Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/229

 rubles to satisfy the rent on his hired land; he has to pay his taxes. The members of his family living out this year either receive less than before, by grain being high, or are entirely paid off. He needs three hundred and fifty rubles, but he receives even less than two hundred, and therefore one thing is left for him to do,—to give up his hired land, to sell his seed oats, to sell a part of his horses, for which there is no price,—in other words, to descend to the level of the average muzhik, and even lower, because the average muzhik has a smaller family.

But no help, or very little, is given to the average muzhik if he has any oats left or a horse or two. So that he is obliged to sell his land to the exceptionally rich, to eat his seed oats, and then also his horse. So that by the distribution of help as it obtains now, the rich must infallibly descend to the level of the average and the average to the level of the poor. And by the conditions obtaining this year, almost all, except the unusually rich, are obliged to descend in this way. The distribution of flour, not attaining its object of supporting the peasant husbandry, does not attain its second object either—that of safeguarding the people from famine diseases. The distribution of flour by "souls" does not secure this for the following reasons:—

In the first place, because in such a distribution of flour there is always a possibility that the person receiving it will yield to the temptation of squandering what he has received, and selling it for drink, and this has happened, though not in many instances.

In the second place, because this help, falling into the hands of the poor, saves them from starvation only in case the family has some means of its own. The largest apportionment amounts to thirty pounds to each man. And if thirty pounds of flour, together with potatoes and some admixture with the flour for baking bread, may support a man for the period of a month, then in complete poverty, when they have not the where- withal to buy even lebeda-weed to mix with their bread, thirty pounds of flour is used up in the form of unmodi-