Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/209

 inasmuch as he strove for the ideal of universal equality. His social philosophy, bound up inseparably with his personal religious evolution, is laid down in a vast number of essays, letters, sketches, tracts, didactic tales, and perhaps most comprehensively in those autobiographical documents already mentioned. Sociologically the most important of these is a book on the problem of property, entitled, "What Then Must We Do?" (1886), which expounds the passage in Luke iii:10, 11: "And the people asked him, saying. What shall we do then? He answered and saith unto them. He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise." Not long before that, he had thought of devoting himself entirely to charitable work, but practical experiments at Moscow demonstrated to him the futility of almsgiving. Speaking on that point to his English biographer, Aylmer Maude, he remarked: "All such activity, if people attribute importance to it, is worthless." When his interviewer insisted that the destitute have to be provided for somehow and that the Count himself was in the habit of giving money to beggars, the latter replied: "Yes, but I do not