Page:Anna Karenina.djvu/341

 "the emancipation of the serfs was quite another affair. It was for personal interest. We wanted to shake off this yoke that hung on the necks of all of us decent people. But to be a member of the council; to discuss how much the night workman should be paid, and how to lay sewer-pipes in streets where one does not live; to be a juryman, and sit in judgment on a muzhik who has stolen a ham; to listen for six hours to all sorts of rubbish which the defendant and the prosecutor may utter, and, as presiding officer, to ask my old friend, the half-idiotic Aloshka, 'Do you plead guilty, Mr. Accused, of having stolen this ham?'" ....

And Konstantin, carried away by his subject, enacted the scene between the president and the half-idiotic Aloshka. It seemed to him that this was in the line of the argument.

But Sergyei Ivanovitch shrugged his shoulders.

"Nu! what do you mean by this?"

"I only mean that I will always defend with all my powers those rights which touch me,—my interests; that when the policemen came to search us students, and read our letters, I was ready to defend these rights with all my might, to defend my rights to instruction, to liberty. I am interested in the military obligation which concerns the fate of my children, of my brothers, and of myself. I am willing to discuss this because it touches me; but to deliberate on the employment of forty thousand rubles of communal money, or to judge the crack-brained Aloshka, I won't do it, and I can't."

Konstantin Levin discoursed as if the fountains of his speech were unloosed. Sergyeï Ivanovitch smiled.

"Supposing to-morrow you. were arrested; would you prefer to be tried by the old 'criminal court'?"

"But I am not going to be arrested. I am not going to cut any one's throat, and this is no use to me. Now, see here!" he continued, again jumping to a matter entirely foreign to their subject, "our provincial institutions, and all that, remind me of the little twigs which on Trinity day we stick into the ground, to imitate a