Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol2.djvu/213

Rh finger through the buttonhole of his coat. 'Come, what could be clearer. You have peasants in order that you may protect them in their peasant existence. And what does it consist of? What is the peasant's occupation? Growing corn. So you must try and make him a good husbandman. Is that clear? There are wiseacres who say: "We can raise him out of that condition. He leads too coarse and simple an existence. We must make him acquainted with objects of luxury." It is not enough for them that through this luxury they have themselves become rags instead of men, and the devil only knows what diseases they have contracted from it, and now there is not a wretched boy of eighteen who hasn't tried everything and has lost all his teeth and is bald,—and so now they want to infect the peasants too. But thank God we have one healthy class left which hasn't got to know these vices. For that we ought simply to thank God. Yes, the man who tills the land is to my mind more worthy of honour than any. God grant that we may all be tillers of the land.'

'So you think that growing corn is the most profitable occupation?' inquired Tchitchikov.

'It's the most righteous, but that's not to say it is the most profitable. "Till the land in the sweat of thy brow"—that is said to all of us, that's not said in vain. The experience of ages has shown that it is in the agricultural class that morals are purest. Where agriculture is the basis of the social structure, there