Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/503

 saying that with their poverty and indefiniteness of life she could not have any children. Her breast even does not fill up. In short, it is inconvenient for her

Just before that I was swinging three waifs, and I came across another boy, Vásya's nephews. Altogether there is a swarm of this brood of children. They are born and they grow up to become drunkards, syphilitics, savages.

And with all this they talk of the salvation of the lives of men and children and of their destruction. What is the sense of breeding savages? What good is there in this? They ought not to be killed, nor ought people to stop breeding them, but they ought to employ all their forces in order to make men out of the savages. This is the only good. But this deed is not done with words alone, but with the example of life.

If you have fallen, know that there is no other redemption of this sin than (1) freeing both yourselves from the offence of the lust and (2) bringing up the children as servants of God.

Be both of you (husband and wife) careful and, more than anything, attentive to your mutual relations, so that the habits of irritation and alienation may not steal in. It is not an easy matter to become one soul and one body. We must try. And the reward for the endeavour is great. I know one chief means for this: amidst your conjugal love do not for a moment forget or lose the love and respect of man to man. Let there be relations of man to wife, but at the base of all let the relations be as to a stranger, a near friend,—this is the chief relation. In them is the power.

Do not strengthen your attachment for one another, but with all your strength increase the caution in your