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+Project Gutenberg's Thoughts Evoked By The Census Of Moscow, by Tolstoi
+#12 in our series by Lyof N. Tolstoi
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+Title: The Moscow Census - From "What to do?"
+
+Author: Lyof N. Tolstoi
+
+Release Date: November, 2002  [Etext #3541]
+[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
+[The actual date this file first posted = 05/31/01]
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+Project Gutenberg's Thoughts Evoked By The Census Of Moscow, by Tolstoi
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+Please be advised that David sent the two Moscow Census pieces to me
+as one file, and that I split it into two, since some people have a
+bit of trouble when we put two titles in one file.  However, I did NOT
+change the numbering of the footnotes, so they all appear at the end
+of each file.
+
+
+
+
+
+This etext was produced by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk,
+from the 1887 Thomas Y. Crowell edition.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE MOSCOW CENSUS--FROM "WHAT TO DO?"
+by Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
+
+
+
+
+Translated from the Russian by
+Isabel F. Hapgood
+
+
+
+
+THOUGHTS EVOKED BY THE CENSUS OF MOSCOW.  [1884-1885.]
+
+
+
+And the people asked him, saying, What shall we do then?
+
+He answereth and saith unto them, He that hath two coats, let him
+impart to him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do
+likewise--LUKE iii. 10. 11.
+
+Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust
+doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:
+
+But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor
+rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:
+
+For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
+
+The light of the body is the eye:  if therefore thine eye be single,
+thy whole body shall be full of light.
+
+But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness.
+If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that
+darkness!
+
+No man can serve two masters:  for either he will hate the one, and
+love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the
+other.  Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
+
+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
+raiment?--MATT. vi. 19-25.
+
+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.--MATT. vi. 31-34.
+
+For it is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye, than for a
+rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.--MATT. xix. 24; MARK x.
+25; LUKE xviii. 25.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+
+I had lived all my life out of town.  When, in 1881, I went to live
+in Moscow, the poverty of the town greatly surprised me.  I am
+familiar with poverty in the country; but city poverty was new and
+incomprehensible to me.  In Moscow it was impossible to pass along
+the street without encountering beggars, and especially beggars who
+are unlike those in the country.  These beggars do not go about with
+their pouches in the name of Christ, as country beggars are
+accustomed to do, but these beggars are without the pouch and the
+name of Christ.  The Moscow beggars carry no pouches, and do not ask
+for alms.  Generally, when they meet or pass you, they merely try to
+catch your eye; and, according to your look, they beg or refrain from
+it.  I know one such beggar who belongs to the gentry.  The old man
+walks slowly along, bending forward every time he sets his foot down.
+When he meets you, he rests on one foot and makes you a kind of
+salute.  If you stop, he pulls off his hat with its cockade, and bows
+and begs:  if you do not halt, he pretends that that is merely his
+way of walking, and he passes on, bending forward in like manner on
+the other foot.  He is a real Moscow beggar, a cultivated man.  At
+first I did not know why the Moscow beggars do not ask alms directly;
+afterwards I came to understand why they do not beg, but still I did
+not understand their position.
+
+Once, as I was passing through Afanasievskaya Lane, I saw a policeman
+putting a ragged peasant, all swollen with dropsy, into a cab.  I
+inquired:  "What is that for?"
+
+The policeman answered:  "For asking alms."
+
+"Is that forbidden?"
+
+"Of course it is forbidden," replied the policeman.
+
+The sufferer from dropsy was driven off.  I took another cab, and
+followed him.  I wanted to know whether it was true that begging alms
+was prohibited and how it was prohibited.  I could in no wise
+understand how one man could be forbidden to ask alms of any other
+man; and besides, I did not believe that it was prohibited, when
+Moscow is full of beggars.  I went to the station-house whither the
+beggar had been taken.  At a table in the station-house sat a man
+with a sword and a pistol.  I inquired:
+
+"For what was this peasant arrested?"
+
+The man with the sword and pistol gazed sternly at me, and said:
+
+"What business is it of yours?"
+
+But feeling conscious that it was necessary to offer me some
+explanation, he added:
+
+"The authorities have ordered that all such persons are to be
+arrested; of course it had to be done."
+
+I went out.  The policeman who had brought the beggar was seated on
+the window-sill in the ante-chamber, staring gloomily at a note-book.
+I asked him:
+
+"Is it true that the poor are forbidden to ask alms in Christ's
+name?"
+
+The policeman came to himself, stared at me, then did not exactly
+frown, but apparently fell into a doze again, and said, as he sat on
+the window-sill:-
+
+"The authorities have so ordered, which shows that it is necessary,"
+and betook himself once more to his note-book.  I went out on the
+porch, to the cab.
+
+"Well, how did it turn out?  Have they arrested him?" asked the
+cabman.  The man was evidently interested in this affair also.
+
+"Yes," I answered.  The cabman shook his head.  "Why is it forbidden
+here in Moscow to ask alms in Christ's name?" I inquired.
+
+"Who knows?" said the cabman.
+
+"How is this?" said I, "he is Christ's poor, and he is taken to the
+station-house."
+
+"A stop has been put to that now, it is not allowed," said the cab-
+driver.
+
+On several occasions afterwards, I saw policemen conducting beggars
+to the station house, and then to the Yusupoff house of correction.
+Once I encountered on the Myasnitzkaya a company of these beggars,
+about thirty in number.  In front of them and behind them marched
+policemen.  I inquired:  "What for?"--"For asking alms."
+
+It turned out that all these beggars, several of whom you meet with
+in every street in Moscow, and who stand in files near every church
+during services, and especially during funeral services, are
+forbidden to ask alms.
+
+But why are some of them caught and locked up somewhere, while others
+are left alone?
+
+This I could not understand.  Either there are among them legal and
+illegal beggars, or there are so many of them that it is impossible
+to apprehend them all; or do others assemble afresh when some are
+removed?
+
+There are many varieties of beggars in Moscow:  there are some who
+live by this profession; there are also genuine poor people, who have
+chanced upon Moscow in some manner or other, and who are really in
+want.
+
+Among these poor people, there are many simple, common peasants, and
+women in their peasant costume.  I often met such people.  Some of
+them have fallen ill here, and on leaving the hospital they can
+neither support themselves here, nor get away from Moscow.  Some of
+them, moreover, have indulged in dissipation (such was probably the
+case of the dropsical man); some have not been ill, but are people
+who have been burnt out of their houses, or old people, or women with
+children; some, too, were perfectly healthy and able to work.  These
+perfectly healthy peasants who were engaged in begging, particularly
+interested me.  These healthy, peasant beggars, who were fit for
+work, also interested me, because, from the date of my arrival in
+Moscow, I had been in the habit of going to the Sparrow Hills with
+two peasants, and sawing wood there for the sake of exercise.  These
+two peasants were just as poor as those whom I encountered on the
+streets.  One was Piotr, a soldier from Kaluga; the other Semyon, a
+peasant from Vladimir.  They possessed nothing except the wages of
+their body and hands.  And with these hands they earned, by dint of
+very hard labor, from forty to forty-five kopeks a day, out of which
+each of them was laying by savings, the Kaluga man for a fur coat,
+the Vladimir man in order to get enough to return to his village.
+Therefore, on meeting precisely such men in the streets, I took an
+especial interest in them.
+
+Why did these men toil, while those others begged?
+
+On encountering a peasant of this stamp, I usually asked him how he
+had come to that situation.  Once I met a peasant with some gray in
+his beard, but healthy.  He begs.  I ask him who is he, whence comes
+he?  He says that he came from Kaluga to get work.  At first he found
+employment chopping up old wood for use in stoves.  He and his
+comrade finished all the chopping which one householder had; then
+they sought other work, but found none; his comrade had parted from
+him, and for two weeks he himself had been struggling along; he had
+spent all his money, he had no saw, and no axe, and no money to buy
+anything.  I gave him money for a saw, and told him of a place where
+he could find work.  I had already made arrangements with Piotr and
+Semyon, that they should take an assistant, and they looked up a mate
+for him.
+
+"See that you come.  There is a great deal of work there."
+
+"I will come; why should I not come?  Do you suppose I like to beg?
+I can work."
+
+The peasant declares that he will come, and it seems to me that he is
+not deceiving me, and that he intents to come.
+
+On the following day I go to my peasants, and inquire whether that
+man has arrived.  He has not been there; and in this way several men
+deceived me.  And those also deceived me who said that they only
+required money for a ticket in order to return home, and who chanced
+upon me again in the street a week later.  Many of these I
+recognized, and they recognized me, and sometimes, having forgotten
+me, they repeated the same trick on me; and others, on catching sight
+of me, beat a retreat.  Thus I perceived, that in the ranks of this
+class also deceivers existed.  But these cheats were very pitiable
+creatures:  all of them were but half-clad, poverty-stricken, gaunt,
+sickly men; they were the very people who really freeze to death, or
+hang themselves, as we learn from the newspapers.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+
+When I mentioned this poverty of the town to inhabitants of the town,
+they always said to me:  "Oh, all that you have seen is nothing.  You
+ought to see the Khitroff market-place, and the lodging-houses for
+the night there.  There you would see a regular 'golden company.'"
+{1}  One jester told me that this was no longer a company, but a
+GOLDEN REGIMENT:  so greatly had their numbers increased.  The jester
+was right, but he would have been still more accurate if he had said
+that these people now form in Moscow neither a company nor a
+regiment, but an entire army, almost fifty thousand in number, I
+think.  [The old inhabitants, when they spoke to me about the poverty
+in town, always referred to it with a certain satisfaction, as though
+pluming themselves over me, because they knew it.  I remember that
+when I was in London, the old inhabitants there also rather boasted
+when they spoke of the poverty of London.  The case is the same with
+us.] {2}
+
+And I wanted to have a sight of this poverty of which I had been
+told.  Several times I set out in the direction of the Khitroff
+market-place, but on every occasion I began to feel uncomfortable and
+ashamed.  "Why am I going to gaze on the sufferings of people whom I
+cannot help?" said one voice.  "No, if you live here, and see all the
+charms of city life, go and view this also," said another voice.  In
+December three years ago, therefore, on a cold and windy day, I
+betook myself to that centre of poverty, the Khitroff market-place.
+This was at four o'clock in the afternoon of a week-day.  As I passed
+through the Solyanka, I already began to see more and more people in
+old garments which had not originally belonged to them, and in still
+stranger foot-gear, people with a peculiar, unhealthy hue of
+countenance, and especially with a singular indifference to every
+thing around them, which was peculiar to them all.  A man in the
+strangest of all possible attire, which was utterly unlike any thing
+else, walked along with perfect unconcern, evidently without a
+thought of the appearance which he must present to the eyes of
+others.  All these people were making their way towards a single
+point.  Without inquiring the way, with which I was not acquainted, I
+followed them, and came out on the Khitroff market-place.  On the
+market-place, women both old and young, of the same description, in
+tattered cloaks and jackets of various shapes, in ragged shoes and
+overshoes, and equally unconcerned, notwithstanding the hideousness
+of their attire, sat, bargained for something, strolled about, and
+scolded.  There were not many people in the market itself.  Evidently
+market-hours were over, and the majority of the people were ascending
+the rise beyond the market and through the place, all still
+proceeding in one direction.  I followed them.  The farther I
+advanced, the greater in numbers were the people of this sort who
+flowed together on one road.  Passing through the market-place and
+proceeding along the street, I overtook two women; one was old, the
+other young.  Both wore something ragged and gray.  As they walked
+they were discussing some matter.  After every necessary word, they
+uttered one or two unnecessary ones, of the most improper character.
+They were not intoxicated, but merely troubled about something; and
+neither the men who met them, nor those who walked in front of them
+and behind them, paid any attention to the language which was so
+strange to me.  In these quarters, evidently, people always talked
+so.  Ascending the rise, we reached a large house on a corner.  The
+greater part of the people who were walking along with me halted at
+this house.  They stood all over the sidewalk of this house, and sat
+on the curbstone, and even the snow in the street was thronged with
+the same kind of people.  On the right side of the entrance door were
+the women, on the left the men.  I walked past the women, past the
+men (there were several hundred of them in all) and halted where the
+line came to an end.  The house before which these people were
+waiting was the Lyapinsky free lodging-house for the night.  The
+throng of people consisted of night lodgers, who were waiting to be
+let in.  At five o'clock in the afternoon, the house is opened, and
+the people permitted to enter.  Hither had come nearly all the people
+whom I had passed on my way.
+
+I halted where the line of men ended.  Those nearest me began to
+stare at me, and attracted my attention to them by their glances.
+The fragments of garments which covered these bodies were of the most
+varied sorts.  But the expression of all the glances directed towards
+me by these people was identical.  In all eyes the question was
+expressed:  "Why have you, a man from another world, halted here
+beside us?  Who are you?  Are you a self-satisfied rich man who wants
+to enjoy our wretchedness, to get rid of his tedium, and to torment
+us still more? or are you that thing which does not and can not
+exist,--a man who pities us?"  This query was on every face.  You
+glance about, encounter some one's eye, and turn away.  I wished to
+talk with some one of them, but for a long time I could not make up
+my mind to it.  But our glances had drawn us together already while
+our tongues remained silent.  Greatly as our lives had separated us,
+after the interchange of two or three glances we felt that we were
+both men, and we ceased to fear each other.  The nearest of all to me
+was a peasant with a swollen face and a red beard, in a tattered
+caftan, and patched overshoes on his bare feet.  And the weather was
+eight degrees below zero. {3}  For the third or fourth time I
+encountered his eyes, and I felt so near to him that I was no longer
+ashamed to accost him, but ashamed not to say something to him.  I
+inquired where he came from? he answered readily, and we began to
+talk; others approached.  He was from Smolensk, and had come to seek
+employment that he might earn his bread and taxes.  "There is no
+work," said he:  "the soldiers have taken it all away.  So now I am
+loafing about; as true as I believe in God, I have had nothing to eat
+for two days."  He spoke modestly, with an effort at a smile.  A
+sbiten{4}-seller, an old soldier, stood near by.  I called him up.
+He poured out his sbiten.  The peasant took a boiling-hot glassful in
+his hands, and as he tried before drinking not to let any of the heat
+escape in vain, and warmed his hands over it, he related his
+adventures to me.  These adventures, or the histories of them, are
+almost always identical:  the man has been a laborer, then he has
+changed his residence, then his purse containing his money and ticket
+has been stolen from him in the night lodging-house; now it is
+impossible to get away from Moscow.  He told me that he kept himself
+warm by day in the dram-shops; that he nourished himself on the bits
+of bread in these drinking places, when they were given to him; and
+when he was driven out of them, he came hither to the Lyapinsky house
+for a free lodging.  He was only waiting for the police to make their
+rounds, when, as he had no passport, he would be taken to jail, and
+then despatched by stages to his place of settlement.  "They say that
+the inspection will be made on Friday," said he, "then they will
+arrest me.  If I can only get along until Friday."  (The jail, and
+the journey by stages, represent the Promised Land to him.)
+
+As he told his story, three men from among the throng corroborated
+his statements, and said that they were in the same predicament.  A
+gaunt, pale, long-nosed youth, with merely a shirt on the upper
+portion of his body, and that torn on the shoulders, and a cap
+without a visor, forced his way sidelong through the crowd.  He
+shivered violently and incessantly, but tried to smile disdainfully
+at the peasants' remarks, thinking by this means to adopt the proper
+tone with me, and he stared at me.  I offered him some sbiten; he
+also, on taking the glass, warmed his hands over it; but no sooner
+had he begun to speak, than he was thrust aside by a big, black,
+hook-nosed individual, in a chintz shirt and waistcoat, without a
+hat.  The hook-nosed man asked for some sbiten also.  Then came a
+tall old man, with a mass of beard, clad in a great-coat girded with
+a rope, and in bast shoes, who was drunk.  Then a small man with a
+swollen face and tearful eyes, in a brown nankeen round-jacket, with
+his bare knees protruding from the holes in his summer trousers, and
+knocking together with cold.  He shivered so that he could not hold
+his glass, and spilled it over himself.  The men began to reproach
+him.  He only smiled in a woe-begone way, and went on shivering.
+Then came a crooked monster in rags, with pattens on his bare feet;
+then some sort of an officer; then something in the ecclesiastical
+line; then something strange and nose-less,--all hungry and cold,
+beseeching and submissive, thronged round me, and pressed close to
+the sbiten.  They drank up all the sbiten.  One asked for money, and
+I gave it.  Then another asked, then a third, and the whole crowd
+besieged me.  Confusion and a press resulted.  The porter of the
+adjoining house shouted to the crowd to clear the sidewalk in front
+of his house, and the crowd submissively obeyed his orders.  Some
+managers stepped out of the throng, and took me under their
+protection, and wanted to lead me forth out of the press; but the
+crowd, which had at first been scattered over the sidewalk, now
+became disorderly, and hustled me.  All stared at me and begged; and
+each face was more pitiful and suffering and humble than the last.  I
+distributed all that I had with me.  I had not much money, something
+like twenty rubles; and in company with the crowd, I entered the
+Lyapinsky lodging-house.  This house is huge.  It consists of four
+sections.  In the upper stories are the men's quarters; in the lower,
+the women's.  I first entered the women's place; a vast room all
+occupied with bunks, resembling the third-class bunks on the railway.
+These bunks were arranged in two rows, one above the other.  The
+women, strange, tattered creatures, both old and young, wearing
+nothing over their dresses, entered and took their places, some below
+and some above.  Some of the old ones crossed themselves, and uttered
+a petition for the founder of this refuge; some laughed and scolded.
+I went up-stairs.  There the men had installed themselves; among them
+I espied one of those to whom I had given money.  [On catching sight
+of him, I all at once felt terribly abashed, and I made haste to
+leave the room.  And it was with a sense of absolute crime that I
+quitted that house and returned home.  At home I entered over the
+carpeted stairs into the ante-room, whose floor was covered with
+cloth; and having removed my fur coat, I sat down to a dinner of five
+courses, waited on by two lackeys in dress-coats, white neckties, and
+white gloves.
+
+Thirty years ago I witnessed in Paris a man's head cut off by the
+guillotine in the presence of thousands of spectators.  I knew that
+the man was a horrible criminal.  I was acquainted with all the
+arguments which people have been devising for so many centuries, in
+order to justify this sort of deed.  I knew that they had done this
+expressly, deliberately.  But at the moment when head and body were
+severed, and fell into the trough, I groaned, and apprehended, not
+with my mind, but with my heart and my whole being, that all the
+arguments which I had heard anent the death-penalty were arrant
+nonsense; that, no matter how many people might assemble in order to
+perpetrate a murder, no matter what they might call themselves,
+murder is murder, the vilest sin in the world, and that that crime
+had been committed before my very eyes.  By my presence and non-
+interference, I had lent my approval to that crime, and had taken
+part in it.  So now, at the sight of this hunger, cold, and
+degradation of thousands of persons, I understood not with my mind,
+but with my heart and my whole being, that the existence of tens of
+thousands of such people in Moscow, while I and other thousands dined
+on fillets and sturgeon, and covered my horses and my floors with
+cloth and rugs,--no matter what the wise ones of this world might say
+to me about its being a necessity,--was a crime, not perpetrated a
+single time, but one which was incessantly being perpetrated over and
+over again, and that I, in my luxury, was not only an accessory, but
+a direct accomplice in the matter.  The difference for me between
+these two impressions was this, that I might have shouted to the
+assassins who stood around the guillotine, and perpetrated the
+murder, that they were committing a crime, and have tried with all my
+might to prevent the murder.  But while so doing I should have known
+that my action would not prevent the murder.  But here I might not
+only have given sbiten and the money which I had with me, but the
+coat from my back, and every thing that was in my house.  But this I
+had not done; and therefore I felt, I feel, and shall never cease to
+feel, myself an accomplice in this constantly repeated crime, so long
+as I have superfluous food and any one else has none at all, so long
+as I have two garments while any one else has not even one.] {5}
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+
+That very evening, on my return from the Lyapinsky house, I related
+my impressions to a friend.  The friend, an inhabitant of the city,
+began to tell me, not without satisfaction, that this was the most
+natural phenomenon of town life possible, that I only saw something
+extraordinary in it because of my provincialism, that it had always
+been so, and always would be so, and that such must be and is the
+inevitable condition of civilization.  In London it is even worse.
+Of course there is nothing wrong about it, and it is impossible to be
+displeased with it.  I began to reply to my friend, but with so much
+heat and ill-temper, that my wife ran in from the adjoining room to
+inquire what had happened.  It appears that, without being conscious
+of it myself, I had been shouting, with tears in my voice, and
+flourishing my hands at my friend.  I shouted:  "It's impossible to
+live thus, impossible to live thus, impossible!"  They made me feel
+ashamed of my unnecessary warmth; they told me that I could not talk
+quietly about any thing, that I got disagreeably excited; and they
+proved to me, especially, that the existence of such unfortunates
+could not possibly furnish any excuse for imbittering the lives of
+those about me.
+
+I felt that this was perfectly just, and held my peace; but in the
+depths of my soul I was conscious that I was in the right, and I
+could not regain my composure.
+
+And the life of the city, which had, even before this, been so
+strange and repellent to me, now disgusted me to such a degree, that
+all the pleasures of a life of luxury, which had hitherto appeared to
+me as pleasures, become tortures to me.  And try as I would, to
+discover in my own soul any justification whatever for our life, I
+could not, without irritation, behold either my own or other people's
+drawing-rooms, nor our tables spread in the lordly style, nor our
+equipages and horses, nor shops, theatres, and assemblies.  I could
+not behold alongside these the hungry, cold, and down-trodden
+inhabitants of the Lyapinsky house.  And I could not rid myself of
+the thought that these two things were bound up together, that the
+one arose from the other.  I remember, that, as this feeling of my
+own guilt presented itself to me at the first blush, so it persisted
+in me, but to this feeling a second was speedily added which
+overshadowed it.
+
+When I mentioned my impressions of the Lyapinsky house to my nearest
+friends and acquaintances, they all gave me the same answer as the
+first friend at whom I had begun to shout; but, in addition to this,
+they expressed their approbation of my kindness of heart and my
+sensibility, and gave me to understand that this sight had so
+especially worked upon me because I, Lyof Nikolaevitch, was very kind
+and good.  And I willingly believed this.  And before I had time to
+look about me, instead of the feeling of self-reproach and regret,
+which I had at first experienced, there came a sense of satisfaction
+with my own kindliness, and a desire to exhibit it to people.
+
+"It really must be," I said to myself, "that I am not especially
+responsible for this by the luxury of my life, but that it is the
+indispensable conditions of existence that are to blame.  In truth, a
+change in my mode of life cannot rectify the evil which I have seen:
+by altering my manner of life, I shall only make myself and those
+about me unhappy, and the other miseries will remain the same as
+ever.  And therefore my problem lies not in a change of my own life,
+as it had first seemed to me, but in aiding, so far as in me lies, in
+the amelioration of the situation of those unfortunate beings who
+have called forth my compassion.  The whole point lies here,--that I
+am a very kind, amiable man, and that I wish to do good to my
+neighbors."  And I began to think out a plan of beneficent activity,
+in which I might exhibit my benevolence.  I must confess, however,
+that while devising this plan of beneficent activity, I felt all the
+time, in the depths of my soul, that that was not the thing; but, as
+often happens, activity of judgment and imagination drowned that
+voice of conscience within me.  At that juncture, the census came up.
+This struck me as a means for instituting that benevolence in which I
+proposed to exhibit my charitable disposition.  I knew of many
+charitable institutions and societies which were in existence in
+Moscow, but all their activity seemed to me both wrongly directed and
+insignificant in comparison with what I intended to do.  And I
+devised the following scheme:  to arouse the sympathy of the wealthy
+for the poverty of the city, to collect money, to get people together
+who were desirous of assisting in this matter, and to visit all the
+refuges of poverty in company with the census, and, in addition to
+the work of the census, to enter into communion with the unfortunate,
+to learn the particulars of their necessities, and to assist them
+with money, with work, by sending them away from Moscow, by placing
+their children in school, and the old people in hospitals and
+asylums.  And not only that, I thought, but these people who
+undertake this can be formed into a permanent society, which, by
+dividing the quarters of Moscow among its members, will be able to
+see to it that this poverty and beggary shall not be bred; they will
+incessantly annihilate it at its very inception; then they will
+fulfil their duty, not so much by healing as by a course of hygiene
+for the wretchedness of the city.  I fancied that there would be no
+more simply needy, not to mention abjectly poor persons, in the town,
+and that all of us wealthy individuals would thereafter be able to
+sit in our drawing-rooms, and eat our five-course dinners, and ride
+in our carriages to theatres and assemblies, and be no longer annoyed
+with such sights as I had seen at the Lyapinsky house.
+
+Having concocted this plan, I wrote an article on the subject; and
+before sending it to the printer, I went to some acquaintances, from
+whom I hoped for sympathy.  I said the same thing to every one whom I
+met that day (and I applied chiefly to the rich), and nearly the same
+that I afterwards printed in my memoir; proposed to take advantage of
+the census to inquire into the wretchedness of Moscow, and to succor
+it, both by deeds and money, and to do it in such a manner that there
+should be no poor people in Moscow, and so that we rich ones might be
+able, with a quiet conscience, to enjoy the blessings of life to
+which we were accustomed.  All listened to me attentively and
+seriously, but nevertheless the same identical thing happened with
+every one of them without exception.  No sooner did my hearers
+comprehend the question, than they seemed to feel awkward and
+somewhat mortified.  They seemed to be ashamed, and principally on my
+account, because I was talking nonsense, and nonsense which it was
+impossible to openly characterize as such.  Some external cause
+appeared to compel my hearers to be forbearing with this nonsense of
+mine.
