Page:Labour - The Divine Command, 1890.djvu/46



undertaking to treat with all my energy of the questions of labor and idleness, let me explain who I am. Am I not like those who, in pointing out to others the good path they should follow, wander themselves in that which is evil, and most opposed to equity and righteousness?

Up to the age of thirty-seven years I worked as a laborer on the estate of a pomestchik on the Don, named Tchernozouboff. Every one knows how one in that condition of life is over-burdened with work. Later the pomestchik enrolled me as a soldier, and my five children, being under age, remained beneath his heavy, intolerable yoke.

When I arrived in Siberia, in 1857, with my wife and two children, we possessed only the clothes on our backs, and those had been given us by the State.