlessness, the ruination of self-ishness. And therefore old people attain unself-ishness without lies. These are two extreme limits.

8) I began to consider soup-kitchens and the purchase of flour, and money, and my soul became so unclean and sad. The realm of money, i.e., every kind of use of money, is a sin. I took money and undertook to use it only so as to have a reason for going away from Moscow and I acted badly.

9) I thought much about The Appeal, yester-day and to-day. It became rather clear how a bad arrangement of life results in religious decep-tion. If something is unclear in one’s mind, if life is disorderly and you don’t want any-thing. . . . (Somehow I haven’t succeeded.)

1898

10) In my sleep I thought to-day that the shortest expression of the meaning of life is this : the world moves, perfects itself; the task of man is to take part in this movement, to submit himself to it and to help it.

My weakness still continues. I have written this out very badly.

May 4. Grinevka. (Evening.)

Yesterday there was a whole house full of guests: The Tsurikovs, Mme. Ilinsky, 308 Stak-hovich. I have done nothing during the day. In the morning I wrote a letter to Chertkov 309 and to S 310 and to still some one else. The day be-fore yesterday I was in Sidorovo and at Se-rezha’s. 311 In the morning I read Chertkov’s article. 312 It is very good.

The ist of May, Lindenberg 313 was here and a teacher 314 and they went to Kamenka. On the 3Oth, I went to Gubarevka.

What hurts me, is that I seem to have lost en-tirely the capacity for writing. To my shame I am indifferent. Latterly in my sleep, I thought keenly about the contrast between the crushed peo-ple and the crushers, but did not write it out.

To-day, yes and in the preceding days, it seemed to me that Hadji Murad became clear, but I could not write it. It is true they interfered.

Thought :

May

1 ) Just as an athlete follows the growth of his muscles, so you ought to follow the growth of love, or at least the decrease of evil and lies and life will be full and joyous.

2) Yesterday there was a discussion about the old question : what is better to take part in evil, to endeavour to diminish it (...) or to keep away from it? The eternal objection is: “ There will be anarchy “ yes, but now it is worse than anarchy: injustice. “What, then, if to begin everything from the beginning; the strong will again offend the weak.” Yes, everything from the beginning again, but with this difference, that while now we continue the cruelty and injus-tice which have been established in heathen bar-baric times, we now live in the light of Christian-ity and the cruelty and injustice will not be the same cruelty and injustice. ... (It isn’t quite all right, but it was. )

3)! look about me and the lines which I see I force into that form which lives in my imagina-tion. I see white on the horizon and involuntarily I give this white the form of a church. Is it not in this way that everything we see in this world takes on the form which already lives in our imagina-tion (consciousness), which we carried over from our former life? (An idea.)

Exquisite weather. Friendly, hot Spring. I am at peace and am well.

May 5. Grinevka. If I live.

To-day May g. Grinevka.

During these days we had visitors: Masha, Varia. 316 I go every day somewhere to open a soup-kitchen. I am not writing at all. I feel weak. Yesterday there was a rain storm. I went to Bobrika. To-day I went to Nicholskoe. I went to Gubarevka and returning through the wood, thought. ... I don’t feel like writing, later I shall write out two thoughts, very impor-tant ones:

1 ) One, that I cannot put before me, that which tortured me before : my destruction.

2) That the other life begins to attract me, only the process of getting there is terrible. If only I could arrive safely, everything there will be all right;

3) To-day I thought that the object of faith is only one God. This I must write out, ex-plain.

To-day I am in a very weak state. May 10. Grinevka. If I live.

To-day May n. Grinevka.

Yesterday I wrote a little on The Appeal. Then I went to Mikhail’s Ford.

Saw Strakhov in my sleep, 316 who said to me 228

May

that I should write out clearly, for the plain man, what God is. ‘ You ought to write it, Leo Nich-olaievich,” (Tolstoi.)

To-day my stomach ached a little. I didn’t dine and wrote much on The Appeal. It seems to be taking form. I am feeling fresh in the head, a thing I haven’t felt for a long time. Thanks to my gymnastic exercises, I have become convinced for the first time, that I am old and weak and I must stop physical exercise entirely. This is even pleasant.

I forgot for a moment, my rule, not to expect anything from others, but to do what one ought to do oneself before God, and there arose in me an evil feeling. . . . But I remembered, asked in good faith what was necessary and I felt better.

1) There is one object of faith God, He who sent me. He who sent me, He who is every-thing of which I feel myself to be a part. This faith is indispensable and satisfying. If you have this faith then there is no room for any other. Everything else is trust and not faith. You can only have faith in that which undoubtedly is, but which we cannot embrace with our reason.

2) Yesterday I thought that the form of think-ing categories are not seven but four : cause, matter, space, time. But only one: movement, encloses everything in itself. Movement is a

* * *

change of place, therefore there is space; change of place can be swifter and slower, therefore there is time; and a preceding movement is a cause, a following one, an effect; that which is displaced is matter. Everything is movement. Man him-self moves incessantly and therefore everything explains itself to him by movement alone.

3) The most harmful effect of an evil act is that when a man accomplishes it he frees himself from the demands of his conscience. “ We eat ani-mals, therefore why not hunt?” . . . and so you have no need to stand on ceremony . . . etc.

4) A strange thought came to me. Our whole life is in this, that we consider ourselves a sepa-rate unit, an individual, a man. But besides this being specialised, individualised, from all others, chemistry discloses for us entirely different sepa-rate units, acids, nitrogen, etc. They are sepa-rate and therefore they have life. (Nonsense.) May 12. Grinevka. If I live.

To-day May 75. Morning. Grinevka.

Within these two days I went to Mtsensk, 317 Kukuevka, and yesterday to Batyevo. 318 Wrote Hadji Murad unwillingly. I have exercised again. 319 It is stupid, almost an insanity. Wrote a poor letter to Posha. I am pleased with every one here.

May

Just now I have reread this journal and it did not leave me very dissatisfied. Oh, if I would only remember more my transitory, subservient condition here !

Have made no entries. My health would be good if my back weren’t aching. Began to write letters. Not succeeding. One must wait peace-fully and live before God. May 1 6. Grinevka. If I live.

To-day May ig. Grinevka.

Sonya was here. She arrived the I7th. This morning she went away. I have been trying to write these two days. Can’t do anything. An ex-ceptional weakness and pain in my spinal column.

To-day May 20. Evening. Grinevka.

This morning I wrote rather much on The Ap-peal. In the evening I wrote 13 letters. Went nowhere. My back is better. The main thing, is that my brain is working and I am happy.

Received 500 roubles, and 1000 roubles arc lying in Cherni. 320

I am not going to write any more, although I have many notes.

To-day May 27. Grinevka. In the morning. During this time I wrote The Appeal and 231

* * *

finished the article on the condition of the peo-ple. 321

Just now I am writing to write out my notes there is much that has to be written out that everything which is said in Paul (Corinthians xiii) about love has to be said, and even more about the renunciation of oneself. It is impos-sible to lay up love within oneself but the re-nunciation of oneself is possible. It suffices to renounce oneself and love will arise.

I thought this, because just now in the morning, I began to remember all the difficulties which might arise from the distribution of the contribu-tions, about everything which had to be done for the Dukhobors, for my own writing, and of which I had done nothing, and about all my weaknesses, errors, about my joyless life with the children, and such as I had not wanted it to be, and my lack of consequence and it sufficed only to negate my-self, my own desires, and immediately all wrong passed away, both of the past and the future, and one thing remained, the need of service in the present. How time vanishes remarkably in the consciousness of one’s mission.

To-day, I think, June 12. Yasnaya Polyana.

I went with Sonya (my daughter-in-law) 322 to the Tsurikovs, Aphremovs, and the Levitskys. 323 I have a very pleasant impression and fell in love

June

with many ; but fell ill and did not do my work and made a lot of fuss both for Levitsky and the house-hold. 324 . . .

It is four days since I arrived in Yasnaya and I am recovering nicely. Wrote many letters.

I received almost 4,000 roubles, which I can-not use this year. 325

Masha is here with her husband and Iliusha. The Westerlunds were here. 326 . . .

To-day, entirely unexpectedly, I began to finish Sergius. 321 No news from England. 328

I have made many notes.

1) I cannot remember now what and how I thought it: this is the note: “ You are often too strict with people, and he, poor man, is good for nothing.”

2 ) Although I noted it before, I can’t help but repeat: . . .

3)

4) The life of the world is one, i.e., in the sense that it is impossible to apply the conception of number to it. Plurality comes only from the partitions of consciousness. For a universal con-sciousness there is no number, no plurality.