+
+"Ah, yes! of course.  That would be very good," they said to me.  "It
+is a self-understood thing that it is impossible not to sympathize
+with this.  Yes, your idea is a capital one.  I have thought of that
+myself, but . . . we are so indifferent, as a rule, that you can
+hardly count on much success . . . however, so far as I am concerned,
+I am, of course, ready to assist."
+
+They all said something of this sort to me.  They all agreed, but
+agreed, so it seemed to me, not in consequence of my convictions, and
+not in consequence of their own wish, but as the result of some
+outward cause, which did not permit them not to agree.  I had already
+noticed this, and, since not one of them stated the sum which he was
+willing to contribute, I was obliged to fix it myself, and to ask:
+"So I may count on you for three hundred, or two hundred, or one
+hundred, or twenty-five rubles?"  And not one of them gave me any
+money.  I mention this because, when people give money for that which
+they themselves desire, they generally make haste to give it.  For a
+box to see Sarah Bernhardt, they will instantly place the money in
+your hand, to clinch the bargain.  Here, however, out of all those
+who agreed to contribute, and who expressed their sympathy, not one
+of them proposed to give me the money on the spot, but they merely
+assented in silence to the sum which I suggested.  In the last house
+which I visited on that day, in the evening, I accidentally came upon
+a large company.  The mistress of the house had busied herself with
+charity for several years.  Numerous carriages stood at the door,
+several lackeys in rich liveries were sitting in the ante-chamber.
+In the vast drawing-room, around two tables and lamps, sat ladies and
+young girls, in costly garments, dressing small dolls; and there were
+several young men there also, hovering about the ladies.  The dolls
+prepared by these ladies were to be drawn in a lottery for the poor.
+
+The sight of this drawing-room, and of the people assembled in it,
+struck me very unpleasantly.  Not to mention the fact that the
+property of the persons there congregated amounted to many millions,
+not to mention the fact that the mere income from the capital here
+expended on dresses, laces, bronzes, brooches, carriages, horses,
+liveries, and lackeys, was a hundred-fold greater than all that these
+ladies could earn; not to mention the outlay, the trip hither of all
+these ladies and gentlemen; the gloves, linen, extra time, the
+candles, the tea, the sugar, and the cakes had cost the hostess a
+hundred times more than what they were engaged in making here.  I saw
+all this, and therefore I could understand, that precisely here I
+should find no sympathy with my mission:  but I had come in order to
+make my proposition, and, difficult as this was for me, I said what I
+intended.  (I said very nearly the same thing that is contained in my
+printed article.)
+
+Out of all the persons there present, one individual offered me
+money, saying that she did not feel equal to going among the poor
+herself on account of her sensibility, but that she would give money;
+how much money she would give, and when, she did not say.  Another
+individual and a young man offered their services in going about
+among the poor, but I did not avail myself of their offer.  The
+principal person to whom I appealed, told me that it would be
+impossible to do much because means were lacking.  Means were lacking
+because all the rich people in Moscow were already on the lists, and
+all of them were asked for all that they could possibly give; because
+on all these benefactors rank, medals, and other dignities were
+bestowed; because in order to secure financial success, some new
+dignities must be secured from the authorities, and that this was the
+only practical means, but this was extremely difficult.
+
+On my return home that night, I lay down to sleep not only with a
+presentment that my idea would come to nothing, but with shame and a
+consciousness that all day long I had been engaged in a very
+repulsive and disgraceful business.  But I did not give up this
+undertaking.  In the first place, the matter had been begun, and
+false shame would have prevented my abandoning it; in the second
+place, not only the success of this scheme, but the very fact that I
+was busying myself with it, afforded me the possibility of continuing
+to live in the conditions under which I was then living; failure
+entailed upon me the necessity of renouncing my present existence and
+of seeking new paths of life.  And this I unconsciously dreaded, and
+I could not believe the inward voice, and I went on with what I had
+begun.
+
+Having sent my article to the printer, I read the proof of it to the
+City Council (Dum).  I read it, stumbling, and blushing even to
+tears, I felt so awkward.  And I saw that it was equally awkward for
+all my hearers.  In answer to my question at the conclusion of my
+reading, as to whether the superintendents of the census would accept
+my proposition to retain their places with the object of becoming
+mediators between society and the needy, an awkward silence ensued.
+Then two orators made speeches.  These speeches in some measure
+corrected the awkwardness of my proposal; sympathy for me was
+expressed, but the impracticability of my proposition, which all had
+approved, was demonstrated.  Everybody breathed more freely.  But
+when, still desirous of gaining my object, I afterwards asked the
+superintendents separately:  Were they willing, while taking the
+census, to inquire into the needs of the poor, and to retain their
+posts, in order to serve as go-betweens between the poor and the
+rich? they all grew uneasy again.  They seemed to say to me with
+their glances:  "Why, we have just condoned your folly out of respect
+to you, and here you are beginning it again!"  Such was the
+expression of their faces, but they assured me in words that they
+agreed; and two of them said in the very same words, as though they
+had entered into a compact together:  "We consider ourselves MORALLY
+BOUND to do this."  The same impression was produced by my
+communication to the student-census-takers, when I said to them, that
+while taking our statistics, we should follow up, in addition to the
+objects of the census, the object of benevolence.  When we discussed
+this, I observed that they were ashamed to look the kind-hearted man,
+who was talking nonsense, in the eye.  My article produced the same
+impression on the editor of the newspaper, when I handed it to him;
+on my son, on my wife, on the most widely different persons.  All
+felt awkward, for some reason or other; but all regarded it as
+indispensable to applaud the idea itself, and all, immediately after
+this expression of approbation, began to express their doubts as to
+its success, and began for some reason (and all of them, too, without
+exception) to condemn the indifference and coldness of our society
+and of every one, apparently, except themselves.
+
+In the depths of my own soul, I still continued to feel that all this
+was not at all what was needed, and that nothing would come of it;
+but the article was printed, and I prepared to take part in the
+census; I had contrived the matter, and now it was already carrying
+me a way with it.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+
+At my request, there had been assigned to me for the census, a
+portion of the Khamovnitchesky quarter, at the Smolensk market, along
+the Prototchny cross-street, between Beregovoy Passage and Nikolsky
+Alley.  In this quarter are situated the houses generally called the
+Rzhanoff Houses, or the Rzhanoff fortress.  These houses once
+belonged to a merchant named Rzhanoff, but now belong to the Zimins.
+I had long before heard of this place as a haunt of the most terrible
+poverty and vice, and I had accordingly requested the directors of
+the census to assign me to this quarter.  My desire was granted.
+
+On receiving the instructions of the City Council, I went alone, a
+few days previous to the beginning of the census, to reconnoitre my
+section.  I found the Rzhanoff fortress at once, from the plan with
+which I had been furnished.
+
+I approached from Nikolsky Alley.  Nikolsky Alley ends on the left in
+a gloomy house, without any gates on that side; I divined from its
+appearance that this was the Rzhanoff fortress.
+
+Passing down Nikolsky Street, I overtook some lads of from ten to
+fourteen years of age, clad in little caftans and great-coats, who
+were sliding down hill, some on their feet, and some on one skate,
+along the icy slope beside this house.  The boys were ragged, and,
+like all city lads, bold and impudent.  I stopped to watch them.  A
+ragged old woman, with yellow, pendent cheeks, came round the corner.
+She was going to town, to the Smolensk market, and she groaned
+terribly at every step, like a foundered horse.  As she came
+alongside me, she halted and drew a hoarse sigh.  In any other
+locality, this old woman would have asked money of me, but here she
+merely addressed me.
+
+"Look there," said she, pointing at the boys who were sliding, "all
+they do is to play their pranks!  They'll turn out just such Rzhanoff
+fellows as their fathers."
+
+One of the boys clad in a great-coat and a visorless cap, heard her
+words and halted:  "What are you scolding about?" he shouted to the
+old woman.  "You're an old Rzhanoff nanny-goat yourself!"
+
+I asked the boy:
+
+"And do you live here?"
+
+"Yes, and so does she.  She stole boot-legs," shouted the boy; and
+raising his foot in front, he slid away.
+
+The old woman burst forth into injurious words, interrupted by a
+cough.  At that moment, an old man, all clad in rags, and as white as
+snow, came down the hill in the middle of the street, flourishing his
+hands [in one of them he held a bundle with one little kalatch and
+baranki" {6}].  This old man bore the appearance of a person who had
+just strengthened himself with a dram.  He had evidently heard the
+old woman's insulting words, and he took her part.
+
+"I'll give it to you, you imps, that I will!" he screamed at the
+boys, seeming to direct his course towards them, and taking a circuit
+round me, he stepped on to the sidewalk.  This old man creates
+surprise on the Arbata by his great age, his weakness, and his
+indigence.  Here he was a cheery laboring-man returning from his
+daily toil.
+
+I followed the old man.  He turned the corner to the left, into
+Prototchny Alley, and passing by the whole length of the house and
+the gate, he disappeared through the door of the tavern.
+
+Two gates and several doors open on Prototchny Alley:  those
+belonging to a tavern, a dram-shop, and several eating and other
+shops.  This is the Rzhanoff fortress itself.  Every thing here is
+gray, dirty, and malodorous--both buildings and locality, and court-
+yards and people.  The majority of the people whom I met here were
+ragged and half-clad.  Some were passing through, others were running
+from door to door.  Two were haggling over some rags.  I made the
+circuit of the entire building from Prototchny Alley and Beregovoy
+Passage, and returning I halted at the gate of one of these houses.
+I wished to enter, and see what was going on inside, but I felt that
+it would be awkward.  What should I say when I was asked what I
+wanted there?  I hesitated, but went in nevertheless.  As soon as I
+entered the court-yard, I became conscious of a disgusting odor.  The
+yard was frightfully dirty.  I turned a corner, and at the same
+instant I heard to my left and overhead, on the wooden balcony, the
+tramp of footsteps of people running, at first along the planks of
+the balcony, and then on the steps of the staircase.  There emerged,
+first a gaunt woman, with her sleeves rolled up, in a faded pink
+gown, and little boots on her stockingless feet.  After her came a
+tattered man in a red shirt and very full trousers, like a petticoat,
+and with overshoes.  The man caught the woman at the bottom of the
+steps.
+
+"You shall not escape," he said laughing.
+
+"See here, you cock-eyed devil," began the woman, evidently flattered
+by this pursuit; but catching sight of me, she shrieked viciously,
+"What do you want?"
+
+As I wanted nothing, I became confused and beat a retreat.  There was
+nothing remarkable about the place; but this incident, after what I
+had witnessed on the other side of the yard, the cursing old woman,
+the jolly old man, and the lads sliding, suddenly presented the
+business which I had concocted from a totally different point of
+view.  I then comprehended for the first time, that all these
+unfortunates to whom I was desirous of playing the part of
+benefactor, besides the time, when, suffering from cold and hunger,
+they awaited admission into the house, had still other time, which
+they employed to some other purpose, that there were four and twenty
+hours in every day, that there was a whole life of which I had never
+thought, up to that moment.  Here, for the first time, I understood,
+that all those people, in addition to their desire to shelter
+themselves from the cold and to obtain a good meal, must still, in
+some way, live out those four and twenty hours each day, which they
+must pass as well as everybody else.  I comprehended that these
+people must lose their tempers, and get bored, show courage, and
+grieve and be merry.  Strange as this may seem, when put into words,
+I understood clearly for the first time, that the business which I
+had undertaken could not consist alone in feeding and clothing
+thousands of people, as one would feed and drive under cover a
+thousand sheep, but that it must consist in doing good to them.
+
+And then I understood that each one of those thousand people was
+exactly such a man,--with precisely the same past, with the same
+passions, temptations, failings, with the same thoughts, the same
+perplexities,--exactly such a man as myself, and then the thing that
+I had undertaken suddenly presented itself to me as so difficult that
+I felt my powerlessness; but the thing had been begun, and I went on
+with it.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+
+On the first appointed day, the student enumerators arrived in the
+morning, and I, the benefactor, joined them at twelve o'clock.  I
+could not go earlier, because I had risen at ten o'clock, then I had
+drunk my coffee and smoked, while waiting on digestion.  At twelve
+o'clock I reached the gates of the Rzhanoff house.  A policeman
+pointed out to me the tavern with a side entrance on Beregovoy
+Passage, where the census-takers had ordered every one who asked for
+them to be directed.  I entered the tavern.  It was very dark, ill-
+smelling, and dirty.  Directly opposite the entrance was the counter,
+on the left was a room with tables, covered with soiled cloths, on
+the right a large apartment with pillars, and the same sort of little
+tables at the windows and along the walls.  Here and there at the
+tables sat men both ragged and decently clad, like laboring-men or
+petty tradesmen, and a few women drinking tea.  The tavern was very
+filthy, but it was instantly apparent that it had a good trade.
+
+There was a business-like expression on the face of the clerk behind
+the counter, and a clever readiness about the waiters.  No sooner had
+I entered, than one waiter prepared to remove my coat and bring me
+whatever I should order.  It was evident that they had been trained
+to brisk and accurate service.  I inquired for the enumerators.
+
+"Vanya!" shouted a small man, dressed in German fashion, who was
+engaged in placing something in a cupboard behind the counter; this
+was the landlord of the tavern, a Kaluga peasant, Ivan Fedotitch, who
+hired one-half of the Zimins' houses and sublet them to lodgers.  The
+waiter, a thin, hooked-nosed young fellow of eighteen, with a yellow
+complexion, hastened up.
+
+"Conduct this gentleman to the census-takers; they went into the main
+building over the well."  The young fellow threw down his napkin, and
+donned a coat over his white jacket and white trousers, and a cap
+with a large visor, and, tripping quickly along with his white feet,
+he led me through the swinging door in the rear.  In the dirty,
+malodorous kitchen, in the out-building, we encountered an old woman
+who was carefully carrying some very bad-smelling tripe, wrapped in a
+rag, off somewhere.  From the out-building we descended into a
+sloping court-yard, all encumbered with small wooden buildings on
+lower stories of stone.  The odor in this whole yard was extremely
+powerful.  The centre of this odor was an out-house, round which
+people were thronging whenever I passed it.  It merely indicated the
+spot, but was not altogether used itself.  It was impossible, when
+passing through the yard, not to take note of this spot; one always
+felt oppressed when one entered the penetrating atmosphere which was
+emitted by this foul smell.
+
+The waiter, carefully guarding his white trousers, led me cautiously
+past this place of frozen and unfrozen uncleanness to one of the
+buildings.  The people who were passing through the yard and along
+the balconies all stopped to stare at me.  It was evident that a
+respectably dressed man was a curiosity in these localities.
+
+The young man asked a woman "whether she had seen the census-takers?"
+And three men simultaneously answered his question:  some said that
+they were over the well, but others said that they had been there,
+but had come out and gone to Nikita Ivanovitch.  An old man dressed
+only in his shirt, who was wandering about the centre of the yard,
+said that they were in No. 30.  The young man decided that this was
+the most probable report, and conducted me to No. 30 through the
+basement entrance, and darkness and bad smells, different from that
+which existed outside.  We went down-stairs, and proceeded along the
+earthen floor of a dark corridor.  As we were passing along the
+corridor, a door flew open abruptly, and an old drunken man, in his
+shirt, probably not of the peasant class, thrust himself out.  A
+washerwoman, wringing her soapy hands, was pursuing and hustling the
+old man with piercing screams.  Vanya, my guide, pushed the old man
+aside, and reproved him.
+
+"It's not proper to make such a row," said me, "and you an officer,
+too!" and we went on to the door of No. 30.
+
+Vanya gave it a little pull.  The door gave way with a smack, opened,
+and we smelled soapy steam, and a sharp odor of spoilt food and
+tobacco, and we entered into total darkness.  The windows were on the
+opposite side; but the corridors ran to right and left between board
+partitions, and small doors opened, at various angles, into the rooms
+made of uneven whitewashed boards.  In a dark room, on the left, a
+woman could be seen washing in a tub.  An old woman was peeping from
+one of these small doors on the right.  Through another open door we
+could see a red-faced, hairy peasant, in bast shoes, sitting on his
+wooden bunk; his hands rested on his knees, and he was swinging his
+feet, shod in bast shoes, and gazing gloomily at them.
+
+At the end of the corridor was a little door leading to the apartment
+where the census-takers were.  This was the chamber of the mistress
+of the whole of No. 30; she rented the entire apartment from Ivan
+Feodovitch, and let it out again to lodgers and as night-quarters.
+In her tiny room, under the tinsel images, sat the student census-
+taker with his charts; and, in his quality of investigator, he had
+just thoroughly interrogated a peasant wearing a shirt and a vest.
+This latter was a friend of the landlady, and had been answering
+questions for her.  The landlady herself, an elderly woman, was there
+also, and two of her curious tenants.  When I entered, the room was
+already packed full.  I pushed my way to the table.  I exchanged
+greetings with the student, and he proceeded with his inquiries.  And
+I began to look about me, and to interrogate the inhabitants of these
+quarters for my own purpose.
+
+It turned out, that in this first set of lodgings, I found not a
+single person upon whom I could pour out my benevolence.  The
+landlady, in spite of the fact that the poverty, smallness and dirt
+of these quarters struck me after the palatial house in which I
+dwell, lived in comfort, compared with many of the poor inhabitants
+of the city, and in comparison with the poverty in the country, with
+which I was thoroughly familiar, she lived luxuriously.  She had a
+feather-bed, a quilted coverlet, a samovar, a fur cloak, and a
+dresser with crockery.  The landlady's friend had the same
+comfortable appearance.  He had a watch and a chain.  Her lodgers
+were not so well off, but there was not one of them who was in need
+of immediate assistance:  the woman who was washing linen in a tub,
+and who had been abandoned by her husband and had children, an aged
+widow without any means of livelihood, as she said, and that peasant
+in bast shoes, who told me that he had nothing to eat that day.  But
+on questioning them, it appeared that none of these people were in
+special want, and that, in order to help them, it would be necessary
+to become well acquainted with them.
+
+When I proposed to the woman whose husband had abandoned her, to
+place her children in an asylum, she became confused, fell into
+thought, thanked me effusively, but evidently did not wish to do so;
+she would have preferred pecuniary assistance.  The eldest girl
+helped her in her washing, and the younger took care of the little
+boy.  The old woman begged earnestly to be taken to the hospital, but
+on examining her nook I found that the old woman was not particularly
+poor.  She had a chest full of effects, a teapot with a tin spout,
+two cups, and caramel boxes filled with tea and sugar.  She knitted
+stockings and gloves, and received monthly aid from some benevolent
+lady.  And it was evident that what the peasant needed was not so
+much food as drink, and that whatever might be given him would find
+its way to the dram-shop.  In these quarters, therefore, there were
+none of the sort of people whom I could render happy by a present of
+money.  But there were poor people who appeared to me to be of a
+doubtful character.  I noted down the old woman, the woman with the
+children, and the peasant, and decided that they must be seen to; but
+later on, as I was occupied with the peculiarly unfortunate whom I
+expected to find in this house, I made up my mind that there must be
+some order in the aid which we should bestow; first came the most
+wretched, and then this kind.  But in the next quarters, and in the
+next after that, it was the same story, all the people had to be
+narrowly investigated before they could be helped.  But unfortunates
+of the sort whom a gift of money would convert from unfortunate into
+fortunate people, there were none.  Mortifying as it is to me to avow
+this, I began to get disenchanted, because I did not find among these
+people any thing of the sort which I had expected.  I had expected to
+find peculiar people here; but, after making the round of all the
+apartments, I was convinced that the inhabitants of these houses were
+not peculiar people at all, but precisely such persons as those among
+whom I lived.  As there are among us, just so among them; there were
+here those who were more or less good, more or less stupid, happy and
+unhappy.  The unhappy were exactly such unhappy beings as exist among
+us, that is, unhappy people whose unhappiness lies not in their
+external conditions, but in themselves, a sort of unhappiness which
+it is impossible to right by any sort of bank-note whatever.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+
+The inhabitants of these houses constitute the lower class of the
+city, which numbers in Moscow, probably, one hundred thousand.
+There, in that house, are representatives of every description of
+this class.  There are petty employers, and master-artisans,
+bootmakers, brush-makers, cabinet-makers, turners, shoemakers,
+tailors, blacksmiths; there are cab-drivers, young women living
+alone, and female pedlers, laundresses, old-clothes dealers, money-
+lenders, day-laborers, and people without any definite employment;
+and also beggars and dissolute women.
+
+Here were many of the very people whom I had seen at the entrance to
+the Lyapinsky house; but here these people were scattered about among
+the working-people.  And moreover, I had seen these people at their
+most unfortunate time, when they had eaten and drunk up every thing,
+and when, cold, hungry, and driven forth from the taverns, they were
+awaiting admission into the free night lodging-house, and thence into
+the promised prison for despatch to their places of residence, like
+heavenly manna; but here I beheld them and a majority of workers, and
+at a time, when by one means or another, they had procured three or
+five kopeks for a lodging for the night, and sometimes a ruble for
+food and drink.
+
+And strange as the statement may seem, I here experienced nothing
+resembling that sensation which I had felt in the Lyapinsky house;
+but, on the contrary, during the first round, both I and the students
+experienced an almost agreeable feeling,--yes, but why do I say
+"almost agreeable"?  This is not true; the feeling called forth by
+intercourse with these people, strange as it may sound, was a
+distinctly agreeable one.
+
+Our first impression was, that the greater part of the dwellers here
+were working people and very good people at that.
+
+We found more than half the inhabitants at work:  laundresses bending
+over their tubs, cabinet-makers at their lathes, cobblers on their
+benches.  The narrow rooms were full of people, and cheerful and
+energetic labor was in progress.  There was an odor of toilsome sweat
+and leather at the cobbler's, of shavings at the cabinet-maker's;
+songs were often to be heard, and glimpses could be had of brawny
+arms with sleeves roiled high, quickly and skilfully making their
+accustomed movements.  Everywhere we were received cheerfully and
+politely:  hardly anywhere did our intrusion into the every-day life
+of these people call forth that ambition, and desire to exhibit their
+importance and to put us down, which the appearance of the
+enumerators in the quarters of well-to-do people evoked.  It not only
+did not arouse this, but, on the contrary, they answered all other
+questions properly, and without attributing any special significance
+to them.  Our questions merely served them as a subject of mirth and
+jesting as to how such and such a one was to be set down in the list,
+when he was to be reckoned as two, and when two were to be reckoned
+as one, and so forth.
+
+We found many of them at dinner, or tea; and on every occasion to our
+greeting:  "bread and salt," or "tea and sugar," they replied:  "we
+beg that you will partake," and even stepped aside to make room for
+us.  Instead of the den with a constantly changing population, which
+we had expected to find here, it turned out, that there were a great
+many apartments in the house where people had been living for a long
+time.  One cabinet-maker with his men, and a boot-maker with his
+journeymen, had lived there for ten years.  The boot-maker's quarters
+were very dirty and confined, but all the people at work were very
+cheerful.  I tried to enter into conversation with one of the
+workmen, being desirous of inquiring into the wretchedness of his
+situation and his debt to his master, but the man did not understand
+me and spoke of his master and his life from the best point of view.
+
+In one apartment lived an old man and his old woman.  They peddled
+apples.  Their little chamber was warm, clean, and full of goods.  On
+the floor were spread straw mats:  they had got them at the apple-
+warehouse.  They had chests, a cupboard, a samovar, and crockery.  In
+the corner there were numerous images, and two lamps were burning
+before them; on the wall hung fur coats covered with sheets.  The old
+woman, who had star-shaped wrinkles, and who was polite and
+talkative, evidently delighted in her quiet, comfortable, existence.
+
+Ivan Fedotitch, the landlord of the tavern and of these quarters,
+left his establishment and came with us.  He jested in a friendly
+manner with many of the landlords of apartments, addressing them all
+by their Christian names and patronymics, and he gave us brief
+sketches of them.  All were ordinary people, like everybody else,--
+Martin Semyonovitches, Piotr Piotrovitches, Marya Ivanovnas,--people
+who did not consider themselves unhappy, but who regarded themselves,
+and who actually were, just like the rest of mankind.
+
+We had been prepared to witness nothing except what was terrible.
+And, all of a sudden, there was presented to us, not only nothing
+that was terrible, but what was good,--things which involuntarily
+compelled our respect.  And there were so many of these good people,
+that the tattered, corrupt, idle people whom we came across now and
+then among them, did not destroy the principal impression.
+
+This was not so much of a surprise to the students as to me.  They
+simply went to fulfil a useful task, as they thought, in the
+interests of science, and, at the same time, they made their own
+chance observations; but I was a benefactor, I went for the purpose
+of aiding the unfortunate, the corrupt, vicious people, whom I
+supposed that I should meet with in this house.  And, behold, instead
+of unfortunate, corrupt, and vicious people, I saw that the majority
+were laborious, industrious, peaceable, satisfied, contented,
+cheerful, polite, and very good folk indeed.
+
+I felt particularly conscious of this when, in these quarters, I
+encountered that same crying want which I had undertaken to
+alleviate.
+
+When I encountered this want, I always found that it had already been
+relieved, that the assistance which I had intended to render had
+already been given.  This assistance had been rendered before my
+advent, and rendered by whom?  By the very unfortunate, depraved
+creatures whom I had undertaken to reclaim, and rendered in such a
+manner as I could not compass.
+
+In one basement lay a solitary old man, ill with the typhus fever.
