Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/137

Rh example shall they follow? Here it is a fine thing that all these lackeys, izvoshchiks, Swisses—Russian men from the country—do not regard you as you regard yourselves, and would wish others to regard you as the representatives of enlightenment. If this were so, they, looking at you, would be disenchanted at every kind of enlightenment and would despise it; but even now, though they do not regard you as the representatives of enlightenment, they nevertheless see in you learned gentlemen who know everything, and, therefore, can and should be followed. And they can put the question to themselves: What will they, poor things, learn from you?

Which is the more powerful: the enlightenment which is spread among the people by public lectures and museums; or the savagery which is sustained and spread among the people by the spectacle of such festivals as the celebration of the twenty-fourth of January, supported by the most enlightened people of Russia?

I think that if all lectures and museums should be done away with, and at the same time all such celebrations and dinners should cease, but the cooks and servant-maids, the izvoshchiks and porters, should spread among themselves in conversations the announcement that all the enlightened men of Russia whom they serve never celebrated their festivals with gluttony and drunkenness, but were able to have good times and dine without wine, then enlightenment would not suffer in the least.

It is time to understand that enlightenment is not spread by a few obscure pictures, nor by verbal and printed words, but by the infectious example of the whole life of the people; and that enlightenment not based on a moral life never was and never will be enlightenment at all, but will always be only obfuscation and perversion.