5 ) Non-resistance to evil is important not there-fore only, because a man has to act so for him-self, for attaining the perfection of love, but also because only non-resistance alone stops evil, local-ises it in itself, neutralises it, does not permit it

* * *

to go farther, as it inevitably does, like the trans-mission of movement to elastic balls, if there be no force which would absorb it. Active Chris-tianity is not in doing, creating Christianity, but in absorbing evil.

I feel very much like writing out the story, The Coupon.

6) Death is the crossing-over from one con-sciousness to another, from one image of the world to another. It is as if you go over from one scene with its scenery to another. At the moment of crossing over, it is evident that that what we consider real, is only an image, because we are going over from one image into another. At the moment of this crossing-over, there be-comes evident, or at least one feels, the most actual reality. Because of this, the moment of death is important and dear.

7) For a universal consciousness, for God, matter does not exist. Matter is only for beings, separated one from another. The limits of sepa-rateness is that which we call matter, in all its in-finite forms.

8) It is impossible to remember sufficiently that the life of all beings is continuous movement. Al-most all our misery comes from the fact that we do not know this or forget this. And imagining that we do not go forward, but that we stand still, we grasp the beings moving alongside of us

June

some going faster, some going slower than we we grasp them and hold on as long as the force of the movement does not tear us away. And we suffer.

9) We are all rolling down a slope, going down lower and lower to the plain. Every attempt to hold to one’s place, only makes the fall bigger, the more you hold on.

10) We are sent to cross this sloping path, carrying across it that light which is entrusted to us. And all that we can do is to help each other on the road to carry this light; but we hold back, pushing each other down, extinguishing our light and that of the others. (It isn’t good, not what I wanted to say.)

n) I know, that when people yawn in front of me, I can become infected, and therefore I say to myself : I don’t want to yawn and I won’t. I have learned to do this as to yawning, but I am only beginning to learn this as to anger.

12) The sight depresses me strangely ... of those owning the land and compelling the people to work. How my conscience is struck. And this is not something reasoned, but a very strong feeling. Was I wrong in not giving my land to the peasants? I don’t know.

13) Lieskov made use of my theme and badly. 330 I had an exquisite thought three problems: What was the most important time?

* * *

what man? and what act? The time is the im-mediate, this minute ; the man he with whom you have immediate business ; the act, to save your soul, i.e., to do the act of love. 331

14) It is impossible to save humanity from that deception in which it is caught. . . . Only a re-ligious feeling can give the counterstroke and con-quer. June 13. Y. P. If I live.

June 14. Y. P. Evening.

Both days I wrote Father Sergius. It is com-ing out well. Wrote letters. To-day there was a christening. 332

I still cannot be fully good. ... It is dif-ficult, but I do not despair.

To-day June 22. Y. P.

On the 1 6th I fell very ill. 333 I never had felt so weak and so near death. I am ashamed to have made use of the care which they gave me. I could do nothing. I only read and made some notes. To-day I am a great deal better. Ukhtomsky 334 was pleased with my article, 335 but nevertheless he refused to print it. I telegraphed to Menshikov that he should try the Viestnik Evropa and the Russki 7>d. 336 I am afraid I am going to be-come tiresome.

June

The youth have been driven away. For they have forbidden that the flour that was bought be sold. 337

. . . Received a letter from Chertkov, a good one. The Dieterichs arrived. 338 Dear Dunaev was here. They talked about the great riot of the factory workers. I shall finish later.

To-day June 28. Y. P. Evening.

I am only now recovered, and am experiencing the joy of convalescence. I feel nature very vividly, keenly, and have a great clarity of thought.

I wrote a little on The Appeal. To-day I wrote Father Sergius and both are good. Wrote many letters yesterday. All that I received yesterday were unpleasant: from N, but principally from Gali, with the news that they have all quarrelled. Posha is going to Switzerland and Boulanger to Bulgaria. 339

Tania went to Masha’s. . . .

There is only one thing; one real thing that has been given us : to live lovingly with one’s brothers, with every one. One must renounce oneself. I wrote that to my friends and I am going to be strict with myself.

Here is what I have written down. . . .

I have just read up to this point, where every-thing that is difficult can be made to vanish when you throw off the illusion of a personal life, when

* * *

you recognise your mission in the service to God, and that it would be good to experience this in physicial suffering, whether it will stand physical suffering. And here was a chance to experience it and I forgot and did not experience it. It is too bad. But the next time. Have written down:

1 ) Paul Adam 34 gives the peasants a cruel characteristic, especially the working men : they are vulgar, selfish, slaves, fanatics perhaps all this is just, but the one thing, that they can live with-out us and we cannot live without them, wipes out everything. And therefore it is not for us to judge. (Something is wrong here.)

2) It is especially disagreeable for me when people who have lived little and thought little, do not believe me, and not understanding me, argue with me about moral problems. It would be the same for which a veterinary surgeon would be hurt, if people who were not familiar with his art were to argue with him. The difference is only in this, that the art of the veterinary, the cook, the samovar-maker or any kind of art or science, is rec-ognised as an art or a science where only those peo-ple are competent who have studied that realm ; in the matter of morality every one considers himself competent, because every one has to justify his life. But life is justified only by theories of moral-ity. And every one makes them for himself.

June

3)! have often thought about falling in love, about the good, ideal falling in love, which is exclusive of every sensuality, and I cannot find either place or meaning for it. But its place and meaning is very clear and definite: it is to lighten the struggle between sex desire and chas-tity. Falling in love ought to be for a young man who cannot keep to full chastity before marriage, and to release the young men in the most critical years, from 1 6 to 20 or more, from the torturing struggle. Here is the place for falling in love. But when it breaks out in the life of people after marriage, it is out of place and disgusting.

4) I am often asked for advice as to the prob-lem of owning land. It is my old custom to an-swer: that it is unsuitable for me to answer such problems, just as it would be unsuitable for me to answer the problem how to make use of the owner-ship or the labour or the rent of a bonded serf.

5) People who stand on a lower moral plane or religious world point of view cannot understand people standing on a higher plane. But that there should be a possibility of union between them, there has been given to people standing on a lower plane the instinct for the good and a respect for this good. If there is not this instinct and re-spect, then it is very bad. But in our society, among so-called educated people, this is getting to be less and less.

* * *

To-day June 30. Y. P.

I am still ill, and very weak. But I think I am improving, and my spiritual state is good. The day before yesterday I received a letter about the quarrel in England. 341 I wrote to them. It is very sad and very instructive. Yesterday I re-ceived a letter from Khilkov with a letter from Miss Pickard about the Dukhobors. 342 I wrote letters to Crosby, and Willard 343 and Khilkov. The affair of the Dukhobors is important and big and evidently something will come out of it which is entirely different from what we are preparing, but it is God’s affair. To-day Mme. Annenkov arrived. Menshikov telegraphed that Gaidebu-rov 344 will print with omissions. During these days I wrote Sergius it isn’t good.

I am going to continue to write out the former :

6) ...

7) A man is a being separated from all others, who feels his limits. Among the number of gen-eral limits by which he separates himself from other beings, are his limits which are in common with that being incomprehensible to him the earth. Death is the destruction of all the various common limits with other beings and always of the common limit of the being of the earth a fusion with earth. Every sickness, wound, old age, is a destruction of these limits.

June

8) The work of life is to love. It is impossi-ble to love expressly those people unworthy of love; but it is possible not to love to behave well, in a good way, toward such people in every given moment.

9) I remembered keenly what a matter of enor-mous importance was complete truthfulness in every detail, in everything, the avoidance of all outer false forms. And I decided to keep to this. It is never too late to mend. 346

10) The minister said to the murderer: “ Oh brother, don’t worry. God has pardoned even greater sinners. But who are you? Don’t lose heart. Pray.” The murderer burst into tears.

n) How great and stable seemed the happi-ness of the American people, and how unstable it proved to be, like all happiness not founded on life, according to the law of Christ. The Span-ish-American War, Jingoism.

12) I have often prayed (almost without be-lieving, to try out) that God arrange my life as I wish. To-day I simply prayed my customary morning prayer and rather attentively. And after this prayer, I recalled my wish and wanted to add a prayer about the fulfilment of this wish, and tried to address God about it. And immediately I realised my mistake that it would be very much better if everything was not according to

* * *

my will, but according to His. And without the least effort and with joy I said: “ Yes, let there not be my will, but Thine.”