+There was no one with the old man.  A widow and her little daughter,
+strangers to him, but his neighbors round the corner, looked after
+him, gave him tea and purchased medicine for him out of their own
+means.  In another lodging lay a woman in puerperal fever.  A woman
+who lived by vice was rocking the baby, and giving her her bottle;
+and for two days, she had been unremitting in her attention.  The
+baby girl, on being left an orphan, was adopted into the family of a
+tailor, who had three children of his own.  So there remained those
+unfortunate idle people, officials, clerks, lackeys out of place,
+beggars, drunkards, dissolute women, and children, who cannot be
+helped on the spot with money, but whom it is necessary to know
+thoroughly, to be planned and arranged for.  I had simply sought
+unfortunate people, the unfortunates of poverty, those who could be
+helped by sharing with them our superfluity, and, as it seemed to me,
+through some signal ill-luck, none such were to be found; but I hit
+upon unfortunates to whom I should be obliged to devote my time and
+care.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+
+The unfortunates whom I noted down, divided themselves, according to
+my ideas, into three sections, namely:  people who had lost their
+former advantageous position, and who were awaiting a return to it
+(there were people of this sort from both the lower and the higher
+class); next, dissolute women, of whom there are a great many in
+these houses; and a third division, children.  More than all the
+rest, I found and noted down people of the first division, who had
+forfeited their former advantageous position, and who hoped to regain
+it.  Of such persons, especially from the governmental and official
+world, there are a very great number in these houses.  In almost all
+the lodgings which we entered, with the landlord, Ivan Fedotitch, he
+said to us:  "Here you need not write down the lodger's card
+yourself; there is a man here who can do it, if he only happens not
+to be intoxicated to-day."
+
+And Ivan Fedotitch called by name and patronymic this man, who was
+always one of those persons who had fallen from a lofty position.  At
+Ivan Fedotitch's call, there crawled forth from some dark corner, a
+former wealthy member of the noble or official class, generally
+intoxicated and always undressed.  If he was not drunk, he always
+readily acceded to the task proposed to him, nodded significantly,
+frowned, set down his remarks in learned phraseology, held the card
+neatly printed on red paper in his dirty, trembling hands, and
+glanced round at his fellow-lodgers with pride and contempt, as
+though now triumphing in his education over those who had so often
+humiliated him.  He evidently enjoyed intercourse with that world in
+which cards are printed on red paper, and with that world of which he
+had once formed a part.  Nearly always, in answer to my inquiries
+about his life, the man began, not only willingly, but eagerly, to
+relate the story of the misfortunes which he had undergone,--which he
+had learned by rote like a prayer,--and particularly of his former
+position, in which he ought still to be by right of his education.
+
+A great many such people were scattered over all the corners of the
+Rzhanoff house.  But one lodging was densely occupied by them alone--
+both men and women.  After we had already entered, Ivan Fedotitch
+said to us:  "Now, here are some of the nobility."  The lodging was
+perfectly crammed; nearly all of the people, forty in number, were at
+home.  More demoralized countenances, unhappy, aged, and swollen,
+young, pallid, and distracted, were not to be seen in the whole
+building.  I conversed with several of them.  The story was nearly
+identical in all cases, only in various stages of development.  Every
+one of them had been rich, or his father, his brother or his uncle
+was still wealthy, or his father or he himself had had a very fine
+position.  Then misfortune had overtaken him, the blame for which
+rested either on envious people, or on his own kind-heartedness, or
+some special chance, and so he had lost every thing, and had been
+forced to condescend to these surroundings to which he was not
+accustomed, and which were hateful to him--among lice, rags, among
+drunkards and corrupt persons, and to nourish himself on bread and
+liver, and to extend his hand in beggary.  All the thoughts, desires,
+memories of these people were directed exclusively to the past.  The
+present appeared to them something unreal, repulsive, and not worthy
+of attention.  Not one of them had any present.  They had only
+memories of the past, and expectations from the future, which might
+be realized at any moment, and for the realization of which only a
+very little was required; but this little they did not possess, it
+was nowhere to be obtained, and this had been ruining their whole
+future life in vain, in the case of one man, for a year, of a second
+for five years, and of a third for thirty years.  All one needed was
+merely to dress respectably, so that he could present himself to a
+certain personage, who was well-disposed towards him another only
+needed to be able to dress, pay off his debts, and get to Orel; a
+third required to redeem a small property which was mortgaged, for
+the continuation of a law-suit, which must be decided in his favor,
+and then all would be well once more.  They all declare that they
+merely require something external, in order to stand once more in the
+position which they regard as natural and happy in their own case.
+
+Had my mind not been obscured by my pride as a benefactor, a glance
+at their faces, both old and young, which were mostly weak and
+sensitive, but amiable, would have given me to understand that their
+misfortunes were irreparable by any external means, that they could
+not be happy in any position whatever, if their views of life were to
+remain unchanged, that they were in no wise remarkable people, in
+remarkably unfortunate circumstances, but that they were the same
+people who surround us on all sides, and just like ourselves.  I
+remember that intercourse with this sort of unfortunates was
+peculiarly difficult for me.  I now understand why this was so; in
+them I beheld myself, as in a mirror.  If I had reflected on my own
+life and on the life of the people in our circle, I should have seen
+that no real difference existed between them.
+
+If those about me dwell in spacious quarters, and in their own houses
+on the Sivtzevy Vrazhok and on the Dimitrovka, and not in the
+Rzhanoff house, and still eat and drink dainties, and not liver and
+herrings with bread, that does not prevent them from being exactly as
+unhappy.  They are just as dissatisfied with their own positions,
+they mourn over the past, and pine for better things, and the
+improved position for which they long is precisely the same as that
+which the inhabitants of the Rzhanoff house long for; that is to say,
+one in which they may do as little work as possible themselves, and
+derive the utmost advantage from the labors of others.  The
+difference is merely one of degrees and time.  If I had reflected at
+that time, I should have understood this; but I did not reflect, and
+I questioned these people, and wrote them down, supposing, that,
+having learned all the particulars of their various conditions and
+necessities, I could aid them LATER ON.  I did not understand that
+such a man can only be helped by changing his views of the world.
+But in order to change the views of another, one must needs have
+better views himself, and live in conformity with them; but mine were
+precisely the same as theirs, and I lived in accordance with those
+views, which must undergo a change, in order that these people might
+cease to be unhappy.
+
+I did not see that these people were unhappy, not because they had
+not, so to speak, nourishing food, but because their stomachs had
+been spoiled, and because their appetites demanded not nourishing but
+irritating viands; and I did not perceive that, in order to help
+them, it was not necessary to give them food, but that it was
+necessary to heal their disordered stomachs.  Although I am
+anticipating by so doing, I will mention here, that, out of all these
+persons whom I noted down, I really did not help a single one, in
+spite of the fact that for some of them, that was done which they
+desired, and that which, apparently, might have raised them.  Three
+of their number were particularly well known to me.  All three, after
+repeated rises and falls, are now in precisely the same situation in
+which they were three years ago.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+
+The second class of unfortunates whom I also expected to assist later
+on, were the dissolute women; there were a very great many of them,
+of all sorts, in the Rzhanoff house--from those who were young and
+who resembled women, to old ones, who were frightful and horrible,
+and who had lost every semblance of humanity.  The hope of being of
+assistance to these women, which I had not at first entertained,
+occurred to me later.  This was in the middle of our rounds.  We had
+already worked out several mechanical tricks of procedure.
+
+When we entered a new establishment, we immediately questioned the
+landlady of the apartment; one of us sat down, clearing some sort of
+a place for himself where he could write, and another penetrated the
+corners, and questioned each man in all the nooks of the apartment
+separately, and reported the facts to the one who did the writing.
+
+On entering a set of rooms in the basement, a student went to hunt up
+the landlady, while I began to interrogate all who remained in the
+place.  The apartment was thus arranged:  in the centre was a room
+six arshins square, {7} and a small oven.  From the oven radiated
+four partitions, forming four tiny compartments.  In the first, the
+entrance slip, which had four bunks, there were two persons--an old
+man and a woman.  Immediately adjoining this, was a rather long slip
+of a room; in it was the landlord, a young fellow, dressed in a
+sleeveless gray woollen jacket, a good-looking, very pale citizen.
+{8}  On the left of the first corner, was a third tiny chamber; there
+was one person asleep there, probably a drunken peasant, and a woman
+in a pink blouse which was loose in front and close-fitting behind.
+The fourth chamber was behind the partition; the entrance to it was
+from the landlord's compartment.
+
+The student went into the landlord's room, and I remained in the
+entrance compartment, and questioned the old man and woman.  The old
+man had been a master-printer, but now had no means of livelihood.
+The woman was the wife of a cook.  I went to the third compartment,
+and questioned the woman in the blouse about the sleeping man.  She
+said that he was a visitor.  I asked the woman who she was.  She
+replied that she was a Moscow peasant.  "What is your business?"  She
+burst into a laugh, and did not answer me.  "What do you live on?" I
+repeated, thinking that she had not understood my question.  "I sit
+in the taverns," she said.  I did not comprehend, and again I
+inquired:  "What is your means of livelihood?"  She made no reply and
+laughed.  Women's voices in the fourth compartment which we had not
+yet entered, joined in the laugh.  The landlord emerged from his
+cabin and stepped up to us.  He had evidently heard my questions and
+the woman's replies.  He cast a stern glance at the woman and turned
+to me:  "She is a prostitute," said he, apparently pleased that he
+knew the word in use in the language of the authorities, and that he
+could pronounce it correctly.  And having said this, with a
+respectful and barely perceptible smile of satisfaction addressed to
+me, he turned to the woman.  And no sooner had he turned to her, than
+his whole face altered.  He said, in a peculiar, scornful, hasty
+tone, such as is employed towards dogs:  "What do you jabber in that
+careless way for?  'I sit in the taverns.'  You do sit in the
+taverns, and that means, to talk business, that you are a
+prostitute," and again he uttered the word.  "She does not know the
+name for herself."  This tone offended me.  "It is not our place to
+abuse her," said I.  "If all of us lived according to the laws of
+God, there would be none of these women."
+
+"That's the very point," said the landlord, with an awkward smile.
+
+"Therefore, we should not reproach but pity them.  Are they to
+blame?"
+
+I do not recollect just what I said, but I do remember that I was
+vexed by the scornful tone of the landlord of these quarters which
+were filled with women, whom he called prostitutes, and that I felt
+compassion for this woman, and that I gave expression to both
+feelings.  No sooner had I spoken thus, than the boards of the bed in
+the next compartment, whence the laugh had proceeded, began to creak,
+and above the partition, which did not reach to the ceiling, there
+appeared a woman's curly and dishevelled head, with small, swollen
+eyes, and a shining, red face, followed by a second, and then by a
+third.  They were evidently standing on their beds, and all three
+were craning their necks, and holding their breath with strained
+attention, and gazing silently at us.
+
+A troubled pause ensued.  The student, who had been smiling up to
+this time, became serious; the landlord grew confused and dropped his
+eyes.  All the women held their breath, stared at me, and waited.  I
+was more embarrassed than any of them.  I had not, in the least,
+anticipated that a chance remark would produce such an effect.  Like
+Ezekiel's field of death, strewn with dead men's bones, there was a
+quiver at the touch of the spirit, and the dead bones stirred.  I had
+uttered an unpremeditated word of love and sympathy, and this word
+had acted on all as though they had only been waiting for this very
+remark, in order that they might cease to be corpses and might live.
+They all stared at me, and waited for what would come next.  They
+waited for me to utter those words, and to perform those actions by
+reason of which these bones might draw together, clothe themselves
+with flesh, and spring into life.  But I felt that I had no such
+words, no such actions, by means of which I could continue what I had
+begun; I was conscious, in the depths of my soul, that I had lied
+[that I was just like them], {9} and there was nothing further for me
+to say; and I began to inscribe on the cards the names and callings
+of all the persons in this set of apartments.
+
+This incident led me into a fresh dilemma, to the thought of how
+these unfortunates also might be helped.  In my self-delusion, I
+fancied that this would be very easy.  I said to myself:  "Here, we
+will make a note of all these women also, and LATER ON when we [I did
+not specify to myself who "we" were] write every thing out, we will
+attend to these persons too."  I imagined that we, the very ones who
+have brought and have been bringing these women to this condition for
+several generations, would take thought some fine day and reform all
+this.  But, in the mean time, if I had only recalled my conversation
+with the disreputable woman who had been rocking the baby of the
+fever-stricken patient, I might have comprehended the full extent of
+the folly of such a supposition.
+
+When we saw this woman with the baby, we thought that it was her
+child.  To the question, "Who was she?" she had replied in a
+straightforward way that she was unmarried.  She did not say--a
+prostitute.  Only the master of the apartment made use of that
+frightful word.  The supposition that she had a child suggested to me
+the idea of removing her from her position.  I inquired:
+
+"Is this your child?"
+
+"No, it belongs to that woman yonder."
+
+"Why are you taking care of it?"
+
+"Because she asked me; she is dying."
+
+Although my supposition proved to be erroneous, I continued my
+conversation with her in the same spirit.  I began to question her as
+to who she was, and how she had come to such a state.  She related
+her history very readily and simply.  She was a Moscow myeshchanka,
+the daughter of a factory hand.  She had been left an orphan, and had
+been adopted by an aunt.  From her aunt's she had begun to frequent
+the taverns.  The aunt was now dead.  When I asked her whether she
+did not wish to alter her mode of life, my question, evidently, did
+not even arouse her interest.  How can one take an interest in the
+proposition of a man, in regard to something absolutely impossible?
+She laughed, and said:  "And who would take me in with my yellow
+ticket?"
+
+"Well, but if a place could be found somewhere as cook?" said I.
+
+This thought occurred to me because she was a stout, ruddy woman,
+with a kindly, round, and rather stupid face.  Cooks are often like
+that.  My words evidently did not please her.  She repeated:
+
+"A cook--but I don't know how to make bread," said she, and she
+laughed.  She said that she did not know how; but I saw from the
+expression of her countenance that she did not wish to become a cook,
+that she regarded the position and calling of a cook as low.
+
+This woman, who in the simplest possible manner was sacrificing every
+thing that she had for the sick woman, like the widow in the Gospels,
+at the same time, like many of her companions, regarded the position
+of a person who works as low and deserving of scorn.  She had been
+brought up to live not by work, but by this life which was considered
+the natural one for her by those about her.  In that lay her
+misfortune.  And she fell in with this misfortune and clung to her
+position.  This led her to frequent the taverns.  Which of us--man or
+woman--will correct her false view of life?  Where among us are the
+people to be found who are convinced that every laborious life is
+more worthy of respect than an idle life,--who are convinced of this,
+and who live in conformity with this belief, and who in conformity
+with this conviction value and respect people?  If I had thought of
+this, I might have understood that neither I, nor any other person
+among my acquaintances, could heal this complaint.
+
+I might have understood that these amazed and affected heads thrust
+over the partition indicated only surprise at the sympathy expressed
+for them, but not in the least a hope of reclamation from their
+dissolute life.  They do not perceive the immorality of their life.
+They see that they are despised and cursed, but for what they are
+thus despised they cannot comprehend.  Their life, from childhood,
+has been spent among just such women, who, as they very well know,
+always have existed, and are indispensable to society, and so
+indispensable that there are governmental officials to attend to
+their legal existence.  Moreover, they know that they have power over
+men, and can bring them into subjection, and rule them often more
+than other women.  They see that their position in society is
+recognized by women and men and the authorities, in spite of their
+continual curses, and therefore, they cannot understand why they
+should reform.
+
+In the course of one of the tours, one of the students told me that
+in a certain lodging, there was a woman who was bargaining for her
+thirteen-year-old daughter.  Being desirous of rescuing this girl, I
+made a trip to that lodging expressly.  Mother and daughter were
+living in the greatest poverty.  The mother, a small, dark-
+complexioned, dissolute woman of forty, was not only homely, but
+repulsively homely.  The daughter was equally disagreeable.  To all
+my pointed questions about their life, the mother responded curtly,
+suspiciously, and in a hostile way, evidently feeling that I was an
+enemy, with evil intentions; the daughter made no reply, did not look
+at her mother, and evidently trusted the latter fully.  They inspired
+me with no sincere pity, but rather with disgust.  But I made up my
+mind that the daughter must be rescued, and that I would interest
+ladies who pitied the sad condition of these women, and send them
+hither.  But if I had reflected on the mother's long life in the
+past, of how she had given birth to, nursed and reared this daughter
+in her situation, assuredly without the slightest assistance from
+outsiders, and with heavy sacrifices--if I had reflected on the view
+of life which this woman had formed, I should have understood that
+there was, decidedly, nothing bad or immoral in the mother's act:
+she had done and was doing for her daughter all that she could, that
+is to say, what she considered the best for herself.  This daughter
+could be forcibly removed from her mother; but it would be impossible
+to convince the mother that she was doing wrong, in selling her
+daughter.  If any one was to be saved, then it must be this woman--
+the mother ought to have been saved; [and that long before, from that
+view of life which is approved by every one, according to which a
+woman may live unmarried, that is, without bearing children and
+without work, and simply for the satisfaction of the passions.  If I
+had thought of this, I should have understood that the majority of
+the ladies whom I intended to send thither for the salvation of that
+little girl, not only live without bearing children and without
+working, and serving only passion, but that they deliberately rear
+their daughters for the same life; one mother takes her daughter to
+the taverns, another takes hers to balls.  But both mothers hold the
+same view of the world, namely, that a woman must satisfy man's
+passions, and that for this she must be fed, dressed, and cared for.
+Then how are our ladies to reform this woman and her daughter? {10} ]
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+
+Still more remarkable were my relations to the children.  In my role
+of benefactor, I turned my attention to the children also, being
+desirous to save these innocent beings from perishing in that lair of
+vice, and noting them down in order to attend to them AFTERWARDS.
+
+Among the children, I was especially struck with a twelve-year-old
+lad named Serozha.  I was heartily sorry for this bold, intelligent
+lad, who had lived with a cobbler, and who had been left without a
+shelter because his master had been put in jail, and I wanted to do
+good to him.
+
+I will here relate the upshot of my benevolence in his case, because
+my experience with this child is best adapted to show my false
+position in the role of benefactor.  I took the boy home with me and
+put him in the kitchen.  It was impossible, was it not, to take a
+child who had lived in a den of iniquity in among my own children?
+And I considered myself very kind and good, because he was a care,
+not to me, but to the servants in the kitchen, and because not I but
+the cook fed him, and because I gave him some cast-off clothing to
+wear.  The boy staid a week.  During that week I said a few words to
+him as I passed on two occasions and in the course of my strolls, I
+went to a shoemaker of my acquaintance, and proposed that he should
+take the lad as an apprentice.  A peasant who was visiting me,
+invited him to go to the country, into his family, as a laborer; the
+boy refused, and at the end of the week he disappeared.  I went to
+the Rzhanoff house to inquire after him.  He had returned there, but
+was not at home when I went thither.  For two days already, he had
+been going to the Pryesnensky ponds, where he had hired himself out
+at thirty kopeks a day in some procession of savages in costume, who
+led about elephants.  Something was being presented to the public
+there.  I went a second time, but he was so ungrateful that he
+evidently avoided me.  Had I then reflected on the life of that boy
+and on my own, I should have understood that this boy was spoiled
+because he had discovered the possibility of a merry life without
+labor, and that he had grown unused to work.  And I, with the object
+of benefiting and reclaiming him, had taken him to my house, where he
+saw--what?  My children,--both older and younger than himself, and of
+the same age,--who not only never did any work for themselves, but
+who made work for others by every means in their power, who soiled
+and spoiled every thing about them, who ate rich, dainty, and sweet
+viands, broke china, and flung to the dogs food which would have been
+a tidbit to this lad.  If I had rescued him from the abyss, and had
+taken him to that nice place, then he must acquire those views which
+prevailed in the life of that nice place; but by these views, he
+understood that in that fine place he must so live that he should not
+toil, but eat and drink luxuriously, and lead a joyous life.  It is
+true that he did not know that my children bore heavy burdens in the
+acquisition of the declensions of Latin and Greek grammar, and that
+he could not have understood the object of these labors.  But it is
+impossible not to see that if he had understood this, the influence
+of my children's example on him would have been even stronger.  He
+would then have comprehended that my children were being educated in
+this manner, so that, while doing no work now, they might be in a
+position hereafter, also profiting by their diplomas, to work as
+little as possible, and to enjoy the pleasures of life to as great an
+extent as possible.  He did understand this, and he would not go with
+the peasant to tend cattle, and to eat potatoes and kvas with him,
+but he went to the zoological garden in the costume of a savage, to
+lead the elephant at thirty kopeks a day.
+
+I might have understood how clumsy I was, when I was rearing my
+children in the most utter idleness and luxury, to reform other
+people and their children, who were perishing from idleness in what I
+called the den of the Rzhanoff house, where, nevertheless, three-
+fourths of the people toil for themselves and for others.  But I
+understood nothing of this.
+
+There were a great many children in the Rzhanoff house, who were in
+the same pitiable plight; there were the children of dissolute women,
+there were orphans, there were children who had been picked up in the
+streets by beggars.  They were all very wretched.  But my experience
+with Serozha showed me that I, living the life I did, was not in a
+position to help them.
+
+While Serozha was living with us, I noticed in myself an effort to
+hide our life from him, in particular the life of our children.  I
+felt that all my efforts to direct him towards a good, industrious
+life, were counteracted by the examples of our lives and by that of
+our children.  It is very easy to take a child away from a
+disreputable woman, or from a beggar.  It is very easy, when one has
+the money, to wash, clean and dress him in neat clothing, to support
+him, and even to teach him various sciences; but it is not only
+difficult for us, who do not earn our own bread, but quite the
+reverse, to teach him to work for his bread, but it is impossible,
+because we, by our example, and even by those material and valueless
+improvements of his life, inculcate the contrary.  A puppy can be
+taken, tended, fed, and taught to fetch and carry, and one may take
+pleasure in him:  but it is not enough to tend a man, to feed and
+teach him Greek; we must teach the man how to live,--that is, to take
+as little as possible from others, and to give as much as possible;
+and we cannot help teaching him to do the contrary, if we take him
+into our houses, or into an institution founded for this purpose.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+
+This feeling of compassion for people, and of disgust with myself,
+which I had experienced in the Lyapinsky house, I experienced no
+longer.  I was completely absorbed in the desire to carry out the
+scheme which I had concocted,--to do good to those people whom I
+should meet here.  And, strange to say, it would appear, that, to do
+good--to give money to the needy--is a very good deed, and one that
+should dispose me to love for the people, but it turned out the
+reverse:  this act produced in me ill-will and an inclination to
+condemn people.  But during our first evening tour, a scene occurred
+exactly like that in the Lyapinsky house, and it called forth a
+wholly different sentiment.
+
+It began by my finding in one set of apartments an unfortunate
+individual, of precisely the sort who require immediate aid.  I found
+a hungry woman who had had nothing to eat for two days.
+
+It came about thus:  in one very large and almost empty night-
+lodging, I asked an old woman whether there were many poor people who
+had nothing to eat?  The old woman reflected, and then told me of
+two; and then, as though she had just recollected, "Why, here is one
+of them," said she, glancing at one of the occupied bunks.  "I think
+that woman has had no food."
+
+"Really?  Who is she?"
+
+"She was a dissolute woman:  no one wants any thing to do with her
+now, so she has no way of getting any thing.  The landlady has had
+compassion on her, but now she means to turn her out . . . Agafya,
+hey there, Agafya!" cried the woman.
+
+We approached, and something rose up in the bunk.  It was a woman
+haggard and dishevelled, whose hair was half gray, and who was as
+thin as a skeleton, dressed in a ragged and dirty chemise, and with
+particularly brilliant and staring eyes.  She looked past us with her
+staring eyes, clutched at her jacket with one thin hand, in order to
+cover her bony breast which was disclosed by her tattered chemise,
+and oppressed, she cried, "What is it? what is it?"  I asked her
+about her means of livelihood.  For a long time she did not
+understand, and said, "I don't know myself; they persecute me."  I
+asked her,--it puts me to shame, my hand refuses to write it,--I
+asked her whether it was true that she had nothing to eat?  She
+answered in the same hurried, feverish tone, staring at me the
+while,--"No, I had nothing yesterday, and I have had nothing to-day."
+
+The sight of this woman touched me, but not at all as had been the
+case in the Lyapinsky house; there, my pity for these people made me
+instantly feel ashamed of myself:  but here, I rejoiced because I had
+at last found what I had been seeking,--a hungry person.
+
+I gave her a ruble, and I recollect being very glad that others saw
+it.  The old woman, on seeing this, immediately begged money of me
+also.  It afforded me such pleasure to give, that, without finding
+out whether it was necessary to give or not, I gave something to the
+old woman too.  The old woman accompanied me to the door, and the
+people standing in the corridor heard her blessing me.  Probably the
+questions which I had put with regard to poverty, had aroused
+expectation, and several persons followed us.  In the corridor also,
+they began to ask me for money.  Among those who begged were some
+drunken men, who aroused an unpleasant feeling in me; but, having
+once given to the old woman, I had no might to refuse these people,
+and I began to give.  As long as I continued to give, people kept
+coming up; and excitement ran through all the lodgings.  People made
+them appearance on the stairs and galleries, and followed me.  As I
+emerged into the court-yard, a little boy ran swiftly down one of the
+staircases thrusting the people aside.  He did not see me, and
+exclaimed hastily:  "He gave Agashka a ruble!"  When he reached the
+ground, the boy joined the crowd which was following me.  I went out
+into the street:  various descriptions of people followed me, and
+asked for money.  I distributed all my small change, and entered an
+open shop with the request that the shopkeeper would change a ten-
+ruble bill for me.  And then the same thing happened as at the
+Lyapinsky house.  A terrible confusion ensued.  Old women, noblemen,
+peasants, and children crowded into the shop with outstretched hands;
+I gave, and interrogated some of them as to their lives, and took
+notes.  The shopkeeper, turning up the furred points of the collar of
+his coat, sat like a stuffed creature, glancing at the crowd
+occasionally, and then fixing his eyes beyond them again.  He
+evidently, like every one else, felt that this was foolish, but he
+could not say so.
