Page:Labour - The Divine Command, 1890.djvu/152

148 any one else, lives in idleness, on the labor of others, and who, as it were, turns the blood of the poor into money? Will you call him a brigand? No; a brigand falls by the sentence of the law, whilst this man is esteemed and elevated to supreme greatness. You have bestowed on us all humiliating epithets; what have you reserved for the sluggard? But why do I thus interrogate you? A stone might answer me, but you, my readers, will not.

If a great famine were inflicted upon Russia during one year only, every one would die of hunger. But where is the wheat of which there was an excess in the preceding years, and which they (the imbeciles) have stored up? The intelligent ones have eaten it, is the reply. Can we believe an intelligent man would commit such a crime? To eat the bread of the ingnorant, to trample under foot the love of our neighbor, and the primitive law—it is almost incredible!

Desire for food is man's strongest inclination, yet what he most disdains is labor for bread. There are actually in Russia millions of children whom they teach to read, that they may be free from this labor, and that they may eat bread for nothing; that is to say, to ride on the backs of poor laborers. If that were not their intention, they would never consent to be instructed, and their parents would not let them go to school. Not to be willing to live without doing anything would seem to them as a crime, a