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Biography “It is better,” he observes, with equal wisdom and humanity, “it is better to help the poor by actually working at their own handicraft with them, than doing higher and perhaps more lucrative work, and giving them the profits thereof, inasmuch as by working with them you teach them to respect their own particular work by showing them that you yourself do not despise it, whereas any money you might give them would be apt to make them indolent and lazy.” So he set about tilling his own fields, thatching his own cottage roofs, and teaching his peasantry thrift and economy by his own personal example. Nor was this all. During the terrible winter of 1891–92, when whole provinces of the Russian Empire presented the terrible and pathetic spectacle of an entire agricultural population, overwhelmed by snow, dying in thousands, without a word of complaint, though absolutely deprived of food, clothes, or firewood, Tolstoi hastened to the afflicted districts, and fed thousands daily at his own expense at improvised ordinaries, never quitting his post for a single instant till all danger was at an end. Indeed, but for his indefatigable efforts, whole parishes would have been depopulated. Nor was this the first time that Tolstoi had shown himself the benefactor of the people. Some ten years before, when a terrible famine was raging in the Province of Samara, which calamity, apparently for economical reasons, was not “officially recognised,” Tolstoi collected subscriptions for the relief of the dying peasantry, and, energetically aided, by Katkov and the Moscow Gazette, never ceased calling attention to the catastrophe till he actually