+
+The poverty and beggary in the Lyapinsky house had horrified me, and
+I felt myself guilty of it; I felt the desire and the possibility of
+improvement.  But now, precisely the same scene produced on me an
+entirely different effect; I experienced, in the first place, a
+malevolent feeling towards many of those who were besieging me; and
+in the second place, uneasiness as to what the shopkeepers and
+porters would think of me.
+
+On my return home that day, I was troubled in my soul.  I felt that
+what I had done was foolish and immoral.  But, as is always the
+result of inward confusion, I talked a great deal about the plan
+which I had undertaken, as though I entertained not the slightest
+doubt of my success.
+
+On the following day, I went to such of the people whom I had
+inscribed on my list, as seemed to me the most wretched of all, and
+those who, as it seemed to me, would be the easiest to help.  As I
+have already said, I did not help any of these people.  It proved to
+be more difficult to help them than I had thought.  And either
+because I did not know how, or because it was impossible, I merely
+imitated these people, and did not help any one.  I visited the
+Rzhanoff house several times before the final tour, and on every
+occasion the very same thing occurred:  I was beset by a throng of
+beggars in whose mass I was completely lost.  I felt the
+impossibility of doing any thing, because there were too many of
+them, and because I felt ill-disposed towards them because there were
+so many of them; and in addition to this, each one separately did not
+incline me in his favor.  I was conscious that every one of them was
+telling me an untruth, or less than the whole truth, and that he saw
+in me merely a purse from which money might be drawn.  And it very
+frequently seemed to me, that the very money which they squeezed out
+of me, rendered their condition worse instead of improving it.  The
+oftener I went to that house, the more I entered into intercourse
+with the people there, the more apparent became to me the
+impossibility of doing any thing; but still I did not give up any
+scheme until the last night tour.
+
+The remembrance of that last tour is particularly mortifying to me.
+On other occasions I had gone thither alone, but twenty of us went
+there on this occasion.  At seven o'clock, all who wished to take
+part in this final night round, began to assemble at my house.
+Nearly all of them were strangers to me,--students, one officer, and
+two of my society acquaintances, who, uttering the usual, "C'est tres
+interessant!" had asked me to include them in the number of the
+census-takers.
+
+My worldly acquaintances had dressed up especially for this, in some
+sort of hunting-jacket, and tall, travelling boots, in a costume in
+which they rode and went hunting, and which, in their opinion, was
+appropriate for an excursion to a night-lodging-house.  They took
+with them special note-books and remarkable pencils.  They were in
+that peculiarly excited state of mind in which men set off on a hunt,
+to a duel, or to the wars.  The most apparent thing about them was
+their folly and the falseness of our position, but all the rest of us
+were in the same false position.  Before we set out, we held a
+consultation, after the fashion of a council of war, as to how we
+should begin, how divide our party, and so on.
+
+This consultation was exactly such as takes place in councils,
+assemblages, committees; that is to say, each person spoke, not
+because he had any thing to say or to ask, but because each one
+cudgelled his brain for something that he could say, so that he might
+not fall short of the rest.  But, among all these discussions, no one
+alluded to that beneficence of which I had so often spoken to them
+all.  Mortifying as this was to me, I felt that it was indispensable
+that I should once more remind them of benevolence, that is, of the
+point, that we were to observe and take notes of all those in
+destitute circumstances whom we should encounter in the course of our
+rounds.  I had always felt ashamed to speak of this; but now, in the
+midst of all our excited preparations for our expedition, I could
+hardly utter the words.  All listened to me, as it seemed to me, with
+sorrow, and, at the same time, all agreed in words; but it was
+evident that they all knew that it was folly, and that nothing would
+come of it, and all immediately began again to talk about something
+else.  This went on until the time arrived for us to set out, and we
+started.
+
+We reached the tavern, roused the waiters, and began to sort our
+papers.  When we were informed that the people had heard about this
+round, and were leaving their quarters, we asked the landlord to lock
+the gates; and we went ourselves into the yard to reason with the
+fleeing people, assuring them that no one would demand their tickets.
+I remember the strange and painful impression produced on me by these
+alarmed night-lodgers:  ragged, half-dressed, they all seemed tall to
+me by the light of the lantern and the gloom of the court-yard.
+Frightened and terrifying in their alarm, they stood in a group
+around the foul-smelling out-house, and listened to our assurances,
+but they did not believe us, and were evidently prepared for any
+thing, like hunted wild beasts, provided only that they could escape
+from us.  Gentlemen in divers shapes--as policemen, both city and
+rural, and as examining judges, and judges--hunt them all their
+lives, in town and country, on the highway and in the streets, and in
+the taverns, and in night-lodging houses; and now, all of a sudden,
+these gentlemen had come and locked the gates, merely in order to
+count them:  it was as difficult for them to believe this, as for
+hares to believe that dogs have come, not to chase but to count them.
+But the gates were locked, and the startled lodgers returned:  and
+we, breaking up into groups, entered also.  With me were the two
+society men and two students.  In front of us, in the dark, went
+Vanya, in his coat and white trousers, with a lantern, and we
+followed.  We went to quarters with which I was familiar.  I knew all
+the establishments, and some of the people; but the majority of the
+people were new, and the spectacle was new, and more dreadful than
+the one which I had witnessed in the Lyapinsky house.  All the
+lodgings were full, all the bunks were occupied, not by one person
+only, but often by two.  The sight was terrible in that narrow space
+into which the people were huddled, and men and women were mixed
+together.  All the women who were not dead drunk slept with men; and
+women with two children did the same.  The sight was terrible, on
+account of the poverty, dirt, rags, and terror of the people.  And it
+was chiefly dreadful on account of the vast numbers of people who
+were in this situation.  One lodging, and then a second like it, and
+a third, and a tenth, and a twentieth, and still there was no end to
+them.  And everywhere there was the same foul odor, the same close
+atmosphere, the same crowding, the same mingling of the sexes, the
+same men and women intoxicated to stupidity, and the same terror,
+submission and guilt on all faces; and again I was overwhelmed with
+shame and pain, as in the Lyapinsky house, and I understood that what
+I had undertaken was abominable and foolish and therefore
+impracticable.  And I no longer took notes of anybody, and I asked no
+questions, knowing that nothing would come of this.
+
+I was deeply pained.  In the Lyapinsky house I had been like a man
+who has seen a fearful wound, by chance, on the body of another man.
+He is sorry for the other man, he is ashamed that he has not pitied
+the man before, and he can still rise to the succor of the sufferer.
+But now I was like a physician, who has come with his medicine to the
+sick man, has uncovered his sore, and examined it, and who must
+confess to himself that every thing that he has done has been in
+vain, and that his remedy is good for nothing.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+
+This visit dealt the final blow to my self-delusion.  It now appeared
+indisputable to me, that what I had undertaken was not only foolish
+but loathsome.
+
+But, in spite of the fact that I was aware of this, it seemed to me
+that I could not abandon the whole thing on the spot.  It seemed to
+me that I was bound to carry out this enterprise, in the first place,
+because by my article, by my visits and promises, I had aroused the
+expectations of the poor; in the second, because by my article also,
+and by my talk, I had aroused the sympathies of benevolent persons,
+many of whom had promised me their co-operation both in personal
+labor and in money.  And I expected that both sets of people would
+turn to me for an answer to this.
+
+What happened to me, so far as the appeal of the needy to me is
+concerned, was as follows:  By letter and personal application I
+received more than a hundred; these applications were all from the
+wealthy-poor, if I may so express myself.  I went to see some of
+them, and some of them received no answer.  Nowhere did I succeed in
+doing any thing.  All applications to me were from persons who had
+once occupied privileged positions (I thus designate those in which
+people receive more from others than they give), who had lost them,
+and who wished to occupy them again.  To one, two hundred rubles were
+indispensable, in order that he might prop up a failing business, and
+complete the education of his children which had been begun; another
+wanted a photographic outfit; a third wanted his debts paid, and
+respectable clothing purchased for him; a fourth needed a piano, in
+order to perfect himself and support his family by giving lessons.
+But the majority did not stipulate for any given sum of money, and
+simply asked for assistance; and when I came to examine into what was
+required, it turned out that their demands grew in proportion to the
+aid, and that there was not and could not be any way of satisfying
+them.  I repeat, that it is very possible that this arose from the
+fact that I did not understand how; but I did not help any one,
+although I sometimes endeavored to do so.
+
+A very strange and unexpected thing happened to me as regards the co-
+operation of the benevolently disposed.  Out of all the persons who
+had promised me financial aid, and who had even stated the number of
+rubles, not a single one handed to me for distribution among the poor
+one solitary ruble.  But according to the pledges which had been
+given me, I could reckon on about three thousand rubles; and out of
+all these people, not one remembered our former discussions, or gave
+me a single kopek.  Only the students gave the money which had been
+assigned to them for their work on the census, twelve rubles, I
+think.  So my whole scheme, which was to have been expressed by tens
+of thousands of rubles contributed by the wealthy, for hundreds and
+thousands of poor people who were to be rescued from poverty and
+vice, dwindled down to this, that I gave away, haphazard, a few
+scores of rubles to those people who asked me for them, and that
+there remained in my hands twelve rubies contributed by the students,
+and twenty-five sent to me by the City Council for my labor as a
+superintendent, and I absolutely did not know to whom to give them.
+
+The whole matter came to an end.  And then, before my departure for
+the country, on the Sunday before carnival, I went to the Rzhanoff
+house in the morning, in order to get rid of those thirty-seven
+rubles before I should leave Moscow, and to distribute them to the
+poor.  I made the round of the quarters with which I was familiar,
+and in them found only one sick man, to whom I gave five rubles.
+There was no one else there to give any to.  Of course many began to
+beg of me.  But as I had not known them at first, so I did not know
+them now, and I made up my mind to take counsel with Ivan Fedotitch,
+the landlord of the tavern, as to the persons upon whom it would be
+proper to bestow the remaining thirty-two rubies.
+
+It was the first day of the carnival.  Everybody was dressed up, and
+everybody was full-fed, and many were already intoxicated.  In the
+court-yard, close to the house, stood an old man, a rag-picker, in a
+tattered smock and bast shoes, sorting over the booty in his basket,
+tossing out leather, iron, and other stuff in piles, and breaking
+into a merry song, with a fine, powerful voice.  I entered into
+conversation with him.  He was seventy years old, he was alone in the
+world, and supported himself by his calling of a rag-picker; and not
+only did he utter no complaints, but he said that he had plenty to
+eat and drink.  I inquired of him as to especially needy persons.  He
+flew into a rage, and said plainly that there were no needy people,
+except drunkards and lazy men; but, on learning my object, he asked
+me for a five-kopek piece to buy a drink, and ran off to the tavern.
+I too entered the tavern to see Ivan Fedotitch, and commission him to
+distribute the money which I had left.  The tavern was full; gayly-
+dressed, intoxicated girls were flitting in and out; all the tables
+were occupied; there were already a great many drunken people, and in
+the small room the harmonium was being played, and two persons were
+dancing.  Out of respect to me, Ivan Fedotitch ordered that the dance
+should be stopped, and seated himself with me at a vacant table.  I
+said to him, that, as he knew his tenants, would not he point out to
+me the most needy among them; that I had been entrusted with the
+distribution of a little money, and, therefore, would he indicate the
+proper persons?  Good-natured Ivan Fedotitch (he died a year later),
+although he was pressed with business, broke away from it for a time,
+in order to serve me.  He meditated, and was evidently undecided.  An
+elderly waiter heard us, and joined the conference.
+
+They began to discuss the claims of persons, some of whom I knew, but
+still they could not come to any agreement.  "The Paramonovna,"
+suggested the waiter.  "Yes, that would do.  Sometimes she has
+nothing to eat.  Yes, but then she tipples."--"Well, what of that?
+That makes no difference."--"Well, Sidoron Ivanovitch has children.
+He would do."  But Ivan Fedotitch had his doubts about Sidoron
+Ivanovitch also.  "Akulina shall have some.  There, now, give
+something to the blind."  To this I responded.  I saw him at once.
+He was a blind old man of eighty years, without kith or kin.  It
+seemed as though no condition could be more painful, and I went
+immediately to see him.  He was lying on a feather-bed, on a high
+bedstead, drunk; and, as he did not see me, he was scolding his
+comparatively youthful female companion in a frightful bass voice,
+and in the very worst kind of language.  They also summoned an
+armless boy and his mother.  I saw that Ivan Fedotitch was in great
+straits, on account of his conscientiousness, for me knew that
+whatever was given would immediately pass to his tavern.  But I had
+to get rid of my thirty-two rubles, so I insisted; and in one way and
+another, and half wrongfully to boot, we assigned and distributed
+them.  Those who received them were mostly well dressed, and we had
+not far to go to find them, as they were there in the tavern.  The
+armless boy appeared in wrinkled boots, and a red shirt and vest.
+With this my charitable career came to an end, and I went off to the
+country; irritated at others, as is always the case, because I myself
+had done a stupid and a bad thing.  My benevolence had ended in
+nothing, and it ceased altogether, but the current of thoughts and
+feelings which it had called up with me not only did not come to an
+end, but the inward work went on with redoubled force.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+
+What was its nature?
+
+I had lived in the country, and there I was connected with the rustic
+poor.  Not out of humility, which is worse than pride, but for the
+sake of telling the truth, which is indispensable for the
+understanding of the whole course of my thoughts and sentiments, I
+will say that in the country I did very little for the poor, but the
+demands which were made upon me were so modest that even this little
+was of use to the people, and formed around me an atmosphere of
+affection and union with the people, in which it was possible to
+soothe the gnawing sensation of remorse at the independence of my
+life.  On going to the city, I had hoped to be able to live in the
+same manner.  But here I encountered want of an entirely different
+sort.  City want was both less real, and more exacting and cruel,
+than country poverty.  But the principal point was, that there was so
+much of it in one spot, that it produced on me a frightful
+impression.  The impression which I experienced in the Lyapinsky
+house had, at the very first, made me conscious of the deformity of
+my own life.  This feeling was genuine and very powerful.  But,
+notwithstanding its genuineness and power, I was, at that time, so
+weak that I feared the alteration in my life to which this feeling
+commended me, and I resorted to a compromise.  I believed what
+everybody told me, and everybody has said, ever since the world was
+made,--that there is nothing evil in wealth and luxury, that they are
+given by God, that one may continue to live as a rich man, and yet
+help the needy.  I believed this, and I tried to do it.  I wrote an
+essay, in which I summoned all rich people to my assistance.  The
+rich people all acknowledged themselves morally bound to agree with
+me, but evidently they either did not wish to do any thing, or they
+could not do any thing or give any thing to the poor.  I began to
+visit the poor, and I beheld what I had not in the least expected.
+On the one hand, I beheld in those dens, as I called them, people
+whom it was not conceivable that I should help, because they were
+working people, accustomed to labor and privation, and therefore
+standing much higher and having a much firmer foothold in life than
+myself; on the other hand, I saw unfortunate people whom I could not
+aid because they were exactly like myself.  The majority of the
+unfortunates whom I saw were unhappy only because they had lost the
+capacity, desire, and habit of earning their own bread; that is to
+say, their unhappiness consisted in the fact that they were precisely
+such persons as myself.
+
+I found no unfortunates who were sick, hungry, or cold, to whom I
+could render immediate assistance, with the solitary exception of
+hungry Agafya.  And I became convinced, that, on account of my
+remoteness from the lives of those people whom I desired to help, it
+would be almost impossible to find any such unfortunates, because all
+actual wants had already been supplied by the very people among whom
+these unfortunates live; and, most of all, I was convinced that money
+cannot effect any change in the life led by these unhappy people.
+
+I was convinced of all this, but out of false shame at abandoning
+what I had once undertaken, because of my self-delusion as a
+benefactor, I went on with this matter for a tolerably long time,--
+and would have gone on with it until it came to nothing of itself,--
+so that it was with the greatest difficulty that, with the help of
+Ivan Fedotitch, I got rid, after a fashion, as well as I could, in
+the tavern of the Rzhanoff house, of the thirty-seven rubles which I
+did not regard as belonging to me.
+
+Of course I might have gone on with this business, and have made out
+of it a semblance of benevolence; by urging the people who had
+promised me money, I might have collected more, I might have
+distributed this money, and consoled myself with my charity; but I
+perceived, on the one hand, that we rich people neither wish nor are
+able to share a portion of our a superfluity with the poor (we have
+so many wants of our own), and that money should not be given to any
+one, if the object really be to do good and not to give money itself
+at haphazard, as I had done in the Rzhanoff tavern.  And I gave up
+the whole thing, and went off to the country with despair in my
+heart.
+
+In the country I tried to write an essay about all this that I had
+experienced, and to tell why my undertaking had not succeeded.  I
+wanted to justify myself against the reproaches which had been made
+to me on the score of my article on the census; I wanted to convict
+society of its in difference, and to state the causes in which this
+city poverty has its birth, and the necessity of combating it, and
+the means of doing so which I saw.
+
+I began this essay at once, and it seemed to me that in it I was
+saying a very great deal that was important.  But toil as I would
+over it, and in spite of the abundance of materials, in spite of the
+superfluity of them even, I could not get though that essay; and so I
+did not finish it until the present year, because of the irritation
+under the influence of which I wrote, because I had not gone through
+all that was requisite in order to bear myself properly in relation
+to this essay, because I did not simply and clearly acknowledge the
+cause of all this,--a very simple cause, which had its root in
+myself.
+
+In the domain of morals, one very remarkable and too little noted
+phenomenon presents itself.
+
+If I tell a man who knows nothing about it, what I know about
+geology, astronomy, history, physics, and mathematics, that man
+receives entirely new information, and he never says to me:  "Well,
+what is there new in that?  Everybody knows that, and I have known it
+this long while."  But tell that same man the most lofty truth,
+expressed in the clearest, most concise manner, as it has never
+before been expressed, and every ordinary individual, especially one
+who takes no particular interest in moral questions, or, even more,
+one to whom the moral truth stated by you is displeasing, will
+infallibly say to you:  "Well, who does not know that?  That was
+known and said long ago."  It really seems to him that this has been
+said long ago and in just this way.  Only those to whom moral truths
+are dear and important know how important and precious they are, and
+with what prolonged labor the elucidation, the simplification, of
+moral truths, their transit from the state of a misty, indefinitely
+recognized supposition, and desire, from indistinct, incoherent
+expressions, to a firm and definite expression, unavoidably demanding
+corresponding concessions, are attained.
+
+We have all become accustomed to think that moral instruction is a
+most absurd and tiresome thing, in which there can be nothing new or
+interesting; and yet all human life, together with all the varied and
+complicated activities, apparently independent, of morality, both
+governmental and scientific, and artistic and commercial, has no
+other aim than the greater and greater elucidation, confirmation,
+simplification, and accessibility of moral truth.
+
+I remember that I was once walking along the street in Moscow, and in
+front of me I saw a man come out and gaze attentively at the stones
+of the sidewalk, after which he selected one stone, seated himself on
+it, and began to plane (as it seemed to me) or to rub it with the
+greatest diligence and force.  "What is he doing to the sidewalk?" I
+said to myself.  On going close to him, I saw what the man was doing.
+He was a young fellow from a meat-shop; he was whetting his knife on
+the stone of the pavement.  He was not thinking at all of the stones
+when he scrutinized them, still less was he thinking of them when he
+was accomplishing his task:  he was whetting his knife.  He was
+obliged to whet his knife so that he could cut the meat; but to me it
+seemed as though he were doing something to the stones of the
+sidewalk.  Just so it appears as though humanity were occupied with
+commerce, conventions, wars, sciences, arts; but only one business is
+of importance to it, and with only one business is it occupied:  it
+is elucidating to itself those moral laws by which it lives.  The
+moral laws are already in existence; humanity is only elucidating
+them, and this elucidation seems unimportant and imperceptible for
+any one who has no need of moral laws, who does not wish to live by
+them.  But this elucidation of the moral law is not only weighty, but
+the only real business of all humanity.  This elucidation is
+imperceptible just as the difference between the dull and the sharp
+knife is imperceptible.  The knife is a knife all the same, and for a
+person who is not obliged to cut any thing with this knife, the
+difference between the dull and the sharp one is imperceptible.  For
+the man who has come to an understanding that his whole life depends
+on the greater or less degree of sharpness in the knife,--for such a
+man, every whetting of it is weighty, and that man knows that the
+knife is a knife only when it is sharp, when it cuts that which needs
+cutting.
+
+This is what happened to me, when I began to write my essay.  It
+seemed to me that I knew all about it, that I understood every thing
+connected with those questions which had produced on me the
+impressions of the Lyapinsky house, and the census; but when I
+attempted to take account of them and to demonstrate them, it turned
+out that the knife would not cut, and that it must be whetted.  And
+it is only now, after the lapse of three years, that I have felt that
+my knife is sufficiently sharp, so that I can cut what I choose.  I
+have learned very little that is new.  My thoughts are all exactly
+the same, but they were duller then, and they all scattered and would
+not unite on any thing; there was no edge to them; they would not
+concentrate on one point, on the simplest and clearest decision, as
+they have now concentrated themselves.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+
+
+I remember that during the entire period of my unsuccessful efforts
+at helping the inhabitants of the city, I presented to myself the
+aspect of a man who should attempt to drag another man out of a swamp
+while he himself was standing on the same unstable ground.  Every
+attempt of mine had made me conscious of the untrustworthy character
+of the soil on which I stood.  I felt that I was in the swamp myself,
+but this consciousness did not cause me to look more narrowly at my
+own feet, in order to learn upon what I was standing; I kept on
+seeking some external means, outside myself, of helping the existing
+evil.
+
+I then felt that my life was bad, and that it was impossible to live
+in that manner.  But from the fact that my life was bad, and that it
+was impossible to live in that manner, I did not draw the very simple
+and clear deduction that it was necessary to amend my life and to
+live better, but I knew the terrible deduction that in order to live
+well myself, I must needs reform the lives of others; and so I began
+to reform the lives of others.  I lived in the city, and I wished to
+reform the lives of those who lived in the city; but I soon became
+convinced that this I could not by any possibility accomplish, and I
+began to meditate on the inherent characteristics of city life and
+city poverty.
+
+"What are city life and city poverty?  Why, when I am living in the
+city, cannot I help the city poor?"
+
+I asked myself.  I answered myself that I could not do any thing for
+them, in the first place, because there were too many of them here in
+one spot; in the second place, because all the poor people here were
+entirely different from the country poor.  Why were there so many of
+them here? and in what did their peculiarity, as opposed to the
+country poor, consist?  There was one and the same answer to both
+questions.  There were a great many of them here, because here all
+those people who have no means of subsistence in the country collect
+around the rich; and their peculiarity lies in this, that they are
+not people who have come from the country to support themselves in
+the city (if there are any city paupers, those who have been born
+here, and whose fathers and grandfathers were born here, then those
+fathers and grandfathers came hither for the purpose of earning their
+livelihood).  What is the meaning of this:  TO EARN ONE'S LIVELIHOOD
+IN THE CITY?  In the words "to earn one's livelihood in the city,"
+there is something strange, resembling a jest, when you reflect on
+their significance.  How is it that people go from the country,--that
+is to say, from the places where there are forests, meadows, grain,
+and cattle, where all the wealth of the earth lies,--to earn their
+livelihood in a place where there are neither trees, nor grass, nor
+even land, and only stones and dust?  What is the significance of the
+words "to earn a livelihood in the city," which are in such constant
+use, both by those who earn the livelihood, and by those who furnish
+it, as though it were something perfectly clear and comprehensible?
+
+I recall the hundreds and thousands of city people, both those who
+live well and the needy, with whom I have conversed on the reason why
+they came hither:  and all without exception said, that they had come
+from the country to earn their living; that in Moscow, where people
+neither sow nor reap,--that in Moscow there is plenty of every thing,
+and that, therefore, it is only in Moscow that they can earn the
+money which they require in the country for bread and a cottage and a
+horse, and articles of prime necessity.  But assuredly, in the
+country lies the source of all riches; there only is real wealth,--
+bread, and forests, and horses, and every thing.  And why, above all,
+take away from the country that which dwellers in the country need,--
+flour, oats, horses, and cattle?
+
+Hundreds of times did I discuss this matter with peasants living in
+town; and from my discussions with them, and from my observations, it
+has been made apparent to me, that the congregation of country people
+in the city is partly indispensable because they cannot otherwise
+support themselves, partly voluntary, and that they are attracted to
+the city by the temptations of the city.
+
+It is true, that the position of the peasant is such that, for the
+satisfaction of his demands made on him in the country, he cannot
+extricate himself otherwise than by selling the grain and the cattle
+which he knows will be indispensable to him; and he is forced,
+whether he will or no, to go to the city in order there to win back
+his bread.  But it is also true, that the luxury of city life, and
+the comparative ease with which money is there to be earned, attract
+him thither; and under the pretext of gaining his living in the town,
+he betakes himself thither in order that he may have lighter work,
+better food, and drink tea three times a day, and dress well, and
+even lead a drunken and dissolute life.  The cause of both is
+identical,--the transfer of the riches of the producers into the
+hands of non-producers, and the accumulation of wealth in the cities.
