Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/524

 But we have a bourgeois rule that a man may marry only when he is pressing hard down on the backs of others, that is, when he has means. Exactly the opposite is needed only he may marry who can live and bring up a child, without having any means. Only such parents will be able to educate their children well.

I have looked through the book.

It is impossible to write about it and reply to it, just as it is impossible to reply to a man's proof that it is agreeable and harmless to cohabit with corpses. A man who does not feel what the elephants feel, that cohabitation is, in general, an act which lowers oneself and one's mate, and so is abominable, an act in which a man involuntarily pays his tribute to his animality, and which is redeemed only by the fact that it fulfils that purpose (childbirth) for which the necessity of this disgusting, debasing act, invincible though it is at a certain time, is inherent in his nature,—to such a man, in spite of his ability to reason, since he is standing on the level of an animal, it is impossible to explain or prove this. I do not even speak of the fallacy of Malthusianism, which places objective considerations (and false ones at that) at the base of the business of morality, which is always subjective,—nor even of the fact that between murder, abortion, and this method there is no material difference.

Pardon me: it is a shame and an abomination to speak seriously of this. It is necessary to speak and to think rather of what distortion or dulness of the moral feeling could have brought men to this. It is not for us to quarrel with them, but to cure them. Really, an ignorant, drunken Russian peasant, who believes in "Friday," who would look with horror upon such an act, and who always looks upon the act of cohabitation as upon a sin, stands immeasurably above the people who write well