13) A spiritual life means that you should see the connection between cause and effect in the spir-itual world and that you be guided in life by this connection. Materialists do not see this connec-tion and therefore do not take it as a guide for their acts, but they take as a guide for their acts the physical, causal connection, the one which is so complicated that we never fully know it, because every effect is an effect of an effect; but the funda-mental cause of everything is always spiritual. (Not clearly expressed, but important).

14) Epictetus says this very thing when he re-proaches people for being very attentive to the phenomenon of the outer world to that which is not in our power and being inattentive to the phenomenon of the inner, to that which is in our power.

15) To many it seems that if you exclude per-sonality from life and a love for it, then nothing will remain. It seems to them that without per-sonality there is no life. But this only appears so to people who have not experienced self-renuncia-tion. Throw off personality from life, renounce it, and then there will remain that which makes the essence of life love.

16) (For The Appeal} . . .

Tomorrow, July 1st. If I live.

July 6. Y. P.

Am entirely well. Yesterday I took leave of Dunaev and Mme. Annenkov, who were here. I live very badly. I cannot reconcile myself to the will of God.

To-day I thought :

The life of Christ is very important as an in-stance of that impossibility of man to see the fruits of his labours. And the less so, the more import-ant the work. Moses could enter into the prom-ised land with his people, but Christ could in no way see the fruit of his teaching even if he had lived up to now. This is what one has to learn. But we want to do the work of God and to receive human reward.

July 17. Y. P. ‘g8. Morning.

There was nothing very special during these 1 1 days. I have decided to give my novels away, Resurrection and Father Sergius, to be printed for the Dukhobors. 348

S. went to Kiev.

An inner struggle. I believe little in God. I do not rejoice at the examination, but am burdened by it, admitting in advance that I won’t pass. All last night I didn’t sleep. I rose early and prayed much.

* * *

To-day the Dieterichs and the Gorbunovs ar-rived. It was pleasant with them. Took hold of Resurrection, and in the beginning it went well, but from the moment when I became alarmed, these two days, I have been unable to do anything. I took a very nice walk.

I wrote a letter to Jarnefelt 347 and prepared a postscript. This is the only important thing. But I haven’t the strength to withstand the cus-tomary temptation. 348 Come and dwell within us. Awake the resurrection in me!

I have made many notes. I will hardly have time to write them out now.

1) Brooding leads to dreams, dreams to pas-sions, passion to devils. (From Love for the Good.) 3 * 9

2) The aesthetic pleasure which you receive from Nature is attainable to all. Every one is af-fected by it differently, but it affects every one. Art should have the same effect.

3) How difficult it is to really live for God alone. You think you are living for God, but as soon as life jolts you, as soon as that support in life to which you are holding on, fails you, then you feel that there is no holding power in God and you fall.

4) For Father Sergius: Alone he is good, with people he falls.

5 ) What an obvious error : to live for worldly 244

July

ends. Whenever the purpose is not narrowly ego-tistic then this purpose is not quickly attained in life. Moses did not enter the promised land and Christ despaired of His labour: “Why hast Thou abandoned me ?” . . .

6) There is no peace, either for him who lives for worldly ends among people, or for him who lives for spiritual ends alone. There is peace only then when a man lives for the service of God among people.

To-day, July 20. Y. P.

A letter from S and from Masha. I still do not sleep, but things are settling themselves in my soul, and as always, suffering is of benefit. Yesterday I went to Ovsiannikovo, spoke with Ivan Ivano-vich. 350 Yesterday I worked well on Resurrec-tion.

It is morning now. I am not continuing to write out from the notebooks, but I am going to write out what I not being asleep have just now been thinking; it is an old but easily forgotten thing, and an important one which should be also told to N with whom they talked last night. Namely:

i) Life for oneself is a torture, because you want to live for an illusion, for that which does not exist, and it not only cannot be happy, but it cannot be at all. It is the same as dressing and

* * *

feeding a shadow. Life exists only outside of oneself, in the service of others, and not in the service of one’s near ones, beloved ones that is again for oneself but in the service of those whom we do not love, and better still, in the ser-vice of enemies. Help, Father. The terrible error is that one confuses sex-love, love for chil-dren, for friends, with love of people through God, of people to whom you are indifferent, and still more of enemies, that is, of erring people.

Aug. 3. Pirogovo.

Again everything is in the old way, again my life is horrid. I have lived through very much; I haven’t passed the examination. But I do not de-spair and I want a re-examination. I passed the examination exceptionally badly, because I had the intention of going over to another institution. It is just these thoughts one must throw away, then one will learn better.

During this time Sonya returned and dear Tania Kuzminsky was here. The work on Resurrection goes very badly, although it seems to me I have thought it out much better. The 3rd day in Piro-govo. Uncle Serezha 351 is not as good as he was before : he is not in the mood. Maria Nicho-laievna. 352 For two days nothing has come into my head.

During this time there was alarming news about 246

August

the condition of the Dukhobors 353 and that Mme. M. N. Rostovtzev was put in prison. 334 For a long time there has been no letter from Chertkov. Perhaps they intercept them. 355

Am going to continue to write out that which I had not written out :

i) ...

2) There are two methods of human activity and according to which one of these two kinds of activity people mainly follow, are there two kinds of people : one use their reason to learn what is good and what is bad and they act according to this knowledge ; the other act as they want to and then they use their reason to prove that that which they did was good and that which they didn’t do was bad.

3) It is absolutely clear that it is much more profitable to do everything in common, but the reasoning about this is insufficient. If the reason-ing were sufficient then it would have happened long ago. The fact that it is seen among Capi-talists is unable to convince people to live in com-mon. Besides the reasoning that this is profit-able, it is necessary that the heart be ready to live like that (that the world point of view should be such that it would harmonise with the indications of the reason) , but this is not so and will not be so until the desires of the heart are changed, i.e., the world point of view of people.

1898

4) Even if that which Marx predicted should happen, then the only thing that will happen, is that despotism will be passed on. Now the capi-talists rule, but then the directors of the working people will rule.

5) The mistake of the Marxists (and not only they, but the whole materialistic school) lies in the fact that they do not see that the life of humanity is moved by the growth of consciousness, by the movement of religion, by an understanding of life becoming more and more clear, general, meeting all problems and not by an economic cause.

6) The most unthought thing, the error, of the theory of Marx is in the supposition that capital will pass from the hands of private people into the hands of the government, and from the govern-ment, representing the people, into the hands of the workers. . . .

7) There is nothing that softens the heart so much as the consciousness of one’s guilt, and noth-ing hardens it so much as the consciousness of one’s right.

8) Working people are so ... that it seems to them they have no outlet. Salvation lies in truth, in preaching and professing it.

9) They prove the law of the conservation of energy; but energy is nothing else than an abstract notion, just the same as matter. But an abstract notion is always equal to itself. In fact, this is

August

nothing else than as if we were to begin to prove that the law of gravitation, notwithstanding seem-ing departures, exists unchangingly in everything. (Unclear and perhaps untrue.)

10) The belief in miracles has for its basis the consciousness that our world just as it is, is the product of our senses. But the error lies only in supposing that the miraculous, that is, that some-thing which is against the laws of reason, when applied to our senses, can happen for us with our tool of consciousness, i.e., with our senses. That which is against our laws of reason, when applied to our senses, can happen for other beings, for be-ings with other “senses, just as our tool of con-sciousness, our sense, is only one particular in-stance from the innumerable quantity of other pos-sibilities.

1 1 ) It is a great error to think that the reason of man is perfect and can disclose everything to him. The limitation of reason is best seen and most obvious from the fact that a man cannot solve (he clearly sees that he cannot) the problems of infinity: for each time there is still more time, for each space there is still more space, for each number there is still a number, so that all time and space is unknowable.

12) The reason of man is just as weak and in-significant in comparison (and in an infinite num-ber of times more so) with that which is, as is the

* * *

reason (the means of perception) of a beetle and an amaeba in comparison with the reason of man. The reason of man in comparison, not only with the highest reason, but with the reason which is higher than his is just the same as the under-standing of a complicated problem of higher math-ematics or even of algebra for a man not knowing mathematics, to whom it seems insoluble, as are the problems of the infinity of space and time to us. While the problem is simple and clear for one knowing mathematics. The difference is only in this, that one can learn mathematics, but no study will help to solve the problem of space and time. This is the limit of the possibility of our knowledge under our reason.

13) I pray God that He release me from my suffering which tortures me. But this suffering is sent to me by God in order to release me from evil. The master whips his cattle with the whip in order to drive them from the burning yard and save them, and the cattle pray that he do not whip them.