+And, in point of fact, when autumn has come, all wealth is collected
+in the country.  And instantly there arise demands for taxes,
+recruits, the temptations of vodka, weddings, festivals; petty
+pedlers make their rounds through the villages, and all sorts of
+other temptations crop up; and by this road, or, if not, by some
+other, wealth of the most varied description--vegetables, calves,
+cows, horses, pigs, chickens, eggs, butter, hemp, flax, rye, oats,
+buckwheat, pease, hempseed, and flaxseed--all passes into the hands
+of strangers, is carried off to the towns, and thence to the
+capitals.  The countryman is obliged to surrender all this to satisfy
+the demands that are made upon him, and temptations; and, having
+parted with his wealth, he is left with an insufficiency, and he is
+forced to go whither his wealth has been carried and there he tries,
+in part, to obtain the money which he requires for his first needs in
+the country, and in part, being himself led away by the blandishments
+of the city, he enjoys, in company with others, the wealth that has
+there accumulated.  Everywhere, throughout the whole of Russia,--yes,
+and not in Russia alone, I think, but throughout the whole world,--
+the same thing goes on.  The wealth of the rustic producers passes
+into the hands of traders, landed proprietors, officials, and
+factory-owners; and the people who receive this wealth wish to enjoy
+it.  But it is only in the city that they can derive full enjoyment
+from this wealth.  In the country, in the first place, it is
+difficult to satisfy all the requirements of rich people, on account
+of the sparseness of the population; banks, shops, hotels, every sort
+of artisan, and all sorts of social diversions, do not exist there.
+In the second place, one of the chief pleasures procured by wealth--
+vanity, the desire to astonish and outshine other people--is
+difficult to satisfy in the country; and this, again, on account of
+the lack of inhabitants.  In the country, there is no one to
+appreciate elegance, no one to be astonished.  Whatever adornments in
+the way of pictures and bronzes the dweller in the country may
+procure for his house, whatever equipages and toilets he may provide,
+there is no one to see them and envy them, and the peasants cannot
+judge of them.  [And, in the third place, luxury is even disagreeable
+and dangerous in the country for the man possessed of a conscience
+and fear.  It is an awkward and delicate matter, in the country, to
+have baths of milk, or to feed your puppies on it, when directly
+beside you there are children who have no milk; it is an awkward and
+delicate matter to build pavilions and gardens in the midst of people
+who live in cots banked up with dung, which they have no means of
+warming.  In the country there is no one to keep the stupid peasants
+in order, and in their lack of cultivation they might disarrange all
+this.] {11}
+
+And accordingly rich people congregate, and join themselves to other
+rich people with similar requirements, in the city, where the
+gratification of every luxurious taste is carefully protected by a
+numerous police force.  Well-rooted inhabitants of the city of this
+sort, are the governmental officials; every description of artisan
+and professional man has sprung up around them, and with them the
+wealthy join their forces.  All that a rich man has to do there is to
+take a fancy to a thing, and he can get it.  It is also more
+agreeable for a rich man to live there, because there he can gratify
+his vanity; there is some one with whom he can vie in luxury; there
+is some one to astonish, and there is some one to outshine.  But the
+principal reason why it is more comfortable in the city for a rich
+man is that formerly, in the country, his luxury made him awkward and
+uneasy; while now, on the contrary, it would be awkward for him not
+to live luxuriously, not to live like all his peers around him.  That
+which seemed dreadful and awkward in the country, here appears to be
+just as it should be.  [Rich people congregate in the city; and
+there, under the protection of the authorities, they calmly demand
+every thing that is brought thither from the country.  And the
+countryman is, in some measure, compelled to go thither, where this
+uninterrupted festival of the wealthy which demands all that is taken
+from him is in progress, in order to feed upon the crumbs which fall
+from the tables of the rich; and partly, also, because, when he
+beholds the care-free, luxurious life, approved and protected by
+everybody, he himself becomes desirous of regulating his life in such
+a way as to work as little as possible, and to make as much use as
+possible of the labors of others.
+
+And so he betakes himself to the city, and finds employment about the
+wealthy, endeavoring, by every means in his power, to entice from
+them that which he is in need of, and conforming to all those
+conditions which the wealthy impose upon him, he assists in the
+gratification of all their whims; he serves the rich man in the bath
+and in the inn, and as cab-driver and prostitute, and he makes for
+him equipages, toys, and fashions; and he gradually learns from the
+rich man to live in the same manner as the latter, not by labor, but
+by divers tricks, getting away from others the wealth which they have
+heaped together; and he becomes corrupt, and goes to destruction.
+And this colony, demoralized by city wealth, constitutes that city
+pauperism which I desired to aid and could not.
+
+All that is necessary, in fact, is for us to reflect on the condition
+of these inhabitants of the country, who have removed to the city in
+order to earn their bread or their taxes,--when they behold,
+everywhere around them, thousands squandered madly, and hundreds won
+by the easiest possible means; when they themselves are forced by
+heavy toil to earn kopeks,--and we shall be amazed that all these
+people should remain working people, and that they do not all of them
+take to an easier method of getting gain,--by trading, peddling,
+acting as middlemen, begging, vice, rascality, and even robbery.
+Why, we, the participants in that never-ceasing orgy which goes on in
+town, can become so accustomed to our life, that it seems to us
+perfectly natural to dwell alone in five huge apartments, heated by a
+quantity of beech logs sufficient to cook the food for and to warm
+twenty families; to drive half a verst with two trotters and two men-
+servants; to cover the polished wood floor with rugs; and to spend, I
+will not say, on a ball, five or ten thousand rubles, and twenty-five
+thousand on a Christmas-tree.  But a man who is in need of ten rubles
+to buy bread for his family, or whose last sheep has been seized for
+a tax-debt of seven rubles, and who cannot raise those rubles by hard
+labor, cannot grow accustomed to this.  We think that all this
+appears natural to poor people there are even some ingenuous persons
+who say in all seriousness, that the poor are very grateful to us for
+supporting them by this luxury.] {12}
+
+But poor people are not devoid of human understanding simply because
+they are poor, and they judge precisely as we do.  As the first
+thought that occurs to us on hearing that such and such a man has
+gambled away or squandered ten or twenty thousand rubles, is:  "What
+a foolish and worthless fellow he is to uselessly squander so much
+money! and what a good use I could have made of that money in a
+building which I have long been in need of, for the improvement of my
+estate, and so forth!"--just so do the poor judge when they behold
+the wealth which they need, not for caprices, but for the
+satisfaction of their actual necessities, of which they are
+frequently deprived, flung madly away before their eyes.  We make a
+very great mistake when we think that the poor can judge thus, reason
+thus, and look on indifferently at the luxury which surrounds them.
+
+They never have acknowledged, and they never will acknowledge, that
+it can be just for some people to live always in idleness, and for
+other people to fast and toil incessantly; but at first they are
+amazed and insulted by this; then they scrutinize it more
+attentively, and, seeing that these arrangements are recognized as
+legitimate, they endeavor to free themselves from toil, and to take
+part in the idleness.  Some succeed in this, and they become just
+such carousers themselves; others gradually prepare themselves for
+this state; others still fail, and do not attain their goal, and,
+having lost the habit of work, they fill up the disorderly houses and
+the night-lodging houses.
+
+Two years ago, we took from the country a peasant boy to wait on
+table.  For some reason, he did not get on well with the footman, and
+he was sent away:  he entered the service of a merchant, won the
+favor of his master, and now he goes about with a vest and a watch-
+chain, and dandified boots.  In his place, we took another peasant, a
+married man:  he became a drunkard, and lost money.  We took a third:
+he took to drunk, and, having drank up every thing he had, he
+suffered for a long while from poverty in the night-lodging house.
+An old man, the cook, took to drink and fell sick.  Last year a
+footman who had formerly been a hard drinker, but who had refrained
+from liquor for five years in the country, while living in Moscow
+without his wife who encouraged him, took to drink again, and ruined
+his whole life.  A young lad from our village lives with my brother
+as a table-servant.  His grandfather, a blind old man, came to me
+during my sojourn in the country, and asked me to remind this
+grandson that he was to send ten rubies for the taxes, otherwise it
+would be necessary for him to sell his cow.  "He keeps saying, I must
+dress decently," said the old man:  "well, he has had some shoes
+made, and that's all right; but what does he want to set up a watch
+for?" said the grandfather, expressing in these words the most
+senseless supposition that it was possible to originate.  The
+supposition really was senseless, if we take into consideration that
+the old man throughout Lent had eaten no butter, and that he had no
+split wood because he could not possibly pay one ruble and twenty
+kopeks for it; but it turned out that the old man's senseless jest
+was an actual fact.  The young fellow came to see me in a fine black
+coat, and shoes for which he had paid eight rubles.  He had recently
+borrowed ten rubles from my brother, and had spent them on these
+shoes.  And my children, who have known the lad from childhood, told
+me that he really considers it indispensable to fit himself out with
+a watch.  He is a very good boy, but he thinks that people will laugh
+at him so long as he has no watch; and a watch is necessary.  During
+the present year, a chambermaid, a girl of eighteen, entered into a
+connection with the coachman in our house.  She was discharged.  An
+old woman, the nurse, with whom I spoke in regard to the unfortunate
+girl, reminded me of a girl whom I had forgotten.  She too, ten yeans
+ago, during a brief stay of ours in Moscow, had become connected with
+a footman.  She too had been discharged, and she had ended in a
+disorderly house, and had died in the hospital before reaching the
+age of twenty.  It is only necessary to glance about one, to be
+struck with terror at the pest which we disseminate directly by our
+luxurious life among the people whom we afterwards wish to help, not
+to mention the factories and establishments which serve our luxurious
+tastes.
+
+[And thus, having penetrated into the peculiar character of city
+poverty, which I was unable to remedy, I perceived that its prime
+cause is this, that I take absolute necessaries from the dwellers in
+the country, and carry them all to the city.  The second cause is
+this, that by making use here, in the city, of what I have collected
+in the country, I tempt and lead astray, by my senseless luxury,
+those country people who come hither because of me, in order in some
+way to get back what they have been deprived of in the country.] {13}
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+
+
+I reached the same conclusion from a totally different point.  On
+recalling all my relations with the city poor during that time, I saw
+that one of the reasons why I could not help the city poor was, that
+the poor were disingenuous and untruthful with me.  They all looked
+upon me, not as a man, but as means.  I could not get near them, and
+I thought that perhaps I did not understand how to do it; but without
+uprightness, no help was possible.  How can one help a man who does
+not disclose his whole condition?  At first I blamed them for this
+(it is so natural to blame some one else); but a remark from an
+observing man named Siutaeff, who was visiting me at the time,
+explained this matter to me, and showed me where the cause of my want
+of success lay.  I remember that Siutaeff's remark struck me very
+forcibly at the time; but I only understood its full significance
+later on.  It was at the height of my self-delusion.  I was sitting
+with my sister, and Siutaeff was there also at her house; and my
+sister was questioning me about my undertaking.  I told her about it,
+and, as always happens when you have no faith in your course, I
+talked to her with great enthusiasm and warmth, and at great length,
+of what I had done, and of what might possibly come of it.  I told
+her every thing,--how we were going to keep track of pauperism in
+Moscow, how we were going to keep an eye on the orphans and old
+people, how we were going to send away all country people who had
+grown poor here, how we were going to smooth the pathway to reform
+for the depraved; how, if only the matter could be managed, there
+would not be a man left in Moscow, who could not obtain assistance.
+My sister sympathized with me, and we discussed it.  In the middle of
+our conversation, I glanced at Siutaeff.  As I was acquainted with
+his Christian life, and with the significance which he attached to
+charity, I expected his sympathy, and spoke so that he understood
+this; I talked to my sister, but directed my remarks more at him.  He
+sat immovable in his dark tanned sheepskin jacket,--which he wore,
+like all peasants, both out of doors and in the house,--and as though
+he did not hear us, but were thinking of his own affairs.  His small
+eyes did not twinkle, and seemed to be turned inwards.  Having
+finished what I had to say, I turned to him with a query as to what
+he thought of it.
+
+"It's all a foolish business," said he.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Your whole society is foolish, and nothing good can come out of it,"
+he repeated with conviction.
+
+"Why not?  Why is it a stupid business to help thousands, at any rate
+hundreds, of unfortunate beings?  Is it a bad thing, according to the
+Gospel, to clothe the naked, and feed the hungry?"
+
+"I know, I know, but that is not what you are doing.  Is it necessary
+to render assistance in that way?  You are walking along, and a man
+asks you for twenty kopeks.  You give them to him.  Is that alms?  Do
+you give spiritual alms,--teach him.  But what is it that you have
+given?  It was only for the sake of getting rid of him."
+
+"No; and, besides, that is not what we are talking about.  We want to
+know about this need, and then to help by both money and deeds; and
+to find work."
+
+"You can do nothing with those people in that way."
+
+"So they are to be allowed to die of hunger and cold?"
+
+"Why should they die?  Are there many of them there?"
+
+"What, many of them?" said I, thinking that he looked at the matter
+so lightly because he was not aware how vast was the number of these
+people.
+
+"Why, do you know," said I, "I believe that there are twenty thousand
+of these cold and hungry people in Moscow.  And how about Petersburg
+and the other cities?"
+
+He smiled.
+
+"Twenty thousand!  And how many households are there in Russia alone,
+do you think?  Are there a million?"
+
+"Well, what then?"
+
+"What then?" and his eyes flashed, and he grew animated.  "Come, let
+us divide them among ourselves.  I am not rich, I will take two
+persons on the spot.  There is the lad whom you took into your
+kitchen; I invited him to come to my house, and he did not come.
+Were there ten times as many, let us divide them among us.  Do you
+take some, and I will take some.  We will work together.  He will see
+how I work, and he will learn.  He will see how I live, and we will
+sit down at the same table together, and he will hear my words and
+yours.  This charity society of yours is nonsense."
+
+These simple words impressed me.  I could not but admit their
+justice; but it seemed to me at that time, that, in spite of their
+truth, still that which I had planned might possibly prove of
+service.  But the further I carried this business, the more I
+associated with the poor, the more frequently did this remark recur
+to my mind, and the greater was the significance which it acquired
+for me.
+
+I arrive in a costly fur coat, or with my horses; or the man who
+lacks shoes sees my two-thousand-ruble apartments.  He sees how, a
+little while ago, I gave five rubles without begrudging them, merely
+because I took a whim to do so.  He surely knows that if I give away
+rubles in that manner, it is only because I have hoarded up so many
+of them, that I have a great many superfluous ones, which I not only
+have not given away, but which I have easily taken from other people.
+[What else could he see in me but one of those persons who have got
+possession of what belongs to him?  And what other feeling can he
+cherish towards me, than a desire to obtain from me as many of those
+rubles, which have been stolen from him and from others, as possible?
+I wish to get close to him, and I complain that he is not frank; and
+here I am, afraid to sit down on his bed for fear of getting lice, or
+catching something infectious; and I am afraid to admit him to my
+room, and he, coming to me naked, waits, generally in the vestibule,
+or, if very fortunate, in the ante-chamber.  And yet I declare that
+he is to blame because I cannot enter into intimate relations with
+him, and because me is not frank.
+
+Let the sternest man try the experiment of eating a dinner of five
+courses in the midst of people who have had very little or nothing
+but black bread to eat.  Not a man will have the spirit to eat, and
+to watch how the hungry lick their chops around him.  Hence, then, in
+order to eat daintily amid the famishing, the first indispensable
+requisite is to hide from them, in order that they may not see it.
+This is the very thing, and the first thing, that we do.
+
+And I took a simpler view of our life, and perceived that an approach
+to the poor is not difficult to us through accidental causes, but
+that we deliberately arrange our lives in such a fashion so that this
+approach may be rendered difficult.
+
+Not only this; but, on taking a survey of our life, of the life of
+the wealthy, I saw that every thing which is considered desirable in
+that life consists in, or is inseparably bound up with, the idea of
+getting as far away from the poor as possible.  In fact, all the
+efforts of our well-endowed life, beginning with our food, dress,
+houses, our cleanliness, and even down to our education,--every thing
+has for its chief object, the separation of ourselves from the poor.
+In procuring this seclusion of ourselves by impassable barriers, we
+spend, to put it mildly, nine-tenths of our wealth.  The first thing
+that a man who was grown wealthy does is to stop eating out of one
+bowl, and he sets up crockery, and fits himself out with a kitchen
+and servants.  And he feeds his servants high, too, so that their
+mouths may not water over his dainty viands; and he eats alone; and
+as eating in solitude is wearisome, he plans how he may improve his
+food and deck his table; and the very manner of taking his food
+(dinner) becomes a matter for pride and vain glory with him, and his
+manner of taking his food becomes for him a means of sequestering
+himself from other men.  A rich man cannot think of such a thing as
+inviting a poor man to his table.  A man must know how to conduct
+ladies to table, how to bow, to sit down, to eat, to rinse out the
+mouth; and only rich people know all these things.  The same thing
+occurs in the matter of clothing.  If a rich man were to wear
+ordinary clothing, simply for the purpose of protecting his body from
+the cold,--a short jacket, a coat, felt and leather boots, an under-
+jacket, trousers, shirt,--he would require but very little, and he
+would not be unable, when he had two coats, to give one of them to a
+man who had none.  But the rich man begins by procuring for himself
+clothing which consists entirely of separate pieces, and which is fit
+only for separate occasions, and which is, therefore, unsuited to the
+poor man.  He has frock-coats, vests, pea-jackets, lacquered boots,
+cloaks, shoes with French heels, garments that are chopped up into
+bits to conform with the fashion, hunting-coats, travelling-coats,
+and so on, which can only be used under conditions of existence far
+removed from poverty.  And his clothing also furnishes him with a
+means of keeping at a distance from the poor.  The same is the case,
+and even more clearly, with his dwelling.  In order that one may live
+alone in ten rooms, it is indispensable that those who live ten in
+one room should not see it.  The richer a man is, the more difficult
+is he of access; the more porters there are between him and people
+who are not rich, the more impossible is it to conduct a poor man
+over rugs, and seat him in a satin chair.
+
+The case is the same with the means of locomotion.  The peasant
+driving in a cart, or a sledge, must be a very ill-tempered man when
+he will not give a pedestrian a lift; and there is both room for this
+and a possibility of doing it.  But the richer the equipage, the
+farther is a man from all possibility of giving a seat to any person
+whatsoever.  It is even said plainly, that the most stylish equipages
+are those meant to hold only one person.
+
+It is precisely the same thing with the manner of life which is
+expressed by the word cleanliness.
+
+Cleanliness!  Who is there that does not know people, especially
+women, who reckon this cleanliness in themselves as a great virtue?
+and who is not acquainted with the devices of this cleanliness, which
+know no bounds, when it can command the labor of others?  Which of
+the people who have become rich has not experienced in his own case,
+with what difficulty he carefully trained himself to this
+cleanliness, which only confirms the proverb, "Little white hands
+love other people's work"?
+
+To-day cleanliness consists in changing your shirt once a day; to-
+morrow, in changing it twice a day.  To-day it means washing the
+face, and neck, and hands daily; to-morrow, the feet; and day after
+to-morrow, washing the whole body every day, and, in addition and in
+particular, a rubbing-down.  To-day the table-cloth is to serve for
+two days, to-morrow there must be one each day, then two a day.  To-
+day the footman's hands must be clean; to-morrow he must wear gloves,
+and in his clean gloves he must present a letter on a clean salver.
+And there are no limits to this cleanliness, which is useless to
+everybody, and objectless, except for the purpose of separating
+oneself from others, and of rendering impossible all intercourse with
+them, when this cleanliness is attained by the labors of others.
+
+Moreover, when I studied the subject, I because convinced that even
+that which is commonly called education is the very same thing.
+
+The tongue does not deceive; it calls by its real name that which men
+understand under this name.  What the people call culture is
+fashionable clothing, political conversation, clean hands,--a certain
+sort of cleanliness.  Of such a man, it is said, in contradistinction
+to others, that he is an educated man.  In a little higher circle,
+what they call education means the same thing as with the people;
+only to the conditions of education are added playing on the
+pianoforte, a knowledge of French, the writing of Russian without
+orthographical errors, and a still greater degree of external
+cleanliness.  In a still more elevated sphere, education means all
+this with the addition of the English language, and a diploma from
+the highest educational institution.  But education is precisely the
+same thing in the first, the second, and the third case.  Education
+consists of those forms and acquirements which are calculated to
+separate a man from his fellows.  And its object is identical with
+that of cleanliness,--to seclude us from the herd of poor, in order
+that they, the poor, may not see how we feast.  But it is impossible
+to hide ourselves, and they do see us.
+
+And accordingly I have become convinced that the cause of the
+inability of us rich people to help the poor of the city lies in the
+impossibility of our establishing intercourse with them; and that
+this impossibility of intercourse is caused by ourselves, by the
+whole course of our lives, by all the uses which we make of our
+wealth.  I have become convinced that between us, the rich and the
+poor, there rises a wall, reared by ourselves out of that very
+cleanliness and education, and constructed of our wealth; and that in
+order to be in a condition to help the poor, we must needs, first of
+all, destroy this wall; and that in order to do this, confrontation
+after Siutaeff's method should be rendered possible, and the poor
+distributed among us.  And from another starting-point also I came to
+the same conclusion to which the current of my discussions as to the
+causes of the poverty in towns had led me:  the cause was our
+wealth.] {14}
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+
+
+I began to examine the matter from a third and wholly personal point
+of view.  Among the phenomena which particularly impressed me, during
+the period of my charitable activity, there was yet another, and a
+very strange one, for which I could for a long time find no
+explanation.  It was this:  every time that I chanced, either on the
+street on in the house, to give some small coin to a poor man,
+without saying any thing to him, I saw, or thought that I saw,
+contentment and gratitude on the countenance of the poor man, and I
+myself experienced in this form of benevolence an agreeable
+sensation.  I saw that I had done what the man wished and expected
+from me.  But if I stopped the poor man, and sympathetically
+questioned him about his former and his present life, I felt that it
+was no longer possible to give three or twenty kopeks, and I began to
+fumble in my purse for money, in doubt as to how much I ought to
+give, and I always gave more; and I always noticed that the poor man
+left me dissatisfied.  But if I entered into still closer intercourse
+with the poor man, then my doubts as to how much to give increased
+also; and, no matter how much I gave, the poor man grew ever more
+sullen and discontented.  As a general rule, it always turned out
+thus, that if I gave, after conversation with a poor man, three
+rubles or even more, I almost always beheld gloom, displeasure, and
+even ill-will, on the countenance of the poor man; and I have even
+known it to happen, that, having received ten rubles, he went off
+without so much as saying "Thank you," exactly as though I had
+insulted him.
+
+And thereupon I felt awkward and ashamed, and almost guilty.  But if
+I followed up a poor man for weeks and months and years, and assisted
+him, and explained my views to him, and associated with him, our
+relations became a torment, and I perceived that the man despised me.
+And I felt that he was in the right.
+
+If I go out into the street, and he, standing in that street, begs of
+me among the number of the other passers-by, people who walk and ride
+past him, and I give him money, I then am to him a passer-by, and a
+good, kind passer-by, who bestows on him that thread from which a
+shirt is made for the naked man; he expects nothing more than the
+thread, and if I give it he thanks me sincerely.  But if I stop him,
+and talk with him as man with man, I thereby show him that I desire
+to be something more than a mere passer-by.  If, as often happens, he
+weeps while relating to me his woes, then he sees in me no longer a
+passer-by, but that which I desire that he should see:  a good man.
+But if I am a good man, my goodness cannot pause at a twenty-kopek
+piece, nor at ten rubles, nor at ten thousand; it is impossible to be
+a little bit of a good man.  Let us suppose that I have given him a
+great deal, that I have fitted him out, dressed him, set him on his
+feet so that the can live without outside assistance; but for some
+reason or other, though misfortune or his own weakness or vices, he
+is again without that coat, that linen, and that money which I have
+given him; he is again cold and hungry, and he has come again to me,-
+-how can I refuse him?  [For if the cause of my action consisted in
+the attainment of a definite, material end, on giving him so many
+rubles or such and such a coat I might be at ease after having
+bestowed them.  But the cause of my action is not this:  the cause
+is, that I want to be a good man, that is to say, I want to see
+myself in every other man.  Every man understands goodness thus, and
+in no other manner.] {15}  And therefore, if he should drink away
+every thing that you had given him twenty times, and if he should
+again be cold and hungry, you cannot do otherwise than give him more,
+if you are a good man; you can never cease giving to him, if you have
+more than he has.  And if you draw back, you will thereby show that
+every thing that you have done, you have done not because you are a
+good man, but because you wished to appear a good man in his sight,
+and in the sight of men.
+
+And thus in the case with the men from whom I chanced to recede, to
+whom I ceased to give, and, by this action, denied good, I
+experienced a torturing sense of shame.
+
+What sort of shame was this?  This shame I had experienced in the
+Lyapinsky house, and both before and after that in the country, when
+I happened to give money or any thing else to the poor, and in my
+expeditions among the city poor.
+
+A mortifying incident that occurred to me not long ago vividly
+reminded me of that shame, and led me to an explanation of that shame
+which I had felt when bestowing money on the poor.
+
+[This happened in the country.  I wanted twenty kopeks to give to a
+poor pilgrim; I sent my son to borrow them from some one; he brought
+the pilgrim a twenty-kopek piece, and told me that he had borrowed it
+from the cook.  A few days afterwards some more pilgrims arrived, and
+again I was in want of a twenty-kopek piece.  I had a ruble; I
+recollected that I was in debt to the cook, and I went to the
+kitchen, hoping to get some more small change from the cook.  I said:
+"I borrowed a twenty-kopek piece from you, so here is a ruble."  I
+had not finished speaking, when the cook called in his wife from
+another room:  "Take it, Parasha," said he.  I, supposing that she
+understood what I wanted, handed her the ruble.  I must state that
+the cook had only lived with me a week, and, though I had seen his
+wife, I had never spoken to her.  I was just on the point of saying
+to her that she was to give me some small coins, when she bent
+swiftly down to my hand, and tried to kiss it, evidently imaging that
+I had given her the ruble.  I muttered something, and quitted the
+kitchen.  I was ashamed, ashamed to the verge of torture, as I had
+not been for a long time.  I shrank together; I was conscious that I
+was making grimaces, and I groaned with shame as I fled from the
+kitchen.  This utterly unexpected, and, as it seemed to me, utterly
+undeserved shame, made a special impression on me, because it was a
+long time since I had been mortified, and because I, as an old man,
+had so lived, it seemed to me, that I had not merited this shame.  I
+was forcibly struck by this.  I told the members of my household
+about it, I told my acquaintances, and they all agreed that they
+should have felt the same.  And I began to reflect:  why had this
+caused me such shame?  To this, something which had happened to me in
+Moscow furnished me with an answer.
