Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/210

 imagine that I am doing good! I only do it for myself, because I know that I have no right to be well off while they are in misery." It is worth mention in passing that during the famine of 1891-2 this determined opponent of organized charity, in noble inconsistency with his theories, led in the dispensation of relief to the starving population of Middle Russia.

But in "What Then Must We Do?" he treats the usual organized dabbling in charity as utterly preposterous: "Give away all you have or else you can do no good." . . . "If I give away a hundred thousand and still withhold five hundred thousand, I am far from acting in the spirit of charity, and remain a factor of social injustice and evil. At the sight of the freezing and hungering I must still feel responsible for their plight, and feel that since we should live in conditions where that evil can be abstained from, it is impossible for me in the position in which I deliberately place myself to be anything other than a source of general evil."

It was chiefly due to the influence of two peasants, named Sutayeff and Bondareff, that Tolstoy decided by a path of religious reasoning to abandon "parasitical existence," — that is, to s