14) There are common, sometimes intentional, sometimes unintentional, misunderstandings of my opinions which I confess irritate me :

a) I say that God ... is not God and that God is that which alone is the unattainable good, the beginning of everything: against me they say, that I deny God ;

August

b) I say that one ought not to resist violence by violence : against me they say, that I say it is not necessary to fight evil ;

c) I say that one ought to strive towards chas-tity and that on this road the highest grade will be virginity, and second a clean marriage, the third not a clean, that is, not a monogamous marriage : against me they say, that I deny marriage and I preach the destruction of the human race.

d) I say that art is an infectious activity and that the more infectious art is, the better it is. But that this activity be good or bad, does not depend on how much it satisfies the demands of art, i.e., its infectiousness, but on how much it satisfies the demands of the religious consciousness, i.e., morality, conscience; against me they say that I preach a tendence art, etc.

15) Woman and the legends say it also is the tool of the devil. She is generally stupid, but the devil lends her his brain when she works for him. Here you see, she has done miracles of thinking, far-sightedness, constancy, in order to do something nasty; but as soon as something not nasty is needed, she cannot understand the simplest thing; she cannot see farther than the present moment and there is no self-control and no pa-tience (except child-birth and the care of children) .

1 6) All this concerns women, un-Christians, un-chaste women, as are all the women of our Chris-,

* * *

tian world. Oh, how I would like to show to women all the significance of a chaste woman. A chaste woman (not in vain is the legend of Mary) will save the world.

17) People are occupied with three things: i) to feed themselves, i.e., to continue their existence, 2) to multiply to continue the existence of the specie, and 3) to fulfil that for which they had been sent in the world: to establish the kingdom of God. For this there is one means to perfect onself. Almost all people are occupied with the first two matters, forgetting the last, which at bottom is the only real work.

18) The decline of the moral consciousness of humanity lies in the greatest part of the people be-ing placed in such a situation that all interest in life for them is only to feed and to multiply. It is just the same as if the master kept his cattle, car-ing only that they be fed, or better, that they do not die from hunger and that they multiply, and never received any income from them : no wool, or milk, or work from them from these cattle. The Master who sent us in this world requires from us, besides existence and its continuation, also the labour He needs.

19) For Resurrection. It was impossible to think and remember one’s sin and be self-satisfied. But he had to be self-satisfied in order to live, and therefore he did not think and forgot.

August

20) It is impossible to demand from woman that she valuate the feeling of her exclusive love, on the basis of moral feeling. She cannot do it, because she hasn’t got a real moral feeling, i.e., one that stands higher than everything.

To-day I plan to go home.

Aug. 4. Y. P. If I live.

Why does the 4th of August come to my mine as if it were important? Nothing important has happened.

To-day, August 24. Y. P.

During this time I received no letters from Chertkov and am very perplexed. 356 I think that during this time the Dukhobors were here. Let-ters from Khilkov, from Ivan Michailovich. I an-swered them all. To-day Sullerzhitsky arrived. 357 I am working all the time on Resurrection and am pleased, even very much so. I am afraid of shocks.

. . . And I feel well. A full house of people : Mashenka, 358 Stakhovich, Vera Kuzminsky, 359 Vera Tolstoi. 880

I am copying:

i) People were sent into the world to do the work of God, but they quarrelled, fought and es-tablished things in such a way that for some, there is no time to do the work, because they have to

* * *

feed themselves, and for others there is no time, because they have to guard that which they took away. What a waste of strength! It is just as if workers had been sent to work and given food; some have taken the food away and they have to guard it and the others have to get food, and the work stands still.

2) People live in the world not fulfilling their mission it is the same way as if factory work-ers were only busied with how to lodge them-selves, feed themselves and amuse themselves.

3) One of the most important tasks of hu-manity consists in the bringing up of a chaste woman.

4) I often think that the world is such as it is, only because I am so separated from all the rest. As soon as my separateness from Everything will end, then the limits will be torn away and other limits will be established and then the world will become altogether different for me.

5) You wish to serve humanity? Very well. That which you wish to do, another will do. Are you satisfied? No, dissatisfied, because the im-portant thing for me is not what will be done, but what / will do; that I do my work. This is the best proof that the matter is not in the doing, but in the advancement towards the good.

Is it possible that I am advancing? Help, Lord.

August

6) How difficult it is to please people: some need one thing, others another. They need both my past and my future. God is one, and His Will in respect to me is one, and He wants only my present, what I am doing this minute is what He wants. And what was, has been, and what will be, isn’t my business.

7) Egoism, the whole egoistic life, is legitimate only as long as reason has not awakened. As soon as it has awakened, then egoism is lawful, only to that degree in which one has to sustain oneself as a tool necessary for the service of people. The purpose of reason is the service to people. All the horror lies in its being used for service to one-self.

8) Man gives himself to the illusion of e.goism, lives for himself and he suffers. It suffices that he begin to live for others, and the suffering becomes lighter and there is obtained the highest good in the world : love of people.

9) As one disaccustoms oneself from smoking or other habits, so one can and must disaccustom oneself from egoism. When you wish to enlarge your pleasure, when you wish to exhibit yourself, when you call forth love in others, stop. If you have nothing to do for others, or you have no de-sire to do anything, then do nothing only don’t do anything for yourself.

10) The Bavarian told about their life. He

* * *

boasts about the high degree of freedom, but at the same time they have compulsory religious teaching, a crude Catholic one. That is the most horrible despotism. Worse than ours. Aug. 25. Y. P. If I live.

Nov. 2. Y. P.

It is horrible to see for what a long time I have made no entries : more than two months. And not only has there been nothing bad, but rather every-thing was good. The Jubilee was not as repuls-ive and as depressing as I expected. 361 The sale of the novel and the receipt of the 12,000 roubles which I gave to the Dukhobors was well ar-ranged. 362 I was displeased with Chertkov 363 and I saw that I was at fault. A Dukhobor ar-rived from the province of Yakutsk. I liked him very much 364 . . .

Masha is pitiable in her weakness, but she is just as near in spirit. . . .

But glory to God and thanks be to Him that he has awakened it in me and has kept it burning so that it is natural for me either to love and re-joice, or to love and to pity. And what happi-ness!

Archer was here yesterday, arriving from Chertkov I liked him. 365 There is much to do, but I am all absorbed in Resurrection, being spar-ing with the water and using it only for Resurrec-

November

tion. It seems to me it won’t be bad. People praise it, but I don’t believe.

Everything that I noted it was all very im-portant I will write out later, but now I want to write that which I just now, walking on the path, in the evening, not only thought but felt clearly:

i) Under my feet there is the frozen, hard earth ; around, enormous trees ; overhead a cloudy sky; I feel my body, I feel pain in the head; I am occupied with thoughts on Resurrection; and yet I know, I feel in all my being, that both the firm and frozen earth and the trees and the sky and my body and my thoughts all this is only a product of my five senses, my image, the world, made by me because such is my partition from the world. And that it will be sufficient for me to die and all this will not disappear but will become transformed, as they make transformations in the theatres: from bushes and stones, they make castles, towers, etc. Death is nothing else than such a transformation, dependent from another partition from the world, another personality: Here I consider as myself, my body with my senses, and then something else will detach itself to be myself. And then the whole world will become something else. But the world is such and not something else, only because I consider myself as this and not as something else. But there can be

* * *

an innumerable quantity of divisions of the world. (This is not entirely clear for others, but for me very. ) 366 Nov. j. // I live.

Nov. 14. Y. P.

Again I have not noticed how 1 1 days have passed. Have been very intensely occupied with Resurrection and am making good progress. Am absolutely near the end. Serezha and Suller were here and both went away to the Caucasus with my letter to Golitsin. 367 S. arrived yesterday. Very well. It is a long time since I have felt so well and keen, intellectually and physically.

I cannot make out what I have written out and what I haven’t. 368

1 ) How difficult it is to please people ! In or-der to please them it is necessary that the past and the future meet their demands. But in order to please God, one has only to satisfy His demands in the present.

2) To live for others seems difficult just as to work seems difficult. But just as in work, in the care for others there may be the best reward : love of others may and may not be; while in labour there is an inner reward, you work to the end, get tired, and you feel good.

3) The poetry of the past occupied itself only with the strong of the world : with the Czars, etc.,

November

because the strong of the world appeared as the highest and the most complete representatives of the people. But if you take the plain people, then it is necessary that they express general phenomena . . . (Unclear.)

4) If you do not permit yourself to live for yourself, then involuntarily, from boredom, you begin to live for others.