+
+I meditated on that incident, and the shame which I had experienced
+in the presence of the cook's wife was explained to me, and all those
+sensations of mortification which I had undergone during the course
+of my Moscow benevolence, and which I now feel incessantly when I
+have occasion to give any one any thing except that petty alms to the
+poor and to pilgrims, which I have become accustomed to bestow, and
+which I consider a deed not of charity but of courtesy.  If a man
+asks you for a light, you must strike a match for him, if you have
+one.  If a man asks for three or for twenty kopeks, or even for
+several rubles, you must give them if you have them.  This is an act
+of courtesy and not of charity.] {16}
+
+This was the case in question:  I have already mentioned the two
+peasants with whom I was in the habit of sawing wood three yeans ago.
+One Saturday evening at dusk, I was returning to the city in their
+company.  They were going to their employer to receive their wages.
+As we were crossing the Dragomilovsky bridge, we met an old man.  He
+asked alms, and I gave him twenty kopeks.  I gave, and reflected on
+the good effect which my charity would have on Semyon, with whom I
+had been conversing on religious topics.  Semyon, the Vladimir
+peasant, who had a wife and two children in Moscow, halted also,
+pulled round the skirt of his kaftan, and got out his purse, and from
+this slender purse he extracted, after some fumbling, three kopeks,
+handed it to the old man, and asked for two kopeks in change.  The
+old man exhibited in his hand two three-kopek pieces and one kopek.
+Semyon looked at them, was about to take the kopek, but thought
+better of it, pulled off his hat, crossed himself, and walked on,
+leaving the old man the three-kopek piece.
+
+I was fully acquainted with Semyon's financial condition.  He had no
+property at home at all.  The money which he had laid by on the day
+when he gave three kopeks amounted to six rubles and fifty kopeks.
+Accordingly, six rubles and twenty kopeks was the sum of his savings.
+My reserve fund was in the neighborhood of six hundred thousand.  I
+had a wife and children, Semyon had a wife and children.  He was
+younger than I, and his children were fewer in number than mine; but
+his children were small, and two of mine were of an age to work, so
+that our position, with the exception of the savings, was on an
+equality; mine was somewhat the more favorable, if any thing.  He
+gave three kopeks, I gave twenty.  What did he really give, and what
+did I really give?  What ought I to have given, in order to do what
+Semyon had done? he had six hundred kopeks; out of this he gave one,
+and afterwards two.  I had six hundred thousand rubles.  In order to
+give what Semyon had given, I should have been obliged to give three
+thousand rubles, and ask for two thousand in change, and then leave
+the two thousand with the old man, cross myself, and go my way,
+calmly conversing about life in the factories, and the cost of liver
+in the Smolensk market.
+
+I thought of this at the time; but it was only long afterwards that I
+was in a condition to draw from this incident that deduction which
+inevitably results from it.  This deduction is so uncommon and so
+singular, apparently, that, in spite of its mathematical
+infallibility, one requires time to grow used to it.  It does seem as
+though there must be some mistake, but mistake there is none.  There
+is merely the fearful mist of error in which we live.
+
+[This deduction, when I arrived at it, and when I recognized its
+undoubted truth, furnished me with an explanation of my shame in the
+presence of the cook's wife, and of all the poor people to whom I had
+given and to whom I still give money.
+
+What, in point of fact, is that money which I give to the poor, and
+which the cook's wife thought I was giving to her?  In the majority
+of cases, it is that portion of my substance which it is impossible
+even to express in figures to Semyon and the cook's wife,--it is
+generally one millionth part or about that.  I give so little that
+the bestowal of any money is not and cannot be a deprivation to me;
+it is only a pleasure in which I amuse myself when the whim seizes
+me.  And it was thus that the cook's wife understood it.  If I give
+to a man who steps in from the street one ruble or twenty kopeks, why
+should not I give her a ruble also?  In the opinion of the cook's
+wife, such a bestowal of money is precisely the same as the flinging
+of honey-cakes to the people by gentlemen; it furnishes the people
+who have a great deal of superfluous cash with amusement.  I was
+mortified because the mistake made by the cook's wife demonstrated to
+me distinctly the view which she, and all people who are not rich,
+must take of me:  "He is flinging away his folly, i.e., his unearned
+money."
+
+As a matter of fact, what is my money, and whence did it come into my
+possession?  A portion of it I accumulated from the land which I
+received from my father.  A peasant sold his last sheep or cow in
+order to give the money to me.  Another portion of my money is the
+money which I have received for my writings, for my books.  If my
+books are hurtful, I only lead astray those who purchase them, and
+the money which I receive for them is ill-earned money; but if my
+books are useful to people, then the issue is still more disastrous.
+I do not give them to people:  I say, "Give me seventeen rubles, and
+I will give them to you."  And as the peasant sells his last sheep,
+in this case the poor student or teacher, or any other poor man,
+deprives himself of necessaries in order to give me this money.  And
+so I have accumulated a great deal of money in that way, and what do
+I do with it?  I take that money to the city, and bestow it on the
+poor, only when they fulfil my caprices, and come hither to the city
+to clean my sidewalk, lamps, and shoes; to work for me in factories.
+And in return for this money, I force from them every thing that I
+can; that is to say, I try to give them as little as possible, and to
+receive as much as possible from them.  And all at once I begin,
+quite unexpectedly, to bestow this money as a simple gift, on these
+same poor persons, not on all, but on those to whom I take a fancy.
+Why should not every poor person expect that it is quite possible
+that the luck may fall to him of being one of those with whom I shall
+amuse myself by distributing my superfluous money?  And so all look
+upon me as the cook's wife did.
+
+And I had gone so far astray that this taking of thousands from the
+poor with one hand, and this flinging of kopeks with the other, to
+those to whom the whim moved me to give, I called good.  No wonder
+that I felt ashamed.] {17}
+
+Yes, before doing good it was needful for me to stand outside of
+evil, in such conditions that I might cease to do evil.  But my whole
+life is evil.  I may give away a hundred thousand rubles, and still I
+shall not be in a position to do good because I shall still have five
+hundred thousand left.  Only when I have nothing shall I be in a
+position to do the least particle of good, even as much as the
+prostitute did which she nursed the sick women and her child for
+three days.  And that seemed so little to me!  And I dared to think
+of good myself!  That which, on the first occasion, told me, at the
+sight of the cold and hungry in the Lyapinsky house, that I was to
+blame for this, and that to live as I live is impossible, and
+impossible, and impossible,--that alone was true.
+
+What, then, was I to do?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+
+
+It was hard for me to come to this confession, but when I had come to
+it I was shocked at the error in which I had been living.  I stood up
+to my ears in the mud, and yet I wanted to drag others out of this
+mud.
+
+What is it that I wish in reality?  I wish to do good to others.  I
+wish to do it so that other people may not be cold and hungry, so
+that others may live as it is natural for people to live.
+
+[I wish this, and I see that in consequence of the violence,
+extortions, and various tricks in which I take part, people who toil
+are deprived of necessaries, and people who do not toil, in whose
+ranks I also belong, enjoy in superabundance the toil of other
+people.
+
+I see that this enjoyment of the labors of others is so arranged,
+that the more rascally and complicated the trickery which is employed
+by the man himself, or which has been employed by the person from
+whom he obtained his inheritance, the more does he enjoy of the
+labors of others, and the less does he contribute of his own labor.
+
+First come the Shtiglitzy, Dervizy, Morozovy, the Demidoffs, the
+Yusapoffs; then great bankers, merchants, officials, landed
+proprietors, among whom I also belong; then the poor--very small
+traders, dramshop-keepers, usurers, district judges, overseers,
+teachers, sacristans, clerks; then house-porters, lackeys, coachmen,
+watch-carriers, cab-drivers, peddlers; and last of all, the laboring
+classes--factory-hands and peasants, whose numbers bear the relation
+to the first named of ten to one.  I see that the life of nine-tenths
+of the working classes demands, by reason of its nature, application
+and toil, as does every natural life; but that, in consequence of the
+sharp practices which take from these people what is indispensable,
+and place them in such oppressive conditions, this life becomes more
+difficult every year, and more filled with deprivations; but our
+life, the life of the non-laboring classes, thanks to the co-
+operation of the arts and sciences which are directed to this object,
+becomes more filled with superfluities, more attractive and careful,
+with every year.  I see, that, in our day, the life of the working-
+man, and, in particular, the life of old men, of women, and of
+children of the working population, is perishing directly from their
+food, which is utterly inadequate to their fatiguing labor; and that
+this life of theirs is not free from care as to its very first
+requirements; and that, alongside of this, the life of the non-
+laboring classes, to which I belong, is filled more and more, every
+year, with superfluities and luxury, and becomes more and more free
+from anxiety, and has finally reached such a point of freedom from
+care, in the case of its fortunate members, of whom I am one, as was
+only dreamed of in olden times in fairy-tales,--the state of the
+owner of the purse with the inexhaustible ruble, that is, a condition
+in which a man is not only utterly released from the law of labor,
+but in which he possesses the possibility of enjoying, without toil,
+all the blessings of life, and of transferring to his children, or to
+any one whom he may see fit, this purse with the inexhaustible ruble.
+
+I see that the products of the people's toil are more and more
+transformed from the mass of the working classes to those who do not
+work; that the pyramid of the social edifice seems to be
+reconstructed in such fashion that the foundation stones are carried
+to the apex, and the swiftness of this transfer is increasing in a
+sort of geometrical ratio.  I see that the result of this is
+something like that which would take place in an ant-heap if the
+community of ants were to lose their sense of the common law, if some
+ants were to begin to draw the products of labor from the bottom to
+the top of the heap, and should constantly contract the foundations
+and broaden the apex, and should thereby also force the remaining
+ants to betake themselves from the bottom to the summit.
+
+I see that the ideal of the Fortunatus' purse has made its way among
+the people, in the place of the ideal of a toilsome life.  Rich
+people, myself among the number, get possession of the inexhaustible
+ruble by various devices, and for the purpose of enjoying it we go to
+the city, to the place where nothing is produced and where every
+thing is swallowed up.
+
+The industrious poor man, who is robbed in order that the rich may
+possess this inexhaustible ruble, yearns for the city in his train;
+and there he also takes to sharp practices, and either acquires for
+himself a position in which he can work little and receive much,
+thereby rendering still more oppressive the situation of the laboring
+classes, or, not having attained to such a position, he goes to ruin,
+and falls into the ranks of those cold and hungry inhabitants of the
+night-lodging houses, which are being swelled with such remarkable
+rapidity.
+
+I belong to the class of those people, who, by divers tricks, take
+from the toiling masses the necessaries of life, and who have
+acquired for themselves these inexhaustible rubles, and who lead
+these unfortunates astray.  I desire to aid people, and therefore it
+is clear that, first of all, I must cease to rob them as I am doing.
+But I, by the most complicated, and cunning, and evil practices,
+which have been heaped up for centuries, have acquired for myself the
+position of an owner of the inexhaustible ruble, that is to say, one
+in which, never working myself, I can make hundreds and thousands of
+people toil for me--which also I do; and I imagine that I pity
+people, and I wish to assist them.  I sit on a man's neck, I weigh
+him down, and I demand that he shall carry me; and without descending
+from his shoulders I assure myself and others that I am very sorry
+for him, and that I desire to ameliorate his condition by all
+possible means, only not by getting off of him.
+
+Surely this is simple enough.  If I want to help the poor, that is,
+to make the poor no longer poor, I must not produce poor people.  And
+I give, at my own selection, to poor men who have gone astray from
+the path of life, a ruble, or ten rubles, or a hundred; and I grasp
+hundreds from people who have not yet left the path, and thereby I
+render them poor also, and demoralize them to boot.
+
+This is very simple; but it was horribly hard for me to understand
+this fully without compromises and reservations, which might serve to
+justify my position; but it sufficed for me to confess my guilt, and
+every thing which had before seemed to me strange and complicated,
+and lacking in cleanness, became perfectly comprehensible and simple.
+But the chief point was, that my way of life, arising from this
+interpretation, became simple, clear and pleasant, instead of
+perplexed, inexplicable and full of torture as before.] {18}
+
+Who am I, that I should desire to help others?  I desire to help
+people; and I, rising at twelve o'clock after a game of vint {19}
+with four candles, weak, exhausted, demanding the aid of hundreds of
+people,--I go to the aid of whom?  Of people who rise at five
+o'clock, who sleep on planks, who nourish themselves on bread and
+cabbage, who know how to plough, to reap, to wield the axe, to chop,
+to harness, to sew,--of people who in strength and endurance, and
+skill and abstemiousness, are a hundred times superior to me,--and I
+go to their succor!  What except shame could I feel, when I entered
+into communion with these people?  The very weakest of them, a
+drunkard, an inhabitant of the Rzhanoff house, the one whom they call
+"the idler," is a hundred-fold more industrious than I; [his balance,
+so to speak, that is to say, the relation of what he takes from
+people and that which they give him, stands on a thousand times
+better footing than my balance, if I take into consideration what I
+take from people and what I give to them.] {18}
+
+And these are the people to whose assistance I go.  I go to help the
+poor.  But who is the poor man?  There is no one poorer than myself.
+I am a thoroughly enervated, good-for-nothing parasite, who can only
+exist under the most special conditions, who can only exist when
+thousands of people toil at the preservation of this life which is
+utterly useless to every one.  And I, that plant-louse, which devours
+the foliage of trees, wish to help the tree in its growth and health,
+and I wish to heal it.
+
+I have passed my whole life in this manner:  I eat, I talk and I
+listen; I eat, I write or read, that is to say, I talk and listen
+again; I eat, I play, I eat, again I talk and listen, I eat, and
+again I go to bed; and so each day I can do nothing else, and I
+understand how to do nothing else.  And in order that I may be able
+to do this, it is necessary that the porter, the peasant, the cook,
+male or female, the footman, the coachman, and the laundress, should
+toil from morning till night; I will not refer to the labors of the
+people which are necessary in order that coachman, cooks, male and
+female, footman, and the rest should have those implements and
+articles with which, and over which, they toil for my sake; axes,
+tubs, brushes, household utensils, furniture, wax, blacking,
+kerosene, hay, wood, and beef.  And all these people work hard all
+day long and every day, so that I may be able to talk and eat and
+sleep.  And I, this cripple of a man, have imagined that I could help
+others, and those the very people who support me!
+
+It is not remarkable that I could not help any one, and that I felt
+ashamed; but the remarkable point is that such an absurd idea could
+have occurred to me.  The woman who served the sick old man, helped
+him; the mistress of the house, who cut a slice from the bread which
+she had won from the soil, helped the beggar; Semyon, who gave three
+kopeks which he had earned, helped the beggar, because those three
+kopeks actually represented his labor:  but I served no one, I toiled
+for no one, and I was well aware that my money did not represent my
+labor.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII. {20}
+
+
+
+Into the delusion that I could help others I was led by the fact that
+I fancied that my money was of the same sort as Semyon's.  But this
+was not the case.
+
+A general idea prevails, that money represents wealth; but wealth is
+the product of labor; and, therefore, money represents labor.  But
+this idea is as just as that every governmental regulation is the
+result of a compact (contrat social).
+
+Every one likes to think that money is only a medium of exchange for
+labor.  I have made shoes, you have raised grain, he has reared
+sheep:  here, in order that we may the more readily effect an
+exchange, we will institute money, which represents a corresponding
+quantity of labor, and, by means of it, we will barter our shoes for
+a breast of lamb and ten pounds of flour.  We will exchange our
+products through the medium of money, and the money of each one of us
+represents our labor.
+
+This is perfectly true, but true only so long as, in the community
+where this exchange is effected, the violence of one man over the
+rest has not made its appearance; not only violence over the labors
+of others, as happens in wars and slavery, but where he exercises no
+violence for the protection of the products of their labor from
+others.  This will be true only in a community whose members fully
+carry out the Christian law, in a community where men give to him who
+asks, and where he who takes is not asked to make restitution.  But
+just so soon as any violence whatever is used in the community, the
+significance of money for its possessor loses its significance as a
+representative of labor, and acquires the significance of a right
+founded, not on labor, but on violence.
+
+As soon as there is war, and one man has taken any thing from any
+other man, money can no longer be always the representative of labor;
+money received by a warrior for the spoils of war, which he sells,
+even if he is the commander of the warriors, is in no way a product
+of labor, and possesses an entirely different meaning from money
+received for work on shoes.  As soon as there are slave-owners and
+slaves, as there always have been throughout the whole world, it is
+utterly impossible to say that money represents labor.
+
+Women have woven linen, sold it, and received money; serfs have woven
+for their master, and the master has sold them and received the
+money.  The money is identical in both cases; but in the one case it
+is the product of labor, in the other the product of violence.  In
+exactly the same way, a stranger or my own father has given me money;
+and my father, when he gave me that money, knew, and I know, and
+everybody knows, that no one can take this money away from me; but if
+it should occur to any one to take it away from me, or even not to
+hand it over at the date when it was promised, the law would
+intervene on my behalf, and would compel the delivery to me of the
+money; and, again, it is evident that this money can in no wise be
+called the equivalent of labor, on a level with the money received by
+Semyon for chopping wood.  So that in any community where there is
+any thing that in any manner whatever controls the labor of others,
+or where violence hedges in, by means of money, its possessions from
+others, there money is no longer invariably the representative of
+labor.  In such a community, it is sometimes the representative of
+labor, and sometimes of violence.
+
+Thus it would be where only one act of violence from one man against
+others, in the midst of perfectly free relations, should have made
+its appearance; but now, when centuries of the most varied deeds of
+violence have passed for accumulations of money, when these deeds of
+violence are incessant, and merely alter their forms; when, as every
+one admits, money accumulated itself represents violence; when money,
+as a representative of direct labor, forms but a very small portion
+of the money which is derived from every sort of violence,--to say
+nowadays that money represents the labor of the person who possesses
+it, is a self-evident error or a deliberate lie.
+
+It may be said, that thus it should be; it may be said, that this is
+desirable; but by no means can it be said, that thus it is.
+
+Money represents labor.  Yes.  Money does represent labor; but whose?
+In our society only in the very rarest, rarest of instances, does
+money represent the labor of its possessor, but it nearly always
+represents the labor of other people, the past or future labor of
+men; it is a representative of the obligation of others to labor,
+which has been established by force.
+
+Money, in its most accurate and at the same the simple application,
+is the conventional stamp which confers a right, or, more correctly,
+a possibility, of taking advantage of the labors of other people.  In
+its ideal significance, money should confer this right, or this
+possibility, only when it serves as the equivalent of labor, and such
+money might be in a community in which no violence existed.  But just
+as soon as violence, that is to say, the possibility of profiting by
+the labors of others without toil of one's own, exists in a
+community, then that profiting by the labors of other men is also
+expressed by money, without any distinction of the persons on whom
+that violence is exercised.
+
+The landed proprietor has imposed upon his serfs natural debts, a
+certain quantity of linen, grain, and cattle, or a corresponding
+amount of money.  One household has procured the cattle, but has paid
+money in lieu of linen.  The proprietor takes the money to a certain
+amount only, because he knows that for that money they will make him
+the same quantity of linen, (generally he takes a little more, in
+order to be sure that they will make it for the same amount); and
+this money, evidently, represents for the proprietor the obligation
+of other people to toil.
+
+The peasant gives the money as an obligation, to he knows not whom,
+but to people, and there are many of them, who undertake for this
+money to make so much linen.  But the people who undertake to make
+the linen, do so because they have not succeeded in raising sheep,
+and in place of the sheep, they must pay money; but the peasant who
+takes money for his sheep takes it because he must pay for grain
+which did not bear well this year.  The same thing goes on throughout
+this realm, and throughout the whole world.
+
+A man sells the product of his labor, past, present or to come,
+sometimes his food, and generally not because money constitutes for
+him a convenient means of exchange.  He could have effected the
+barter without money, but he does so because money is exacted from
+him by violence as a lien on his labor.
+
+When the sovereign of Egypt exacted labor from his slaves, the slaves
+gave all their labor, but only their past and present labor, their
+future labor they could not give.  But with the dissemination of
+money tokens, and the credit which had its rise in them, it became
+possible to sell one's future toil for money.  Money, with co-
+existent violence in the community, only represents the possibility
+of a new form of impersonal slavery, which has taken the place of
+personal slavery.  The slave-owner has a right to the labor of Piotr,
+Ivan, and Sidor.  But the owner of money, in a place where money is
+demanded from all, has a right to the toil of all those nameless
+people who are in need of money.  Money has set aside all the
+oppressive features of slavery, under which an owner knows his right
+to Ivan, and with them it has set aside all humane relations between
+the owner and the slave, which mitigated the burden of personal
+thraldom.
+
+I will not allude to the fact, that such a condition of things is,
+possibly, necessary for the development of mankind, for progress, and
+so forth,--that I do not contest.  I have merely tried to elucidate
+to myself the idea of money, and that universal error into which I
+fell when I accepted money as the representative of labor.  I became
+convinced, after experience, that money is not the representative of
+labor, but, in the majority of cases, the representative of violence,
+or of especially complicated sharp practices founded on violence.
+
+Money, in our day, has completely lost that significance which it is
+very desirable that it should possess, as the representative of one's
+own labor; such a significance it has only as an exception, but, as a
+general rule, it has been converted into a right or a possibility of
+profiting by the toil of others.
+
+The dissemination of money, of credit, and of all sorts of money
+tokens, confirms this significance of money ever more and more.
+Money is a new form of slavery, which differs from the old form of
+slavery only in its impersonality, its annihilation of all humane
+relations with the slave.
+
+Money--money, is a value which is always equal to itself, and is
+always considered legal and righteous, and whose use is regarded as
+not immoral, just as the right of slavery was regarded.
+
+In my young days, the game of loto was introduced into the clubs.
+Everybody rushed to play it, and, as it was said, many ruined
+themselves, rendered their families miserable, lost other people's
+money, and government funds, and committed suicide; and the game was
+prohibited, and it remains prohibited to this day.
+
+I remember to have seen old and unsentimental gamblers, who told me
+that this game was particularly pleasing because you did not see from
+whom you were winning, as is the case in other games; a lackey
+brought, not money, but chips; each man lost a little stake, and his
+disappointment was not visible  . . .  It is the same with roulette,
+which is everywhere prohibited, and not without reason.
+
+It is the same with money.  I possess a magic, inexhaustible ruble; I
+cut off my coupons, and have retired from all the business of the
+world.  Whom do I injure,--I, the most inoffensive and kindest of
+men?  But this is nothing more than playing at loto or roulette,
+where I do not see the man who shoots himself, because of his losses,
+after procuring for me those coupons which I cut off from the bonds
+so accurately with a strictly right-angled corner.
+
+I have done nothing, I do nothing, and I shall do nothing, except cut
+off those coupons; and I firmly believe that money is the
+representative of labor!  Surely, this is amazing!  And people talk
+of madmen, after that!  Why, what degree of lunacy can be more
+frightful than this?  A sensible, educated, in all other respects
+sane man lives in a senseless manner, and soothes himself for not
+uttering the word which it is indispensably necessary that he should
+utter, with the idea that there is some sense in his conclusions, and
+he considers himself a just man.  Coupons--the representatives of
+toil!  Toil!  Yes, but of whose toil?  Evidently not of the man who
+owns them, but of him who labors.
+
+Slavery is far from being suppressed.  It has been suppressed in Rome
+and in America, and among us:  but only certain laws have been
+abrogated; only the word, not the thing, has been put down.  Slavery
+is the freeing of ourselves alone from the toil which is necessary
+for the satisfaction of our demands, by the transfer of this toil to
+others; and wherever there exists a man who does not work, not
+because others work lovingly for him, but where he possesses the
+power of not working, and forces others to work for him, there
+slavery exists.  There too, where, as in all European societies,
+there are people who make use of the labor of thousands of men, and
+regard this as their right,--there slavery exists in its broadest
+measure.
+
+And money is the same thing as slavery.  Its object and its
+consequences are the same.  Its object is--that one may rid one's
+self of the first born of all laws, as a profoundly thoughtful writer
+from the ranks of the people has expressed it; from the natural law
+of life, as we have called it; from the law of personal labor for the
+satisfaction of our own wants.  And the results of money are the same
+as the results of slavery, for the proprietor; the creation, the
+invention of new and ever new and never-ending demands, which can
+never be satisfied; the enervation of poverty, vice, and for the
+slaves, the persecution of man and their degradation to the level of
+the beasts.
+
+Money is a new and terrible form of slavery, and equally demoralizing
+with the ancient form of slavery for both slave and slave-owner; only
+much worse, because it frees the slave and the slave-owner from their
+personal, humane relations.]
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+
+
+I am always surprised by the oft-repeated words:  "Yes, this is so in
+theory, but how is it in practice?"  Just as though theory were fine
+words, requisite for conversation, but not for the purpose of having
+all practice, that is, all activity, indispensably founded on them.
+There must be a fearful number of stupid theories current in the
+world, that such an extraordinary idea should have become prevalent.
