Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/390

 swinish life, the children, was taken away, and life became more abominable still.

"A peasant, a labourer, needs children. It is hard for him to bring them up, but he needs them, and therefore his conjugal relations are justified. But we people who have children, need no more children: they are an additional care, an expense, co-heirs, they are a burden. And thus there is no justification whatsoever for our swinish life. Either we artificially get rid of children or we look upon them as a misfortune, as the result of an accident, and this is still more abominable.

"There are no justifications. But we have fallen morally so deep that we do not even see the need of any justification.

"The majority of the contemporary educated world abandon themselves to this debauchery without the least compunction.

"There is no reason for feeling any compunction, because in our existence there is no other conscience than, if one may call it so, the conscience of public opinion and criminal law. In this case neither the one nor the other are violated there is no cause to be conscience-stricken before society, because they all do it: Márya Pávlovna, and Iván Zakhárych. And what sense would there be in breeding paupers and depriving yourself of the possibility of leading a social life? Nor is there any cause for being conscience-stricken before the criminal law, or to be afraid of it. Those monstrous girls and soldiers' wives throw their children into ponds and wells,—they, of course, must be put in jail,—but we do it all at the proper time and in a decent manner.

"Thus we lived two more years. The measures of the scoundrel doctors apparently began to bear fruit: she became physically stronger and handsomer, like the last beauty of summer. She felt it and paid attention to it. There developed in her a certain provoking beauty which