5) Woman, just like man, is endowed with feel-ing and brain, but the difference is in this, that men mostly consider themselves and their feelings bound by the commands of reason, while women consider their feelings binding for themselves and for their reason. The same thing, but only in different places.

6) You get angry at the philosopher who rea-sons, who considers that the main basis of the life of man is his material nature; but this man does not know the spiritual, but knows only material effect and therefore he cannot think other-wise.

7) You think that you are alone and you suffer from loneliness ; yet you are not only in harmony, but you are one with every one ; only artificial and removable barriers separate you. Remove them and you are one with every one. The remov-ing of these barriers according to your strength is the business of life.

8) If a man considers his animal being as him-

* * *

self, then he will represent God also as a material being, a ruler who rules materially over material things. But God is not such, God is spirit and does not rule over anything, but lives in everything.

9) ... If people could have been so deceived, then there is no deception into which they would not fall.

10) I have noted down that it is depressing be-cause there is no life, but only an egoistic existence. I cannot remember what else I could have meant by this.

1 1 ) God manifests himself in our consciousness. When there is no consciousness there is no God. Only consciousness gives the possibility for the good, for continence, service, self-sacrifice. Every-thing depends to what consciousness is directed. Consciousness directed to the animal “ self “ kills, paralyzes life. Consciousness directed to the spir-itual “ self “ rouses, lifts, frees life. Conscious-ness directed to the animal “ self “ strengthens, ignites passion, creates fear, struggle, the horror of death. Consciousness directed towards the spiritual “ self “ frees love. This is very import-ant and if I live, I will write it out.

12) Death is a change of consciousness, a change of that which I can recognise as myself. And therefore fear of death is a horrible super-stition. Death is a joyous event standing at the

November

end of each life. Suffering is sent to people to hold them back from death. Otherwise every one understanding life and death, would struggle to-wards death. But now it is impossible to go to-wards death unless through suffering.

13) The greatest act in life is the consciousness of one’s self, and its consequences are benevolent or most terrible, according to whether you direct your consciousness towards the spirit or towards the body.

14) In order to get rid of moral suffering (and even physical) there are two means : to destroy the cause of suffering or the feeling in one’s self which produces suffering. The first is not in man’s power, the second is. (I am repeating Epictetus) .

15) The moral progress of humanity advances only because there are old people. The old peo-ple become kinder, wiser, and give over that which they have lived through to the following genera-tions. If this were not so, humanity had not ad-vanced ; and what a simple method !

1 6) If man looks on life materially, then old people do not become better, but worse, and there is no progress.

17) Technical progress is greeted by every one, is pushed on by every one ; the moral, the religious progress, is held back by the priests. From this come the main calamities in life.

* * *

November 15. Y. P. If I live.

It seemed to me that I made no entries for about three days and now it is ten days. To-day, Nov. 25. Y.P.

... I promised to arrive December 6th. 369 . . . I feel also like going to Pirogovo. We are alone : Tania, Masha, Kolia. Only Liza Obolensky. 370 I am still diligently occupying myself with Resur-rection.

Last night I thought out an article on why the people are corrupted. They have no faith of any kind. They christen naive infants and then they consider every reasoning about faith (perversion) and every lapse, as a capital crime. Only the sec-tarians have faith. Perhaps I am going to bring that into the Appeal. What a pity. I thought it out well at night.

Resurrection is growing. It can hardly be com-pressed into 100 chapters. 371

I have noted down the following and I think it is very important (which might be good for the Declaration of Faith) :

i ) We are very much accustomed to the reason-ing as to how the life of other people, people in general, should be arranged. And such kind of reasoning does not seem strange to us. And yet such kind of reasoning could in no ways exist among religious and therefore free people; such reasoning is the consequence of despotism, . . .

November

In this way reason . . . They say : “ If I had the power I would do so and so with the others.” That is a dangerous error, not only because it tortures, deforms people who have to undergo violence . . . but it weakens in all people the consciousness of the necessity of improving them-selves, which is the only effective means of influ-encing other people.

2) To-day I thought about this from another angle. I recalled the words of the Gospel : “ And the pupil is not higher than the teacher; if he learns then he will be like the pupil.” We, the rich mas-ter-classes, teach the people. What would happen if we succeeded in teaching them so that they be-come as we are ?

3) They talk, they write, they preach about the knowing of God. What a horrible blasphemy, and horrible admission of the non-understanding of what God is and what we are. We, a particle of the infinite whole, wish to understand not only this whole, but its causes, the origin of the whole. What absurdity and what a recognition of godless-ness, or a recognition of God of that which is not God. We can only know that He is, To oV, He exists, and we can only conclude by ourselves, what He is not.

4) Love is God. Love is only the recognition that God is not flesh, not passion, not egoism, not malice. (Doubtful.)

* * *

5) Violence rules our world, i.e., malice, and therefore there is always found in society a ma-jority of dependent, unstable members: women, children, stupid ones brought up on malice, and who side with malice. But the world ought to be ruled by reason, by goodness; then all this majority would be brought up on goodness and would side with it. In order that this should take place it is necessary that reason and goodness mani-fest themselves, and undismayed, assert their exist-ence ; that is very important.

6) The complexity of knowledge is a sign of its falseness. That which is true is simple.

7) How bad it is that people seeking perfec-tion are pained at calumny, at a deserved bad name (or better still, at an undeserved). Calumny, a bad name, gives an opportunity, drives toward an activity, the value of which is only in our con-science. This is so rare, so difficult, and so useful. Involuntary simpleness is the best school for goodness. 372

8)1 have noted down : “ Justice is insufficient. It is . . . 373 necessary to oppose.” I cannot re-member what this means.

9) Physical labour is important, because it pre-vents the mind from working idly and aimlessly.

10) Perhaps it is more important to know what one ought not to think about, than to know what one ought to think about.

November

1 1 ) Women are weak and they not only do not want to know their own weakness, but want to boast of their strength. What can be more dis-gusting?

12) A good man if he does not acknowledge his mistakes and tries to justify himself can become a monster.

13)-..

Now Nov. 26. Morning. Y. P.

Did not sleep and thought :

i ) Evil is the material for love. Without evil there is none and can be no manifestation of love. God is love, i.e., God manifests Himself to us in victory over evil, i.e., in love. The question of the origin of evil is just as absurd as the question of the origin of the world. It is not “ whence comes evil? “ that one must know, but “ how to conquer it ? How to apply love ? “

1899

Jan. 2. Yasnaya Polyana.

The last time I wrote it was November 25, which means a month and a week. I made en-tries in Yasnaya Polyana, then I was in Moscow, where I did not make one entry. At the end of November I went to Pirogovo. I returned on the first and since that time have not been quite well the small of my back ached and still aches, and lately I have had something like bilious fever. It is the second day that I am better.

All this time I have been occupied exclusively with Resurrection. 374 I have had some communi-cations about the Dukhobors, 375 an innumerable pile of letters. Kolechka Gay is with me, with whom it is a rest to be. ... I am calm in the fashion of an old man. And that is all.

There is quite a lot to write out. I am going to write it out on the pages I skipped. Lately I feel as if my interest in Resurrection has weakened, and I joyously feel other, more important, inter-ests, in the understanding of life and death. Much seems clear.

Made an entry, the 2nd of January. To-day, Feb. 21. Moscow.

More than six weeks that I have made no en-269

1899

tries. Am all the time in Moscow. At first Res-urrection went well, then I cooled off entirely. 376 I wrote a letter to the non-commissioned officer 377 and to the Swedish papers. 378 For about three days I have again taken up Resurrection. Am ad-vancing.

Students’ strike. They are trying to drag me in all the time. 379 I am counselling them to hold themselves passively, but I do not feel like writing letters to them.

... As to me my back is better. There is living with us, an interesting and live Frenchman, Sinet, the first religious Frenchman. 380 There is very much that I ought to write out. Have been in a very bad mood; now all right. Feb 22. Moscow.

June 26. Yasnaya Polyana.

Four months that I have made no entries. I will not say I have lived badly all this time. I have worked and am working diligently on Resur-rection. There is much that is good, there is that, in the name of which I write. During these days I have been gravely ill ; now well. . . .

Difficult relations because of the printing and translating of Resurrection, 381 but most of the time am calm.

Neglected correspondence. They continue sending money for the famine-stricken, but I can

June

do nothing else but send it to them through the post. 382 Kolichka is with me helping me in the work.

I continue to write out from my note-book :

14) Nearing the place of destination, one thinks more and more often of that place to which one is nearing. Thus also while nearing death, the change of destination.

