Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/197

Rh ability, or, if you please, in worth; but equals in their right to life, and to all that life can give.

It may be possible to doubt the equality of people when we look at adults, each with a different past, but doubt becomes impossible when we see children. Why should this boy have watchful care and all the assistance knowledge can give to assist his physical and mental development, while that other charming child, of equal or better promise, is to become rickety, crippled, or dwarfed from lack of milk, and to grow up illiterate, wild, hampered by superstitions, a man representing merely so much brute labor-power?

Surely, if people have left town life, and have settled, as these have, to live in the village, it is only because they, not in words only, but in very truth, believe in the brotherhood of man, and intend, if not to realize it, at least to begin realizing it in their lives. And just this attempt to realize it must, if they are sincere, inevitably bring them to a terrible position.

With their habits (formed from childhood upwards) of order, comfort, and especially of cleanliness, they, on moving to the village, after buying or hiring a hut, cleared it of insects, perhaps even papered it themselves, and installed some remains, not luxurious but necessary, of their furniture, say an iron bedstead, a cupboard, and a writing-table. And so they begin living. At first the folk shun them, expecting them (like other rich people) to defend their advantages by force, and therefore do not approach them with requests and demands. But presently, bit by bit, the disposition of the newcomers gets known; they themselves offer disinterested services, and the boldest and most impudent of the villagers find out practically that these newcomers do not refuse to give, and that one can get something out of them.

Thereupon, all kinds of demands on them begin to spring up, and constantly increase.

A process begins comparable to the subsidence and running down to a level of the grains in a heap. They settle down till there is no longer any heap rising above the average level.