+Theory is what a man thinks on a subject, but its practice is what he
+does.  How can a man think it necessary to do so and so, and then do
+the contrary?  If the theory of baking bread is, that it must first
+be mixed, and then set to rise, no one except a lunatic, knowing this
+theory, would do the reverse.  But it has become the fashion with us
+to say, that "this is so in theory, but how about the practice?"
+
+In the matter which interests me now, that has been confirmed which I
+have always thought,--that practice infallibly flows from theory, and
+not that it justifies it, but it cannot possibly be otherwise, for if
+I have understood the thing of which I have been thinking, then I
+cannot carry out this thing otherwise than as I have understood it.
+
+I wanted to help the unfortunate only because I had money, and I
+shared the general belief that money was the representative of labor,
+or, on the whole, something legal and good.  But, having begun to
+give away this money, I saw, when I gave the bills which I had
+accumulated from poor people, that I was doing precisely that which
+was done by some landed proprietors who made some of their serfs wait
+on others.  I saw that every use of money, whether for making
+purchases, or for giving away without an equivalent to another, is
+handing over a note for extortion from the poor, or its transfer to
+another man for extortion from the poor.  I saw that money in itself
+was not only not good, but evidently evil, and that it deprives us of
+our highest good,--labor, and thereby of the enjoyment of our labor,
+and that that blessing I was not in a position to confer on any one,
+because I was myself deprived of it:  I do not work, and I take no
+pleasure in making use of the labor of others.
+
+It would appear that there is something peculiar in this abstract
+argument as to the nature of money.  But this argument which I have
+made not for the sake of argument, but for the solution of the
+problem of my life, of my sufferings, was for me an answer to my
+question:  What is to be done?
+
+As soon as I grasped the meaning of riches, and of money, it not only
+became clear and indisputable to me, what I ought to do, but also
+clear and indisputable what others ought to do, because they would
+infallibly do it.  I had only actually come to understand what I had
+known for a long time previously, the theory which was given to men
+from the very earliest times, both by Buddha, and Isaiah, and Lao-
+Tze, and Socrates, and in a peculiarly clear and indisputable manner
+by Jesus Christ and his forerunner, John the Baptist.  John the
+Baptist, in answer to the question of the people,--What were they to
+do? replied simply, briefly, and clearly:  "He that hath two coats,
+let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him
+do likewise" (Luke iii. 10, 11).  In a similar manner, but with even
+greater clearness, and on many occasions, Christ spoke.  He said:
+"Blessed are the poor, and woe to the rich."  He said that it is
+impossible to serve God and mammon.  He forbade his disciples to take
+not only money, but also two garments.  He said to the rich young
+man, that he could not enter into the kingdom of heaven because he
+was rich, and that it was 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 should not leave every thing, houses and children and
+lands, and follow him, could not be his disciple.  He told the
+parable of the rich man who did nothing bad, like our own rich men,
+but who only arrayed himself in costly garments, and ate and drank
+daintily, and who lost his soul thereby; and of poor Lazarus, who had
+done nothing good, but who was saved merely because he was poor.
+
+This theory was sufficiently familiar to me, but the false teachings
+of the world had so obscured it that it had become for me a theory in
+the sense which people are fond of attributing to that term, that is
+to say, empty words.  But as soon as I had succeeded in destroying in
+my consciousness the sophisms of worldly teaching, theory conformed
+to practice, and the truth with regard to my life and to the life of
+the people about me became its conclusion.
+
+I understood that man, besides life for his own personal good, is
+unavoidably bound to serve the good of others also; that, if we take
+an illustration from the animal kingdom,--as some people are fond of
+doing, defending violence and conflict by the conflict for existence
+in the animal kingdom,--the illustration must be taken from
+gregarious animals, like bees; that consequently man, not to mention
+the love to his neighbor incumbent on him, is called upon, both by
+reason and by his nature, to serve other people and the common good
+of humanity.  I comprehended that the natural law of man is that
+according to which only he can fulfil destiny, and therefore be
+happy.  I understood that this law has been and is broken hereby,--
+that people get rid of labor by force (like the robber bees), make
+use of the toil of others, directing this toil, not to the common
+weal, but to the private satisfaction of swift-growing desires; and,
+precisely as in the case of the robber bees, they perish in
+consequence.  [I understood that the original form of this
+disinclination for the law is the brutal violence against weaker
+individuals, against women, wars and imprisonments, whose sequel is
+slavery, and also the present reign of money.  I understood that
+money is the impersonal and concealed enslavement of the poor.  And,
+once having perceived the significance of money as slavery, I could
+not but hate it, nor refrain from doing all in my power to free
+myself from it.] {21}
+
+When I was a slave-owner, and comprehended the immorality of my
+position, I tried to escape from it.  My escape consisted in this,
+that I, regarding it as immoral, tried to exercise my rights as
+slave-owner as little as possible, but to live, and to allow other
+people to live, as though that right did not exist.  And I cannot
+refrain from doing the same thing now in reference to the present
+form of slavery,--exercising my right to the labor of others as
+little as possible, i.e., hiring and purchasing as little as
+possible.
+
+The root of every slavery is the use of the labor of others; and
+hence, the compelling others to it is founded indifferently on my
+right to the slave, or on my possession of money which is
+indispensable to him.  If I really do not approve, and if I regard as
+an evil, the employment of the labor of others, then I shall use
+neither my right nor my money for that purpose; I shall not compel
+others to toil for me, but I shall endeavor to free them from the
+labor which they have performed for me, as far as possible, either by
+doing without this labor or by performing it for myself.
+
+And this very simple and unavoidable deduction enters into all the
+details of my life, effects a total change in it, and at one blow
+releases me from those moral sufferings which I have undergone at the
+sight of the sufferings and the vice of the people, and instantly
+annihilates all three causes of my inability to aid the poor, which I
+had encountered while seeking the cause of my lack of success.
+
+The first cause was the herding of the people in towns, and the
+absorption there of the wealth of the country.  All that a man needs
+is to understand how every hiring or purchase is a handle to
+extortion from the poor, and that therefore he must abstain from
+them, and must try to fulfil his own requirements; and not a single
+man will then quit the country, where all wants can be satisfied
+without money, for the city, where it is necessary to buy every
+thing:  and in the country he will be in a position to help the
+needy, as has been my own experience and the experience of every one
+else.
+
+The second cause is the estrangement of the rich from the poor.  A
+man needs but to refrain from buying, from hiring, and, disdaining no
+sort of work, to satisfy his requirements himself, and the former
+estrangement will immediately be annihilated, and the man, having
+rejected luxury and the services of others, will amalgamate with the
+mass of the working people, and, standing shoulder to shoulder with
+the working people, he can help them.
+
+The third cause was shame, founded on a consciousness of immorality
+in my owning that money with which I desired to help people.  All
+that is required is:  to understand the significance of money as
+impersonal slavery, which it has acquired among us, in order to
+escape for the future from falling into the error according to which
+money, though evil in itself, can be an instrument of good, and in
+order to refrain from acquiring money; and to rid one's self of it in
+order to be in a position to do good to people, that is, to bestow on
+them one's labor, and not the labor of another.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+
+
+[I saw that money is the cause of suffering and vice among the
+people, and that, if I desired to help people, the first thing that
+was required of me was not to create those unfortunates whom I wished
+to assist.
+
+I came to the conclusion that the man who does not love vice and the
+suffering of the people should not make use of money, thus presenting
+an inducement to extortion from the poor, by forcing them to work for
+him; and that, in order not to make use of the toil of others, he
+must demand as little from others as possible, and work as much as
+possible himself.] {22}
+
+By dint of a long course of reasoning, I came to this inevitable
+conclusion, which was drawn thousands of years ago by the Chinese in
+the saying, "If there is one idle man, there is another dying with
+hunger to offset him.
+
+[Then what are we to do?  John the Baptist gave the answer to this
+very question two thousand years ago.  And when the people asked him,
+"What are we to do?" he said, "Let him that hath two garments impart
+to him that hath none, and let him that hath meat do the same."  What
+is the meaning of giving away one garment out of two, and half of
+one's food?  It means giving to others every superfluity, and
+thenceforth taking nothing superfluous from people.
+
+This expedient, which furnishes such perfect satisfaction to the
+moral feelings, kept my eyes fast bound, and binds all our eyes; and
+we do not see it, but gaze aside.
+
+This is precisely like a personage on the stage, who had entered a
+long time since, and all the spectators see him, and it is obvious
+that the actors cannot help seeing him, but the point on the stage
+lies in the acting characters pretending not to see him, and in
+suffering from his absence.] {23}
+
+Thus we, in our efforts to recover from our social diseases, search
+in all quarters, governmental and anti-governmental, and in
+scientific and in philanthropic superstitions; and we do not see what
+is perfectly visible to every eye.
+
+For the man who really suffers from the sufferings of the people who
+surround us, there exists the very plainest, simplest, and easiest
+means; the only possible one for the cure of the evil about us, and
+for the acquisition of a consciousness of the legitimacy of his life;
+the one given by John the Baptist, and confirmed by Christ:  not to
+have more than one garment, and not to have money.  And not to have
+any money, means, not to employ the labor of others, and hence, first
+of all, to do with our own hands every thing that we can possibly do.
+
+This is so clear and simple!  But it is clear and simple when the
+requirements are simple.  I live in the country.  I lie on the oven,
+and I order my debtor, my neighbor, to chop wood and light my fire.
+It is very clear that I am lazy, and that I tear my neighbor away
+from his affairs, and I shall feel mortified, and I shall find it
+tiresome to lie still all the time; and I shall go and split my wood
+for myself.
+
+But the delusion of slavery of all descriptions lies so far back, so
+much of artificial exaction has sprung up upon it, so many people,
+accustomed in different degrees to these habits, are interwoven with
+each other, enervated people, spoiled for generations, and such
+complicated delusions and justifications for their luxury and
+idleness have been devised by people, that it is far from being so
+easy for a man who stands at the summit of the ladder of idle people
+to understand his sin, as it is for the peasant who has made his
+neighbor build his fire.
+
+It is terribly difficult for people at the top of this ladder to
+understand what is required of them.  [Their heads are turned by the
+height of this ladder of lies, upon which they find themselves when a
+place on the ground is offered to them, to which they must descend in
+order to begin to live, not yet well, but no longer cruelly,
+inhumanly; for this reason, this clear and simple truth appears
+strange to these people.  For the man with ten servants, liveries,
+coachmen, cooks, pictures, pianofortes, that will infallibly appear
+strange, and even ridiculous, which is the simplest, the first act
+of--I will not say every good man--but of every man who is not
+wicked:  to cut his own wood with which his food is cooked, and with
+which he warms himself; to himself clean those boots with which he
+has heedlessly stepped in the mire; to himself fetch that water with
+which he preserves his cleanliness, and to carry out that dirty water
+in which he has washed himself.] {24}
+
+But, besides the remoteness of people from the truth, there is
+another cause which prevents people from seeing the obligation for
+them of the simplest and most natural personal, physical labor for
+themselves:  this is the complication, the inextricability of the
+conditions, the advantage of all the people who are bound together
+among themselves by money, in which the rich man lives:  My luxurious
+life feeds people.  What would become of my old valet if I were to
+discharge him?  What! we must all do every thing necessary,--make our
+clothes and hew wood? . . .  And how about the division of labor?"
+
+[This morning I stepped out into the corridor where the fires were
+being built.  A peasant was making a fire in the stove which warms my
+son's room.  I went in; the latter was asleep.  It was eleven o'clock
+in the morning.  To-day is a holiday:  there is some excuse, there
+are no lessons.
+
+The smooth-skinned, eighteen-year-old youth, with a beard, who had
+eaten his fill on the preceding evening, sleeps until eleven o'clock.
+But the peasant of his age had been up at dawn, and had got through a
+quantity of work, and was attending to his tenth stove, while the
+former slept.  "The peasant shall not make the fire in his stove to
+warm that smooth, lazy body of his!" I thought.  But I immediately
+recollected that this stove also warmed the room of the housekeeper,
+a woman forty years of age, who, on the evening before, had been
+making preparations up to three o'clock in the morning for the supper
+which my son had eaten, and that she had cleared the table, and risen
+at seven, nevertheless.  The peasant was building the fire for her
+also.  And under her name the lazybones was warming himself.
+
+It is true that the interests of all are interwoven; but, even
+without any prolonged reckoning, the conscience of each man will say
+on whose side lies labor, and on whose idleness.  But although
+conscience says this, the account-book, the cash-book, says it still
+more clearly.  The more money any one spends, the more idle he is,
+that is to say, the more he makes others work for him.  The less he
+spends, the more he works.] {25}  But trade, but public undertakings,
+and, finally, the most terrible of words, culture, the development of
+sciences, and the arts,--what of them?
+
+[If I live I will make answer to those points, and in detail; and
+until such answer I will narrate the following.] {25}
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+
+
+LIFE IN THE CITY.
+
+Last year, in March, I was returning home late at night.  As I turned
+from the Zubova into Khamovnitchesky Lane, I saw some black spots on
+the snow of the Dyevitchy Pole (field).  Something was moving about
+in one place.  I should not have paid any attention to this, if the
+policeman who was standing at the end of the street had not shouted
+in the direction of the black spots, -
+
+"Vasily! why don't you bring her in?"
+
+"She won't come!" answered a voice, and then the spot moved towards
+the policeman.
+
+I halted and asked the police-officer, "What is it?"
+
+He said,--"They are taking a girl from the Rzhanoff house to the
+station-house; and she is hanging back, she won't walk."  A house-
+porter in a sheepskin coat was leading her.  She was walking forward,
+and he was pushing her from behind.  All of us, I and the porter and
+the policeman, were dressed in winter clothes, but she had nothing on
+over her dress.  In the darkness I could make out only her brown
+dress, and the kerchiefs on her head and neck.  She was short in
+stature, as is often the case with the prematurely born, with small
+feet, and a comparatively broad and awkward figure.
+
+"We're waiting for you, you carrion.  Get along, what do you mean by
+it?  I'll give it to you!" shouted the policeman.  He was evidently
+tired, and he had had too much of her.  She advanced a few paces, and
+again halted.
+
+The little old porter, a good-natured fellow (I know him), tugged at
+her hand.  "Here, I'll teach you to stop!  On with you!" he repeated,
+as though in anger.  She staggered, and began to talk in a discordant
+voice.  At every sound there was a false note, both hoarse and
+whining.
+
+"Come now, you're shoving again.  I'll get there some time!"
+
+She stopped and then went on.  I followed them.
+
+"You'll freeze," said the porters
+
+"The likes of us don't freeze:  I'm hot."
+
+She tried to jest, but her words sounded like scolding.  She halted
+again under the lantern which stands not far from our house, and
+leaned against, almost hung over, the fence, and began to fumble for
+something among her skirts, with benumbed and awkward hands.  Again
+they shouted at her, but she muttered something and did something.
+In one hand she held a cigarette bent into a bow, in the other a
+match.  I paused behind her; I was ashamed to pass her, and I was
+ashamed to stand and look on.  But I made up my mind, and stepped
+forward.  Her shoulder was lying against the fence, and against the
+fence it was that she vainly struck the match and flung it away.  I
+looked in her face.  She was really a person prematurely born; but,
+as it seemed to me, already an old woman.  I credited her with thirty
+years.  A dirty hue of face; small, dull, tipsy eyes; a button-like
+nose; curved moist lips with drooping corners, and a short wisp of
+harsh hair escaping from beneath her kerchief; a long flat figure,
+stumpy hands and feet.  I paused opposite her.  She stared at me, and
+burst into a laugh, as though she knew all that was going on in my
+mind.
+
+I felt that it was necessary to say something to her.  I wanted to
+show her that I pitied her.
+
+"Are your parents alive?" I inquired.
+
+She laughed hoarsely, with an expression which said, "he's making up
+queer things to ask."
+
+"My mother is," said she.  "But what do you want?"
+
+"And how old are you?"
+
+"Sixteen," said she, answering promptly to a question which was
+evidently customary.
+
+"Come, march, you'll freeze, you'll perish entirely," shouted the
+policeman; and she swayed away from the fence, and, staggering along,
+she went down Khamovnitchesky Lane to the police-station; and I
+turned to the wicket, and entered the house, and inquired whether my
+daughters had returned.  I was told that they had been to an evening
+party, had had a very merry time, had come home, and were in bed.
+
+Next morning I wanted to go to the station-house to learn what had
+been done with this unfortunate woman, and I was preparing to go out
+very early, when there came to see me one of those unlucky noblemen,
+who, through weakness, have dropped from the gentlemanly life to
+which they are accustomed, and who alternately rise and fall.  I had
+been acquainted with this man for three years.  In the course of
+those three years, this man had several times made way with every
+thing that he had, and even with all his clothes; the same thing had
+just happened again, and he was passing the nights temporarily in the
+Rzhanoff house, in the night-lodging section, and he had come to me
+for the day.  He met me as I was going out, at the entrance, and
+without listening to me he began to tell me what had taken place in
+the Rzhanoff house the night before.  He began his narrative, and did
+not half finish it; all at once (he is an old man who has seen men
+under all sorts of aspects) he burst out sobbing, and flooded has
+countenance with tears, and when he had become silent, turned has
+face to the wall.  This is what he told me.  Every thing that he
+related to me was absolutely true.  I authenticated his story on the
+spot, and learned fresh particulars which I will relate separately.
+
+In that night-lodging house, on the lower floor, in No. 32, in which
+my friend had spent the night, among the various, ever-changing
+lodgers, men and women, who came together there for five kopeks,
+there was a laundress, a woman thirty years of age, light-haired,
+peaceable and pretty, but sickly.  The mistress of the quarters had a
+boatman lover.  In the summer her lover kept a boat, and in the
+winter they lived by letting accommodations to night-lodgers:  three
+kopeks without a pillow, five kopeks with a pillow.
+
+The laundress had lived there for several months, and was a quiet
+woman; but latterly they had not liked her, because she coughed and
+prevented the women from sleeping.  An old half-crazy woman eighty
+years old, in particular, also a regular lodger in these quarters,
+hated the laundress, and imbittered the latter's life because she
+prevented her sleeping, and cleared her throat all night like a
+sheep.  The laundress held her peace; she was in debt for her
+lodgings, and was conscious of her guilt, and therefore she was bound
+to be quiet.  She began to go more and more rarely to her work, as
+her strength failed her, and therefore she could not pay her
+landlady; and for the last week she had not been out to work at all,
+and had only poisoned the existence of every one, especially of the
+old woman, who also did not go out, with her cough.  Four days before
+this, the landlady had given the laundress notice to leave the
+quarters:  the latter was already sixty kopeks in debt, and she
+neither paid them, nor did the landlady foresee any possibility of
+getting them; and all the bunks were occupied, and the women all
+complained of the laundress's cough.
+
+When the landlady gave the laundress notice, and told her that she
+must leave the lodgings if she did not pay up, the old woman rejoiced
+and thrust the laundress out of doors.  The laundress departed, but
+returned in an hour, and the landlady had not the heart to put her
+out again.  And the second and the third day, she did not turn her
+out.  "Where am I to go?" said the laundress.  But on the third day,
+the landlady's lover, a Moscow man, who knew the regulations and how
+to manage, sent for the police.  A policeman with sword and pistol on
+a red cord came to the lodgings, and with courteous words he led the
+laundress into the street.
+
+It was a clear, sunny, but freezing March day.  The gutters were
+flowing, the house-porters were picking at the ice.  The cabman's
+sleigh jolted over the icy snow, and screeched over the stones.  The
+laundress walked up the street on the sunny side, went to the church,
+and seated herself at the entrance, still on the sunny side.  But
+when the sun began to sink behind the houses, the puddles began to be
+skimmed over with a glass of frost, and the laundress grew cold and
+wretched.  She rose, and dragged herself . . . whither?  Home, to the
+only home where she had lived so long.  While she was on her way,
+resting at times, dusk descended.  She approached the gates, turned
+in, slipped, groaned and fell.
+
+One man came up, and then another.  "She must be drunk."  Another man
+came up, and stumbled over the laundress, and said to the potter:
+"What drunken woman is this wallowing at your gate?  I came near
+breaking my head over her; take her away, won't you?"
+
+The porter came.  The laundress was dead.  This is what my friend
+told me.  It may be thought that I have wilfully mixed up facts,--I
+encounter a prostitute of fifteen, and the story of this laundress.
+But let no one imagine this; it is exactly what happened in the
+course of one night (only I do not remember which) in March, 1884.
+And so, after hearing my friend's tale, I went to the station-house,
+with the intention of proceeding thence to the Rzhanoff house to
+inquire more minutely into the history of the laundress.  The weather
+was very beautiful and sunny; and again, through the stars of the
+night-frost, water was to be seen trickling in the shade, and in the
+glare of the sun on Khamovnitchesky square every thing was melting,
+and the water was streaming.  The river emitted a humming noise.  The
+trees of the Neskutchny garden looked blue across the river; the
+reddish-brown sparrows, invisible in winter, attracted attention by
+their sprightliness; people also seemed desirous of being merry, but
+all of them had too many cares.  The sound of the bells was audible,
+and at the foundation of these mingling sounds, the sounds of shots
+could be heard from the barracks, the whistle of rifle-balls and
+their crack against the target.
+
+I entered the station-house.  In the station some armed policemen
+conducted me to their chief.  He was similarly armed with sword and
+pistol, and he was engaged in taking some measures with regard to a
+tattered, trembling old man, who was standing before him, and who
+could not answer the questions put to him, on account of his
+feebleness.  Having finished his business with the old man, he turned
+to me.  I inquired about the girl of the night before.  At first he
+listened to me attentively, but afterwards he began to smile, at my
+ignorance of the regulations, in consequence of which she had been
+taken to the station-house; and particularly at my surprise at her
+youth.
+
+"Why, there are plenty of them of twelve, thirteen, or fourteen years
+of age," he said cheerfully.
+
+But in answer to my question about the girl whom I had seen on the
+preceding evening, he explained to me that she must have been sent to
+the committee (so it appeared).  To my question where she had passed
+the night, he replied in an undecided manner.  He did not recall the
+one to whom I referred.  There were so many of them every day.
+
+In No. 32 of the Rzhanoff house I found the sacristan already reading
+prayers over the dead woman.  They had taken her to the bunk which
+she had formerly occupied; and the lodgers, all miserable beings, had
+collected money for the masses for her soul, a coffin and a shroud,
+and the old women had dressed her and laid her out.  The sacristan
+was reading something in the gloom; a woman in a long wadded cloak
+was standing there with a wax candle; and a man (a gentleman, I must
+state) in a clean coat with a lamb's-skin collar, polished overshoes,
+and a starched shirt, was holding one like it.  This was her brother.
+They had hunted him up.
+
+I went past the dead woman to the landlady's nook, and questioned her
+about the whole business.
+
+She was alarmed at my queries; she was evidently afraid that she
+would be blamed for something; but afterwards she began to talk
+freely, and told me every thing.  As I passed back, I glanced at the
+dead woman.  All dead people are handsome, but this dead woman was
+particularly beautiful and touching in her coffin; her pure, pale
+face, with closed swollen eyes, sunken cheeks, and soft reddish hair
+above the lofty brow,--a weary and kind and not a sad but a surprised
+face.  And in fact, if the living do not see, the dead are surprised.
+
+On the same day that I wrote the above, there was a great ball in
+Moscow.
+
+That night I left the house at nine o'clock.  I live in a locality
+which is surrounded by factories, and I left the house after the
+factory-whistles had sounded, releasing the people for a day of
+freedom after a week of unremitting toil.
+
+Factory-hands overtook me, and I overtook others of them, directing
+their steps to the drinking-shops and taverns.  Many were already
+intoxicated, many were women.  Every morning at five o'clock we can
+hear one whistle, a second, a third, a tenth, and so forth, and so
+forth.  That means that the toil of women, children, and of old men
+has begun.  At eight o'clock another whistle, which signifies a
+breathing-spell of half an hour.  At twelve, a third:  this means an
+hour for dinner.  And a fourth at eight, which denotes the end of the
+day.
+
+By an odd coincidence, all three of the factories which are situated
+near me produce only articles which are in demand for balls.
+
+In one factory, the nearest, only stockings are made; in another
+opposite, silken fabrics; in the third, perfumes and pomades.
+
+It is possible to listen to these whistles, and connect no other idea
+with them than as denoting the time:  "There's the whistle already,
+it is time to go to walk."  But one can also connect with those
+whistles that which they signify in reality; that first whistle, at
+five o'clock, means that people, often all without exception, both
+men and women, sleeping in a damp cellar, must rise, and hasten to
+that building buzzing with machines, and must take their places at
+their work, whose end and use for themselves they do not see, and
+thus toil, often in heat and a stifling atmosphere, in the midst of
+dirt, and with the very briefest breathing-spells, an hour, two
+hours, three hours, twelve, and even more hours in succession.  They
+fall into a doze, and again they rise.  And this, for them, senseless
+work, to which they are driven only by necessity, is continued over
+and over again.
+
+And thus one week succeeds another with the breaks of holidays; and I
+see these work-people released on one of these holidays.  They emerge
+into the street.  Everywhere there are drinking-shops, taverns, and
+loose girls.  And they, in their drunken state, drag by the hand each
+other, and girls like the one whom I saw taken to the station-house;
+they drag with them cabmen, and they ride and they walk from one
+tavern to another; and they curse and stagger, and say they
+themselves know not what.  I had previously seen such unsteady gait
+on the part of factory-hands, and had turned aside in disgust, and
+had been on the point of rebuking them; but ever since I have been in
+the habit of hearing those whistles every day, and understand their
+meaning, I am only amazed that they, all the men, do not come to the
+condition of the "golden squad," of which Moscow is full, {26} [and
+the women to the state of the one whom I had seen near my house].