15) Only always to remember that there is no other meaning in life, no other way of finding the joy of life, but through fulfilling His will. And how peacefully and joyously one could live !

1 6) In time of illness, to fulfil His will by pre-paring oneself for the going over into another form.

17) It seems to us that the real labour is the labour on something external: to make, to collect something; property, houses, cattle, fruit; but to labour on one’s own soul that is just phantasy. And yet every other labour except on one’s own soul, the enlarging of the habits of good, every other labour is a bagatelle.

1 8) They do not obey God, but adore Him. It is better not to adore, but to obey.

19) No matter what the work you are doing, be always ready to drop it. And plan it, so as to be able to leave it.

20) The machine ... is a terrible machine.

1899

If we would have clearly understood its danger, we would never have permitted it to be formed.

2 1 ) It seems strange and immoral that a writer, an artist, seeing the suffering of people, sympa-thises less than he observes, in order to reproduce this suffering. But that is not immoral. The suffering of one personality is an insignificant thing in comparison with that spiritual effect, if it is a good one, which a work of art will produce.

22) Humanity, it is an enormous animal who seeks and cannot find what it needs. Very slowly, sensations call forth emotions, and emotions are transmitted to the brain and the brain calls forth acts. The activity of the liberals, Socialists, rev-olutionaries, are attempts to galvanise, to compel the animal to” act by arousing its motor nerves and muscles. But there is one organ which does every-thing when it is not impaired; in the animal it is the brain, in the people, religion.

23) I am depressed and I ask God to help me. But my work is to serve God and not that He should serve me.

24) An individual, personal life is an illusion. There is no such life; there is only function, a tool, for something.

25) ... is vestigal, having no application, like the appendix.

26) We complain at our depressed spirits, but

June

they are necessary. Man cannot stay on that height to which he sometimes rises; but man rises and then hypnotises himself for the time of his depression and in the time of his depression he already acts from the view-point that was dis-closed to him in the moment of rising. If only to know how to make use of those moments of rising and to know how to hypnotise oneself !

27) The evil of the world, its cause is very sim-ple. Every one seeks midi a quatorze heures now in the economic system, now in the political. I just now read the discussions in the German parliament, on how to keep the peasants from running to the cities. But the solution of all prob-lems is one and no one recognises it and it does not even seem to be of interest to them. But the solution is one, clear and undoubted: . . . The salvation is one : the destruction of false teaching.

28) The difference between people: N thinks about death, and that does not lead him farther than the question of how and to whom he should leave his money, where and how be buried. And Pascal also thinks about death.

29) ...

30) There is no future. It is made by us.

31) The infinity of time and space is not a sign of the greatness of the human mind, but on the contrary, it is a sign of its incompleteness, of its inevitable falsity.

1899

32) We think of the future, we build it; but nothing future is important, because the impor-tant thing is to do the creative work of love, which can be done under every possible condition; and therefore it is altogether indifferent, what the future will be.

33) We get angry at circumstances, are pained, wish to change them, but all possible circumstances are nothing else than indications as to how to act in different spheres. If you are in need, you must work, if in prison think, and if in wealth, free yourself . . . etc.

It is just like a horse getting angry with the road on which he is being led.

34) The press that is a lie: with a ‘venge-ance?**

35) Everything is divided. Only God unites us, living in everything. That is why He is love.

36) The conception of God to a religious man, is continuously destroyed and being replaced by a new, higher conception.

37) .. . is not only the loss of labour, of lives, but the loss of the good.

38) With many people it is possible to live only when you treat them as you would a horse : not to take them into consideration, not reproach-ing them, not suggesting, but only finding a modus vivendi. It is about them: “Not to cast pearls”

June

... It is terrible, but without this rule, it would be worse.

39) Is it possible to imagine to oneself a So-cialist working-man with faith in the Iversk Ikon? Then, first of all, there must be a religious eman-cipation.

40) We are all agreed that only he is free who has overcome passion, and yet knowing this, we seriously trouble ourselves with the freeing of peo-ple who are full of passions.

41) A rational conviction can never be com-plete. A full conviction can only be irrational, es-pecially with women.

42 ) Answer good for evil and you destroy in an evil man all pleasure which he receives from evil.

43 ) God is love. We know God only in love, which unites everything. You know God in your-self through the striving towards this union.

44) One continually thinks that the good will be good for him. But the good is, or it is not it is not something that will be.

45) The important thing lies in thoughts. Thoughts are the beginning of everything. And thoughts can be directed. And therefore the principal task of perfection is to work on thoughts.

June 27. If I live. Y.P.

1899

To-day July 4th. Y. P.

All this time I have been ill with my usual stomach sickness. The work which absorbed me very much, has stopped.

Christ as a myth; 384 and Kenworthy’s book, a rational exposition of the life of Christ. The first is better. There is need of a philosophy of moral economy, i.e., of religious truth. There is such a thing.

I have had many good thoughts, being ill and nearing death. I think often with pain of brother S.

I have noted down the 4th :

1 ) The government destroys faith, but faith is necessary. Some violating themselves believe in the miraculous, in the absurd; others in science. But in which? In the contemporary. But in the contemporary, there is 99/100 of lie and error. In every contemporary science there are lies. Truth revealed by God is of course the right, it is religion; and truth obtained by the reason of man, by science, is also of course, the right. But the matter lies in recognising what is discovered by God and what has been gained by human reason.

2) Death is the destruction of those organs by means of which I perceive the world as it appears in this life; it is the destruction of that glass through which I looked and a change to another.

3) Educated people using their education not

September

for the enlightenment and freeing of the working-classes, but for befogging them, are like workers using their strength not for sustaining life but for destroying it. These are the intellectual Puga-chevs, Stenka Razins, only a thousand times more dangerous. July 5. Y. P. If I live.

To-day September 28. Y. P.

Have worked all the time on Resurrection; now I have stumbled on the third part. It is long since I have made no progress.

... I have wrought for myself a calm which is not to be disturbed: not to speak and to know that this is necessary; that it is under these condi-tions one ought to live.

There are here Ilya, Sonya 385 with the children, Andrusha with his wife, Masha with her hus-band.

I am thinking more and more often about the philosophic definition of space and time. To-day, if I have time, I am going to write it out.

I read an interesting book about Christ never having been, that it was a myth. 386 The proba-bilities that it is right there are as many for it, as there are against.

Yesterday with the help of Masha I answered all the letters; many remained unanswered. I am still ill; rarely a day without pain. I am dissatis-

1899

fied with myself, also morally. I have let myself go very much I do not work physically and I am occupied with myself, with my health. How difficult it is to bear sickness resignedly, to go unto death without resistance and one must. I have been thinking during this time :

1 ) Women demanding for themselves the work of man and the same freedom, mostly demand for themselves unconsciously the freedom for licence, and as a result go down much lower than the family, though aiming to stand higher than it.

2) What is this memory which makes from me one being, from childhood unto death? What is this faculty connecting separate beings in time, into one? One ought to ask not what is it that unites, but what divides, these beings. The faculty of time divides, beyond which I cannot see myself. I am one indivisible being from birth un-til death; but to manifest and to know myself, I must do so in time. I am now such as I was and will be; but one who had to and even will manifest myself and know myself in time. I have to manifest myself and know myself in time for communion with other beings and for influencing them.

3) I plucked a flower and threw it away. There were so many of them, it was no pity. We do not value these inimitable beauties of living be-ings and destroy them, having no pity not only for

September

plants, but for animals, human people. There are so many of them. Culture, civilisation, is nothing else than the ruin of these beauties and the re-placing them . . . with what? The saloon, the theatre . . .

4) They reproach you with malice, debauchery, lies, thefts, bring proof, etc. What is to be done? Answer the question with What time is it? Are you going to take a swim? Have you seen N N, etc. That is the best and only means of bearing these accusations and even clearing them up.

5 ) The dearest thing on earth is the good rela-tion between people; but the establishment of these relations is not the result of conversation on the contrary, they become spoiled by conversation. Speak as little as possible, and especially with those people with whom you want to be in good rela-tion.

6) In eating, I destroy the limits between my-self and other beings; creating children, I do al-most the same thing. The results of the destruc-tion of material limits are visible ; the results of the destruction of the spiritual limits and the union re-sulting from this are invisible, only because they are broader.

7) “ People are divided (divided from other beings), and this appears to them as space. The fact that they are inseparable in essence appears to them as time.” That is the way I have noted

1899

it. Space divides, time unites. But this is un-true. Both time and space are dividers and they form the impossibility of realising unity. (Unclear, but I understand. I will make it clear later.)

