Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/398

384 do we act in regard to you, and we cannot do otherwise. And notwithstanding my promise to help you, and to comply with your request, I look on your doctrine as most harmful and low: low, because dishonorably and unjustly you devour the breast that nourishes you: take advantage of the blessings of the imperial order without sharing in its support, and yet trying to destroy it!"

"What you say would be just," said Pamphilius, "if we really lived as you think. But you do not know about our life, and you have formed a false conception of it. For you, with your habitual luxury, it is hard to imagine how little a man requires when he exists without superfluities. A man is so constituted that, when he is well, he can produce with his hands far more than he needs for the support of his life. Living in a community as we do, we are able by our labor to support without effort our children, and the aged and the sick and the feeble. You assert that we Christians arouse in the slave the desire to be the Cæsar; on the contrary, both by word and deed we fulfil one thing: patient submissiveness and work, the most humble work of all—the work of the working-man. We know nothing and we care nothing about affairs of state. We know one thing, but we know it beyond question,—that our well-being is only when the well-being of others is found, and we strive after this well-being; the well-being of all men is in their union."