+{27}
+
+Thus I walked along, and scrutinized these factory-hands, as long as
+they roamed the streets, which was until eleven o'clock.  Then their
+movements began to calm down.  Some drunken men remained here and
+there, and here and there I encountered men who were being taken to
+the station-house.  And then carriages began to make their appearance
+on all sides, directing their course toward one point.
+
+On the box sits a coachman, sometimes in a sheepskin coat; and a
+footman, a dandy, with a cockade.  Well-fed horses in saddle-cloths
+fly through the frost at the rate of twenty versts an hour; in the
+carriages sit ladies muffled in round cloaks, and carefully tending
+their flowers and head-dresses.  Every thing from the horse-
+trappings, the carriages, the gutta-percha wheels, the cloth of the
+coachman's coat, to the stockings, shoes, flowers, velvet, gloves,
+and perfumes,--every thing is made by those people, some of whom
+often roll drunk into their dens or sleeping-rooms, and some stay
+with disreputable women in the night-lodging houses, while still
+others are put in jail.  Thus past them in all their work, and over
+them all, ride the frequenters of balls; and it never enters their
+heads, that there is any connection between these balls to which they
+make ready to go, and these drunkards at whom their coachman shouts
+so roughly.
+
+These people enjoy themselves at the ball with the utmost composure
+of spirit, and assurance that they are doing nothing wrong, but
+something very good.  Enjoy themselves!  Enjoy themselves from eleven
+o'clock until six in the morning, in the very dead of night, at the
+very hour when people are tossing and turning with empty stomachs in
+the night-lodging houses, and while some are dying, as did the
+laundress.
+
+Their enjoyment consists in this,--that the women and young girls,
+having bared their necks and arms, and applied bustles behind, place
+themselves in a situation in which no uncorrupted woman or maiden
+would care to display herself to a man, on any consideration in the
+world; and in this half-naked condition, with their uncovered bosoms
+exposed to view, with arms bare to the shoulder, with a bustle behind
+and tightly swathed hips, under the most brilliant light, women and
+maidens, whose chief virtue has always been modesty, exhibit
+themselves in the midst of strange men, who are also clad in
+improperly tight-fitting garments; and to the sound of maddening
+music, they embrace and whirl.  Old women, often as naked as the
+young ones, sit and look on, and eat and drink savory things; old men
+do the same.  It is not to be wondered at that this should take place
+at night, when all the common people are asleep, so that no one may
+see them.  But this is not done with the object of concealment:  it
+seems to them that there is nothing to conceal; that it is a very
+good thing; that by this merry-making, in which the labor of
+thousands of toiling people is destroyed, they not only do not injure
+any one, but that by this very act they furnish the poor with the
+means of subsistence.  Possibly it is very merry at balls.  But how
+does this come about?  When we see that there is a man in the
+community, in our midst, who has had no food, or who is freezing, we
+regret our mirth, and we cannot be cheerful until he is fed and
+warmed, not to mention the impossibility of imagining people who can
+indulge in such mirth as causes suffering to others.  The mirth of
+wicked little boys, who pitch a dog's tail in a split stick, and make
+merry over it, is repulsive and incomprehensible to us.
+
+In the same manner here, in these diversions of ours, blindness has
+fallen upon us, and we do not see the split stick with which we have
+pitched all those people who suffer for our amusement.
+
+[We live as though there were no connection between the dying
+laundress, the prostitute of fourteen, and our own life; and yet the
+connection between them strikes us in the face.
+
+We may say:  "But we personally have not pinched any tail in a
+stick;" but we have no right, to deny that had the tail not been
+pitched, our merry-making would not have taken place.  We do not see
+what connection exists between the laundress and our luxury; but that
+is not because no such connection does exist, but because we have
+placed a screen in front of us, so that we may not see.
+
+If there were no screen, we should see that which it is impossible
+not to see.] {28}
+
+Surely all the women who attended that ball in dresses worth a
+hundred and fifty rubles each were born not in a ballroom, or at
+Madame Minanguoit's; but they have lived in the country, and have
+seen the peasants; they know their own nurse and maid, whose father
+and brother are poor, for whom the earning of a hundred and fifty
+rubles for a cottage is the object of a long, laborious life.  Each
+woman knows this.   How could she enjoy herself, when she knew that
+she wore on her bared body at that ball the cottage which is the
+dream of her good maid's father and brother?  But let us suppose that
+she could not make this reflection; but since velvet and silk and
+flowers and lace and dresses do not grow of themselves, but are made
+by people, it would seem that she could not help knowing what sort of
+people make all these things, and under what conditions, and why they
+do it.  She cannot fail to know that the seamstress, with whom she
+has already quarrelled, did not make her dress in the least out of
+love for her; therefore, she cannot help knowing that all these
+things were made for her as a matter of necessity, that her laces,
+flowers, and velvet have been made in the same way as her dress.
+
+But possibly they are in such darkness that they do not consider
+this.  One thing she cannot fail to know,--that five or six elderly
+and respectable, often sick, lackeys and maids have had no sleep, and
+have been put to trouble on her account.  She has seen their weary,
+gloomy faces.  She could not help knowing this also, that the cold
+that night reached twenty-eight degrees below zero, {29} and that the
+old coachman sat all night long in that temperature on his box.  But
+I know that they really do not see this.  And if they, these young
+women and girls, do not see this, on account of the hypnotic state
+superinduced in them by balls, it is impossible to condemn them.
+They, poor things, have done what is considered right by their
+elders; but how are their elders to explain away this their cruelty
+to the people?
+
+The elders always offer the explanation:  "I compel no one.  I
+purchase my things; I hire my men, my maid-servants, and my coachman.
+There is nothing wrong in buying and hiring.  I force no one's
+inclination:  I hire, and what harm is there in that?"
+
+I recently went to see an acquaintance.  As I passed through one of
+the rooms, I was surprised to see two women seated at a table, as I
+knew that my friend was a bachelor.  A thin, yellow, old-fashioned
+woman, thirty years of age, in a dress that had been carelessly
+thrown on, was doing something with her hands and fingers on the
+table, with great speed, trembling nervously the while, as though in
+a fit.  Opposite her sat a young girl, who was also engaged in
+something, and who trembled in the same manner.  Both women appeared
+to be afflicted with St. Vitus' dance.  I stepped nearer to them, and
+looked to see what they were doing.  They raised their eyes to me,
+but went on with their work with the same intentness.  In front of
+them lay scattered tobacco and paper cases.  They were making
+cigarettes.  The woman rubbed the tobacco between her hands, pushed
+it into the machine, slipped on the cover, thrust the tobacco
+through, then tossed it to the girl.  The girl twisted the paper,
+and, making it fast, threw it aside, and took up another.  All thus
+was done with such swiftness, with such intentness, as it is
+impossible to describe to a man who has never seen it done.  I
+expressed my surprise at their quickness.
+
+"I have been doing nothing else for fourteen years," said the woman.
+
+"Is it hard?"
+
+"Yes:  it pains my chest, and makes my breathing hard."
+
+It was not necessary for her to add this, however.  A look at the
+girl sufficed.  She had worked at this for three years, but any one
+who had not seen her at this occupation would have said that here was
+a strong organism which was beginning to break down.
+
+My friend, a kind and liberal man, hires these women to fill his
+cigarettes at two rubles fifty kopeks the thousand.  He has money,
+and he spends it for work.  What harm is there in that?  My friend
+rises at twelve o'clock.  He passes the evening, from six until two,
+at cards, or at the piano.  He eats and drinks savory things; others
+do all his work for him.  He has devised a new source of pleasure,--
+smoking.  He has taken up smoking within my memory.
+
+Here is a woman, and here is a girl, who can barely support
+themselves by turning themselves into machines, and they pass their
+whole lives inhaling tobacco, and thereby running their health.  He
+has money which he never earned, and he prefers to play at whist to
+making his own cigarettes.  He gives these women money on condition
+that they shall continue to live in the same wretched manner in which
+they are now living, that is to say, by making his cigarettes.
+
+I love cleanliness, and I give money only on the condition that the
+laundress shall wash the shirt which I change twice a day; and that
+shirt has destroyed the laundress's last remaining strength, and she
+has died.  What is there wrong about that?  People who buy and hire
+will continue to force other people to make velvet and confections,
+and will purchase them, without me; and no matter what I may do, they
+will hire cigarettes made and shirts washed.  Then why should I
+deprive myself of velvet and confections and cigarettes and clean
+shirts, if things are definitively settled thus?  This is the
+argument which I often, almost always, hear.  This is the very
+argument which makes the mob which is destroying something, lose its
+senses.  This is the very argument by which dogs are guided when one
+of them has flung himself on another dog, and overthrown him, and the
+rest of the pack rush up also, and tear their comrade in pieces.
+Other people have begun it, and have wrought mischief; then why
+should not I take advantage of it?  Well, what will happen if I wear
+a soiled shirt, and make my own cigarettes?  Will that make it easier
+for anybody else? ask people who would like to justify their course.
+If it were not so far from the truth, it would be a shame to answer
+such a question, but we have become so entangled that this question
+seems very natural to us; and hence, although it is a shame, it is
+necessary to reply to it.
+
+What difference will it make if I wear one shirt a week, and make may
+own cigarettes, or do not smoke at all?  This difference, that some
+laundress and some cigarette-maker will exert their strength less,
+and that what I have spent for washing and for the making of
+cigarettes I can give to that very laundress, or even to other
+laundresses and toilers who are worn out with their labor, and who,
+instead of laboring beyond their strength, will then be able to rest,
+and drink tea.  But to this I hear an objection.  (It is so
+mortifying to rich and luxurious people to understand their
+position.)  To this they say:  "If I go about in a dirty shirt, and
+give up smoking, and hand over this money to the poor, the poor will
+still be deprived of every thing, and that drop in the sea of yours
+will help not at all."
+
+Such an objection it is a shame to answer.  It is such a common
+retort. {30}
+
+If I had gone among savages, and they had regaled me with cutlets
+which struck me as savory, and if I should learn on the following day
+that these savory cutlets had been made from a prisoner whom they had
+slain for the sake of the savory cutlets, if I do not admit that it
+is a good thing to eat men, then, no matter how dainty the cutlets,
+no matter how universal the practice of eating men may be among my
+fellows, however insignificant the advantage to prisoners, prepared
+for consumption, may be my refusal to eat of the cutlets, I will not
+and I can not eat any more of them.  I may, possibly, eat human
+flesh, when hunger compels me to it; but I will not make a feast, and
+I will not take part in feasts, of human flesh, and I will not seek
+out such feasts, and pride myself on my share in them.
+
+
+LIFE IN THE COUNTRY.
+
+
+But what is to be done?  Surely it is not we who have done this?  And
+if not we, who then?
+
+We say:  "We have not done this, this has done itself;" as the
+children say, when they break any thing, that it broke itself.  We
+say, that, so long as there is a city already in existence, we, by
+living in it, support the people, by purchasing their labor and
+services.  But this is not so.  And this is why.  We only need to
+look ourselves, at the way we have in the country, and at the manner
+in which we support people there.
+
+The winter passes in town.  Easter Week passes.  On the boulevards,
+in the gardens in the parks, on the river, there is music.  There are
+theatres, water-trips, walks, all sorts of illuminations and
+fireworks.  But in the country there is something even better,--there
+are better air, trees and meadows, and the flowers are fresher.  One
+should go thither where all these things have unfolded and blossomed
+forth.  And the majority of wealthy people do go to the country to
+breathe the superior air, to survey these superior forests and
+meadows.  And there the wealthy settle down in the country, and the
+gray peasants, who nourish themselves on bread and onions, who toil
+eighteen hours a day, who get no sound sleep by night, and who are
+clad in blouses.  Here no one has led these people astray.  There
+have been no factories nor industrial establishments, and there are
+none of those idle hands, of which there are so many in the city.
+Here the whole population never succeeds, all summer long, in
+completing all their tasks in season; and not only are there no idle
+hands, but a vast quantity of property is ruined for the lack of
+hands, and a throng of people, children, old men, and women, will
+perish through overstraining their powers in work which is beyond
+their strength.  How do the rich order their lives there?  In this
+fashion:-
+
+If there is an old-fashioned house, built under the serf regime, that
+house is repaired and embellished; if there is none, then a new one
+is erected, of two or three stories.  The rooms, of which there are
+from twelve to twenty, and even more, are all six arshins in height.
+{31}  Wood floors are laid down.  The windows consist of one sheet of
+glass.  There are rich rugs and costly furniture.  The roads around
+the house are macadamized, the ground is levelled, flower-beds are
+laid out, croquet-grounds are prepared, swinging-rings for gymnastics
+are erected, reflecting globes, often orangeries, and hotbeds, and
+lofty stables always with complicated scroll-work on the gables and
+ridges.
+
+And here, in the country, an honest educated official, or noble
+family dwells.  All the members of the family and their guests have
+assembled in the middle of June, because up to June, that is to say,
+up to the beginning of mowing-time, they have been studying and
+undergoing examinations; and they live there until September, that is
+to say, until harvest and sowing-time.  The members of this family
+(as is the case with nearly every one in that circle) have lived in
+the country from the beginning of the press of work, the suffering
+time, not until the end of the season of toil (for in September
+sowing is still in progress, as well as the digging of potatoes), but
+until the strain of work has relaxed a little.  During the whole of
+their residence in the country, all around them and beside them, that
+summer toil of the peasantry has been going on, of whose fatigues, no
+matter how much we may have heard, no matter how much we may have
+heard about it, no matter how much we may have gazed upon it, we can
+form no idea, unless we have had personal experience of it.  And the
+members of this family, about ten in number, live exactly as they do
+in the city.
+
+At St. Peter's Day, {32} a strict fast, when the people's food
+consists of kvas, bread, and onions, the mowing begins.
+
+The business which is effected in mowing is one of the most important
+in the commune.  Nearly every year, through the lack of hands and
+time, the hay crop may be lost by rain; and more or less strain of
+toil decides the question, as to whether twenty or more per cent of
+hay is to be added to the wealth of the people, or whether it is to
+rot or die where it stands.  And additional hay means additional meat
+for the old, and additional milk for the children.  Thus, in general
+and in particular, the question of bread for each one of the mowers,
+and of milk for himself and his children, in the ensuing winter, is
+then decided.  Every one of the toilers, both male and female, knows
+this; even the children know that this is an important matter, and
+that it is necessary to strain every nerve to carry the jug of kvas
+to their father in the meadow at his mowing, and, shifting the heavy
+pitcher from hand to hand, to run barefooted as rapidly as possible,
+two versts from the village, in order to get there in season for
+dinner, and so that their fathers may not scold them.
+
+Every one knows, that, from the mowing season until the hay is got
+in, there will be no break in the work, and that there will be no
+time to breathe.  And there is not the mowing alone.  Every one of
+them has other affairs to attend to besides the mowing:  the ground
+must be turned up and harrowed; and the women have linen and bread
+and washing to attend to; and the peasants have to go to the mill,
+and to town, and there are communal matters to attend to, and legal
+matters before the judge and the commissary of police; and the wagons
+to see to, and the horses to feed at night:  and all, old and young,
+and sickly, labor to the last extent of their powers.  The peasants
+toil so, that on every occasion, the mowers, before the end of the
+third stint, whether weak, young, or old, can hardly walk as they
+totter past the last rows, and only with difficulty are they able to
+rise after the breathing-spell; and the women, often pregnant, or
+nursing infants, work in the same way.  The toil is intense and
+incessant.  All work to the extreme bounds of their strength, and
+expend in this toil, not only the entire stock of their scanty
+nourishment, but all their previous stock.  All of them--and they are
+not fat to begin with--grow gaunt after the "suffering" season.
+
+Here a little association is working at the mowing; three peasants,--
+one an old man, the second his nephew, a young married man, and a
+shoemaker, a thin, sinewy man.  This hay-harvest will decide the fate
+of all of them for the winter.  They have been laboring incessantly
+for two weeks, without rest.  The rain has delayed their work.  After
+the rain, when the hay has dried, they have decided to stack it, and,
+in order to accomplish this as speedily as possible, that two women
+for each of them shall follow their scythes.  On the part of the old
+man go his wife, a woman of fifty, who has become unfit for work,
+having borne eleven children, who is deaf, but still a tolerably
+stout worker; and a thirteen-year-old daughter, who is short of
+stature, but a strong and clever girl.  On the part of his nephew go
+his wife, a woman as strong and well-grown as a sturdy peasant, and
+his daughter-in-law, a soldier's wife, who is about to become a
+mother.  On the part of the shoemaker go his wife, a stout laborer,
+and her aged mother, who has reached her eightieth year, and who
+generally goes begging.  They all stand in line, and labor from
+morning till night, in the full fervor of the June sun.  It is
+steaming hot, and rain threatens.  Every hour of work is precious.
+It is a pity to tear one's self from work to fetch water or kvas.  A
+tiny boy, the old woman's grandson, brings them water.  The old
+woman, evidently only anxious lest she shall be driven away from her
+work, will not let the rake out of her hand, though it is evident
+that she can barely move, and only with difficulty.  The little boy,
+all bent over, and stepping gently, with his tiny bare feet, drags
+along a jug of water, shifting it from hand to hand, for it is
+heavier than he.  The young girl flings over her shoulder a load of
+hay which is also heavier than herself, advances a few steps, halts,
+and drops it, without the strength to carry it.  The old woman of
+fifty rakes away without stopping, and with her kerchief awry she
+drags the hay, breathing heavily and tottering.  The old woman of
+eighty only rakes the hay, but even this is beyond her strength; she
+slowly drags along her feet, shod with bast shoes, and, frowning, she
+gazes gloomily before her, like a seriously ill or dying person.  The
+old man has intentionally sent her farther away than the rest, to
+rake near the cocks of hay, so that she may not keep in line with the
+others; but she does not fall in with this arrangement, and she toils
+on as long as the others do, with the same death-like, gloomy
+countenance.  The sun is already setting behind the forest; but the
+cocks are not yet all heaped together, and much still remains to do.
+All feel that it is time to stop, but no one speaks, waiting until
+the others shall say it.  Finally the shoemaker, conscious that his
+strength is exhausted, proposes to the old man, to leave the cocks
+until the morrow; and the old man consents, and the women instantly
+run for the garments, jugs, pitchforks; and the old woman immediately
+sits down just where she has been standings and then lies back with
+the same death-like look, staring straight in front of her.  But the
+women are going; and she rises with a groan, and drags herself after
+them.  And this will go on in July also, when the peasants, without
+obtaining sufficient sleep, reap the oats by night, lest it should
+fall, and the women rise gloomily to thresh out the straw for the
+bands to tie the sheaves; when this old woman, already utterly
+cramped by the labor of mowing, and the woman with child, and the
+young children, injure themselves overworking and over-drinking; and
+when neither hands, nor horses, nor carts will suffice to bring to
+the ricks that grain with which all men are nourished, and millions
+of poods {33} of which are daily required in Russia to keep people
+from perishing.
+
+And we live as though there were no connection between the dying
+laundress, the prostitute of fourteen years, the toilsome manufacture
+of cigarettes by women, the strained, intolerable, insufficiently fed
+toil of old women and children around us; we live as though there
+were no connection between this and our own lives.
+
+It seems to us, that suffering stands apart by itself, and our life
+apart by itself.  We read the description of the life of the Romans,
+and we marvel at the inhumanity of those soulless Luculli, who
+satiated themselves on viands and wines while the populace were dying
+with hunger.  We shake our heads, and we marvel at the savagery of
+our grandfathers, who were serf-owners, supporters of household
+orchestras and theatres, and of whole villages devoted to the care of
+their gardens; and we wonder, from the heights of our grandeur, at
+their inhumanity.  We read the words of Isa. 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, and 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 then 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."
+
+We read these words, and it seems to us that this has no reference to
+us.  We read in the Gospels (Matt. iii. 10):  "And now also the axe
+is laid unto the root of the trees:  therefore every tree which
+bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire."
+
+And we are fully convinced that the good tree which bringeth forth
+good fruit is ourselves; and that these words are not spoken to us,
+but to some other and wicked people.
+
+We read the words of Isa. 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
+heart, 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, and are fully convinced that this marvellous deed is not
+performed on us, but on some other people.  And because we see
+nothing it is, that this marvellous deed is performed, and has been
+performed, on us.  We hear not, we see not, and we understand not
+with our heart.  How has this happened?
+
+Whether that God, or that natural law by virtue of which men exist in
+the world, has acted well or ill, yet the position of men in the
+world, ever since we have known it, has been such, that naked people,
+without any hair on their bodies, without lairs in which they could
+shelter themselves, without food which they could find in the
+fields,--like Robinson {34} on his island,--have all been reduced to
+the necessity of constantly and unweariedly contending with nature in
+order to cover their bodies, to make themselves clothing, to
+construct a roof over their heads, and to earn their bread, that two
+or three times a day they may satisfy their hunger and the hunger of
+their helpless children and of their old people who cannot work.
+
+Wherever, at whatever time, in whatever numbers we may have observed
+people, whether in Europe, in America, in China, or in Russia,
+whether we regard all humanity, or any small portion of it, in
+ancient times, in a nomad state, or in our own times, with steam-
+engines and sewing-machines, perfected agriculture, and electric
+lighting, we behold always one and the same thing,--that man, toiling
+intensely and incessantly, is not able to earn for himself and his
+little ones and his old people clothing, shelter, and food; and that
+a considerable portion of mankind, as in former times, so at the
+present day, perish through insufficiency of the necessaries of life,
+and intolerable toil in the effort to obtain them.
+
+Wherever we have, if we draw a circle round us of a hundred thousand,
+a thousand, or ten versts, or of one verst, and examine into the
+lives of the people comprehended within the limits of our circle, we
+shall see within that circle prematurely-born children, old men, old
+women, women in labor, sick and weak persons, who toil beyond their
+strength, and who have not sufficient food and rest for life, and who
+therefore die before their time.  We shall see people in the flower
+of their age actually slain by dangerous and injurious work.
+
+We see that people have been struggling, ever since the world has
+endured, with fearful effort, privation, and suffering, against this
+universal want, and that they cannot overcome it . . . {35}
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+{1}  The fine, tall members of a regiment, selected and placed
+together to form a showy squad.
+
+{2}  [] Omitted by the Censor in the authorized edition printed in
+Russia, in the set of Count Tolstoi's works.
+
+{3}  Reaumur.
+
+{4}  A drink made of water, honey, and laurel or salvia leaves, which
+is drunk as tea, especially by the poorer classes.
+
+{5}  [] Omitted by the censor from the authorized edition published
+in Russia in the set of count Tolstoi's works.  The omission is
+indicated thus . . .
+
+{6}  Kalatch, a kind of roll:  baranki, cracknels of fine flour.
+
+{7}  An arshin is twenty-eight inches.
+
+{8}  A myeshchanin, or citizen, who pays only poll-tax and not a
+guild tax.
+
+{9}  Omitted in authorized edition.
+
+{10}  Omitted by the censor in the authorized edition.
+
+{11}  Omitted by the Censor in the authorized edition.
+
+{12}  Omitted by the Censor in the authorized edition.
+
+{13}  Omitted by the Censor in the authorized edition.
+
+{14}  Omitted by the Censor from the authorized edition.
+
+{15}  Omitted by the Censor in the authorized edition.
+
+{16}  Omitted by the Censor in the authorized edition
+
+{17}  Omitted by the Censor in the authorized edition.
+
+{18}  Omitted by the Censor in the authorized edition.
+
+{19}  A very complicated sort of whist.
+
+{20}  The whole of this chapter is omitted by the Censor in the
+authorized edition, and is there represented by the following
+sentence:  "And I felt that in money, in money itself, in the
+possession of it, there was something immoral; and I asked myself,
+What is money?"
+
+{21}  Omitted by the Censor in the authorized edition.
+
+{22}  Omitted by the Censor in the authorized edition.
+
+{23}  The above passage is omitted in the authorized edition, and the
+following is added:  "I came to the simple and natural conclusion,
+that, if I pity the tortured horse upon which I am riding, the first
+thing for me to do is to alight, and to walk on my own feet."
+
+{24}  Omitted in the authorized edition.
+
+{25}  Omitted in the authorized edition.
+
+{26}  "Into a worse state," in the authorized edition.
+
+{27}  Omitted in the authorized edition.
+
+{28}  Omitted in the authorized edition.
+
+{29}  Reaumur.
+
+{30}  In the Moscow edition (authorized by the Censor), the
+concluding paragraph is replaced by the following: --"They say:  The
+action of a single man is but a drop in the sea.  A drop in the sea!
+
+"There is an Indian legend relating how a man dropped a pearl into
+the sea, and in order to recover it he took a bucket, and began to
+bail out, and to pour the water on the shore.  Thus he toiled without
+intermission, and on the seventh day the spirit of the sea grew
+alarmed lest the man should dip the sea dry, and so he brought him
+his pearl.  If our social evil of persecuting man were the sea, then
+that pearl which we have lost is equivalent to devoting our lives to
+bailing out the sea of that evil.  The prince of this world will take
+fright, he will succumb more promptly than did the spirit of the sea;
+but this social evil is not the sea, but a foul cesspool, which we
+assiduously fill with our own uncleanness.  All that is required is
+for us to come to our senses, and to comprehend what we are doing; to
+fall out of love with our own uncleanness,--in order that that
+imaginary sea should dry away, and that we should come into
+possession of that priceless pearl,--fraternal, humane life."
+
+{31}  An arshin is twenty-eight inches.
+
+{32}  The fast extends from the 5th to the 30th of June, O.S.  (June
+27 to July 12, N.S.)
+
+{33}  A pood is thirty-six pounds.
+
+{34}  Robinson Crusoe.
+
+{35}  Here something has been omitted by the Censor, which I am
+unable to supply.--TRANS.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Thoughts Evoked By The Census Of Moscow, by Tolstoi
+
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