8) Brotherhood is natural, proper to people. Non-brotherhood, divisions, are carefully nur-tured.

9) Sometimes one feels like complaining child-ishly to some one (to God), to beg for help. Is this feeling good ? It is not good : it is a weakness, a lack of faith. That which more than anything resembles faith the beseeching prayer, is in truth a lack of faith a lack of faith that there is no evil, that there is nothing to ask for, that if things are going badly with you, then it only dem-onstrates that you ought to improve yourself, and that there is going on, that very thing which ought to be, and under which you ought to do that which has to be done.

10) Just now I wrote this coldly, understand-ing with difficulty that state in which you wish to live for God alone, and I see through this how there are people who absolutely never understand this, not knowing any other kind of life besides the worldly, for people. I know this state, but can-not just now call it up in myself, but only remem-ber it.

n) Everything which lives without conscious-280

September

ness, as I live when I sleep, as I lived in the womb of my mother, lives not materially, i.e., not know-ing matter, but lives. But life is something spiritual. Endeavouring to remember my state before consciousness, on the threshold of con-sciousness, I know only the feeling of depression, satisfaction, pleasure, suffering, but there is no conception of my body or of another’s. The con-ception of body (matter) manifests itself only when consciousness is manifested. The conception of body manifests itself only, because conscious-ness gives understanding of the presence in one’s self of the basis of everything (spiritual). And at the same time, as I know that I am the basis of everything, I know also that I am not the whole basis, but a part of it. And it is this being a part of a whole, these limits separating me from the whole, I know through my body : through my own body and the bodies surrounding me.

12) If you desire something, if you are afraid of something, that means that you do not believe in that God of love which is in you. If you had believed in Him, then you could not have wanted anything or have been afraid, because all desires of that God which lives in you are being always fulfilled, because God is all-powerful; and you would never have been afraid, because for God there is nothing terrible.

13) Not to think that you know in what the

1899

will of God really lies, but to be humble ; and then you will be loving. And the will of God in rela-tion to you, lies only in this.

14) People convincing others that reason can-not be the guide of life are those in whom reason is so perverted, that they clearly see that they have been led into a swamp.

15) The only instance where a man can and ought to occupy himself with himself, is when he feels unhappy. Unhappiness is the best condi-tion for perfection, the ascent to the higher steps. Unhappiness is a sign of one’s own imperfection. One ought to rejoice at these instances: it is the preparation of one’s self for work, a spiritual food.

1 6) Now I am an ordinary man, L. N. (Tol-stoi), and animal, and now I am the messenger of God. I am all the time the same man, but now I am the public and now I am the judge himself with the chain, fulfilling the highest respon-sibilities. One must put on the chain more often.

L’atterly I have got out of the habit, have weakened. I have only just now remembered.

17) Man is a being beyond time and beyond space who is conscious of himself in the conditions of space and time.

18) Games, cards, women, races, are alluring because they have been thought out for the biases. It is not for nothing that the wise teachers have

October

forbidden them. Artificial play is corrupting. They are needed for the blase, but the simple working people need the very simplest plays with-out preparation.

19) Only then will you produce true love, when you will resist offence, overcome offence with love, will love your enemy.

20) They desire, they are excited, they suffer only for trifles or for bad things. The good things are accomplished without excitement. It is from this that the word heart means malice. (Serdit, to get angry, to put into a passion, comes from sertse, the heart. Translator’s note.)

To-day Oct. 2. Y. P.

I am still ill, I am not suffering, but I feel threatened constantly. Morally I am better I remember God in myself more often, and death. It seems to me I have come out of the difficult place in Resurrection. . . . Kolichka went away. Sonya arrived she is ill.

I am continuing to write out from the note-books :

i ) I have made this note : Space comes from the consciousness of limits, from the conscious-ness of one’s own separateness; I am one, and the world is another. And in the world are simi-lar beings with limits: 2, 3, 4, ... to infinity.

These beings can find place only in space. 283

1899

From the consciousness of limits comes also time. I have thought this out again and can express it in this way: Separateness, the non-all-comprehen-siveness of our selves, is expressed in recognising a part of moving matter as ourselves. The part of matter which we recognise as ourselves gives us an understanding of space; that part of motion which we recognise as ourselves gives us a con-ception of time.

Or, in other words : We cannot imagine a part of matter in any other way than in space. To imagine a part of motion, we cannot in any other way than in time. Space comes from the im-possibility of imagining two or many objects be-yond time. Time comes from the impossibility of imagining two, many objects beyond space. Space is the possibility of representing to one’s self two, many objects at one and the same time. Time is the possibility of representing to one’s self two, many objects, in one and the same space (one goes out, the other enters).

Divisions cannot be in one space, without time. If there were no time (motion) all objects in space would be unmoving and they would form not many objects, but one space, undivided and filled with matter. If there were no space, there could be no motion and our “ self “ would not be separated by anything from all the rest. My body understood by me as my “ self,” and

October

understanding all the rest, is that part of matter which moves for a definite time and occupies a definite space.

(Not good, unclear, perhaps even untrue.)

2) Anarchy does not mean the absence of in-stitutions, but only the absence of those institu-tions to which people are compelled to submit by force, but those institutions to which people sub-mit themselves voluntarily, rationally. It seems to me that otherwise there cannot be established and ought not to be, a society of beings endowed with reason.

3) “Why is it that after sin, suffering does not follow that person who committed the sin? Then he would see what ought not to be done “ because people live not separately but in so-ciety and if every one suffered from the sin of each one, then every one would have to resist it.

4) Conscience is the memory of society assimi-lated by separate individuals.

5 ) In old age you experience the same thing as on a journey. At first your thoughts are on that place from which you are going, then on the journey itself, and then on the place to which you are going.

I experience this more and more often, thinking of death.

6) It is true that a great sin might be beneficial, by calling forth repentance before God, independ-

1899

ently from human judgment. Such a sin leads one away from the realm of human judgment, from vanity, which masters man, and hides from him his relation to God. 387

7) The physical growth is only a preparation of material for spiritual work, the service to God and man which begins with the withering of the body.

To-day Oct. 13. Y. P.

I am still not fully well. It is as it ought to be. But that does not hinder from living, think-ing and moving towards a fixed goal. Resurrec-tion advances poorly. Have sent away four chap-ters, I think not passable by the censor, but at least I think I have settled on one point, and that I won’t make any more great important changes. I do not cease thinking of brother Sergei, but be-cause of the weather and ill health I cannot make up my mind to go. . . . Sonya was in Moscow and is going again to-day. To-day I had a kind of intellectual idleness, not only to-day, but all these latter days. For Resurrection I have thought out good scenes. Concerning separate-ness which appears to us as matter in space and movement in time, I am thinking more and more often and more and more clearly.

I have also received Westrup’s pamphlets from America about the money, 388 which struck me by

October

explaining everything that was unclear in financial questions and reducing everything as it ought to be, to violence. ... If I get time I will write it out. I have another important, joyous thought, although an old one, but which came to me as a new one and which makes me very happy, namely :

i) The principal cause of family unhappiness is because people are brought up to think that marriage gives happiness. Sex attraction induces to marriage and it takes the form of a promise, a hope, for happiness, which is supported by public opinion and literature; but marriage is not happi-ness, but always suffering, which man pays for the satisfaction of his sex desire. Suffering in the form of lack of freedom, slavery, over-satiety, disgust of all kinds of spiritual and physical de-fects of the mate which one has to bear ; malicious-ness, stupidity, falsity, vanity, drunkenness, lazi-ness, miserliness, greed and corruption all de-fects which are especially difficult to bear when not in oneself but in another person, and from which one suffers as if they were one’s own; and the same with physical defects: ugliness, uncleanliness, stench, sores, insanity, etc., which are even more difficult to bear when not in oneself. All this, or at least something of this, will always be and to bear them will be difficult for every one. But that which ought to compensate: the care, satis-

1899

faction, aid, all these things are taken as a matter of course; while all defects as if they were not a matter of course, and the more one expected happi-ness from marriage the more one suffers.

The principal cause of this suffering, is that one expects that which does not happen, and does not expect that which always happens. And there-fore escape from this suffering is only by not ex-pecting joys, but by expecting the bad, being pre-pared to bear them. If you expect all that which is described in the beginning of “ The Thousand and One Nights,” if you expect drunkenness, stench, disgusting diseases then obstinacy, un-truthfulness, even drunkenness, can, if not exactly be forgiven, at least be a matter of no suffering and one can rejoice that there is absent that which might have been, that which is described in “ The Thousand and One Nights “ : that there is no insanity, cancer, etc. And then everything that is good will be appreciated.

But is it not in this, that the principal means of happiness in general lie ? And is it not therefore that people are so often unhappy, especially the rich ones? Instead of recognising oneself in the condition of a slave who has to labour for him-self and for others, and to labour in the way that the master wishes, people imagine that every kind of pleasure awaits them, that their whole work lies in enjoying them. How not be unhappy un-

October

der this circumstance? Then everything: work and obstacles and illnesses the necessary con-ditions of life appear as unexpected, terrible calamities. The poor, therefore, are less often unhappy: they know beforehand that before them lie labour, struggle, obstacles, and therefore they appreciate everything which gives them joy. But the rich, expecting only joys, see a calamity in every obstacle, and do not notice and do not ap-preciate those goods which they are enjoying. “ Blessed be the poor, for they shall be comforted; the hungry, for they shall be fed; and woe unto ye, the rich.” Oct. 14. Y. P. If I live.

Oct. 27. Y. P.

We are living alone: . . . Olga, 389 Andrusha, Julie 390 and Andrei Dmitrievich. 391 Everything is all right, but I am often indisposed: there are more ill days than healthy ones and therefore I write little. Sent off 19 chapters, 392 very much unfinished. I am working on the end. I have thought much, and perhaps well: i) About the freedom of the will, simply: Man is free in everything spiritual, in love: he can love or not love, more and less. In every-thing remaining he is not free, consequently in everything material. Man can direct and not di-rect his strength towards the service of God. In

1899

this one thing (but it is an enormous thing), he is free : he can pull or be driven.

2) ... of the workers, prostitution and many other things, all this is a necessary, inevitable con-sequence and condition of the pagan order of life in which we live, and to change either one or many of these, is impossible. What is to be done? Change the very order of this life, that on which it stands. How? By this, in the first place, by not taking part in this order, in that which sup-ports it ... etc. And, second, to do that in which man alone is absolutely free : to change self-ishness in his soul and everything which flows from it: malice, greed, violence, and everything else by love and by all that which flows from it: reason-ableness, humility, kindness and the rest. It is impossible to turn back the wheel of a machine by force, they are all bound together with cogs and other wheels but to let the steam go which will move them or not let it go is easy; thus it is terribly difficult to change the very outer con-ditions of life, but to be good or bad is easy. But this being good or evil changes all the outer con-ditions of life.

3) Our life is the freeing of the enclosed the expansion of the limits in which the illimitable principle acts. This expansion of the limits ap-pears to us as matter in motion. The limit of ex-pansion in space appears to us as matter. That

November

part of matter which we recognise as ourselves we call our body; the other part we call the world. The limit of expansion in time we call motion. That part of motion which we recognise as our-selves we call our life; the other part we call the life of the world. All of life is the expansion of these limits, the being freed from them. (All unclear, inexact.)

Nov. 20. Moscow.

Much I have not written out. I am in Mos-cow. . . . For 70 years I have been lowering and lowering my opinion of women and still it has to be lowered more and more. The woman ques-tion! How can there not be a woman question? Only not in this, how women should begin to di-rect life, but in this, how they should stop ruining it.

All morning I have not been writing and have been thinking two things:

i ) We speak of the end of life although it is true, not the one which we understand, but the one which would be understood by the highest reason. The purpose is just the same as the cause. The cause is looking backward, the purpose is look-ing forward, but the cause, the conception of the cause (and therefore of an end) appears only then when there is time, i.e., a being is limited in his conceptions by time. And therefore for God,

1899

and for man living a Godly life, there is no pur-pose. There is life in which consciousness grows (? 393 ) and that is all.

2) A drop fusing with a great drop, a pool, ceases to be and begins to be.

To-day December 18. Moscow.

Almost a month I have not written. Have been severely ill. 394 Had acute pain for one day, then a respite, and weakness. And death became more than natural, almost desirable. And so it has remained now, when I am getting well that is a new, joyous step.

Finished Resurrection. Not good, uncorrected, hurried; but it has fallen from me and I am no longer interested. Serezha is here, Masha and her husband, Maria Alexandrovna.

I am all right. Have not yet begun to write anything. More than anything I am occupied with , 395 but I have no desire for any-

thing very much, am resting. Wrote letters.

I am attempting to write out my notes :

1) (Trifles) about many-voiced music. It is necessary that the voice say something, but here there are many voices and each one says nothing.

2) One of the principal causes of evil in our life is the faith cultivated in our Christian world, the faith in the crude Hebrew personal God, when the principal sign (if one can express it so) of

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God is that he is not limited, by anything, conse-quently not personal.

3 ) One should conquer death not death, but the fear of death coming from a lack of under-standing of life. If only you understand life and its necessarily good purpose death then you cease to fear it, to resist it. And when you cease to fear it, you cease to serve yourself, a mortal, and you will serve an immortal : God, from whom you came and to whom you are going.

4) Matter is everything which is accessible to our senses. Science forces us to suppose matter inaccessible to our senses. In this realm, there can be beings composed of that matter and per-ceiving it, matter inaccessible to our senses. I do not think that there are such beings; I only think that our matter and our senses perceiving it, are only one of innumerable 396 possibilities of life.

5 ) “I am a slave, I am a worm, I am a Czar, I am a God.” 397 Slave and worm true, but Czar and God untrue. It is in vain that people attrib-ute a special significance and greatness to his rea-son. The limits of human reason are very narrow and are seen at once. These limits are the infinity of space and time. Man sees the final answers to the questions he asks himself, recede and recede in time and also in space, and in both these realms.

6) I read about Englehardt’s book: Evolution, the Progress of Cruelty. 598 I think that here

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there is a great deal of truth. Cruelty has in-creased mainly because division of labour has been brought to pass, which assists the increase of the material wealth of man. Every one speaks of the benefits of the division of labour, not see-ing that the inevitable condition of the division of labour, besides the mechanising of man, is also the removing of those conditions which call forth a human, moral communion between people. If we are doing the same work, as agricultural labour-ers, then naturally there would be established be-tween us an exchange of service, a mutual aid, but between the shepherd and the factory-weaver, there can be no communion.

(This seems untrue; I shall think it over.) 7) What would God’s attitude be towards prayer, if there were such a God to whom one could pray? Just the same as would be the atti-tude of the owner of a house where water had been introduced and to whom the inhabitants would come to ask for water. The water has been intro-duced. You have only to turn the tap. In the same way everything has been prepared for men which is necessary to them, and God is not at fault that instead of making use of the clean water which was there, some of the tenants carry water from a stagnant pond, others fall into de-spair from lack of water and beg for that which had been given them in such abundance.

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8) ...

9) One can by personal experience verify the truth, that God, a part of Whom is my own self, is love, and by the experimental way convince one’s self of this truth. As soon as love is violated, life ends. There is no desire to do anything, everything is depressing, and on the contrary, as soon as love is restored, as soon as you have made peace with those whom you quarrelled, forgiven, received forgiveness then you wish to live, to act, everything seems easy and possible.

10) It would be good to express even in ap-proximate numbers and then graphically, that quantity of labour, of working days, which rich people use up in their lives. Approximately more or less, this could be expressed by money. If I spend 10 roubles a day, that means that 20 men are working constantly for me. (Unclear, not what I want to say.)

n) They generally say: “That is very deep, and therefore not to be fully understood.” This is untrue. On the contrary. Everything that is deep is clear to transparency. Just as water is murky on top, but the deeper it is, the more trans-parent.

12) One small part of people, about 20 per cent., is insane by itself, possessed by a mania of egoism, which reaches to the point of concentra-tion of all spiritual strengths on oneself; another,

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the greater part, almost 80 per cent., is hypnotised by the scientific, by the artistic . . . and princi-pally . . . hypnotism, and also does not make use of its reason. Therefore progress in the world is always attained by the insane possessed by the same kind of insanity by which the majority is pos-sessed.

13) I experience the feeling of peace, of satis-faction, when I am ill, when there takes place in me the destruction of the limits of my personality. As soon as I get well I experience the opposite: restlessness, dissatisfaction. Are these not obvi-ous signs that the destruction of the limits of per-sonality in this world, is the entrance of life into new limits?

I have finished. December ig. Moscow. If I live.

To-day December 20. Moscow.

My health is not good. My spiritual condition is good, ready for death. In the evenings there are many people. I tire. In number 5i, 399 Resurrection did not appear and I was sorry. This is bad.

I thought out a philosophic definition of life. To-day I thought well about The Coupon. Perhaps I shall write it out.