Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/231

 an old woman who is ill from the effects of the lebeda-weed bread, and declares that it is better to eat once a day only to have good bread to eat, but that this does not keep up one's strength.

Or a third case: a peasant woman comes from a rich farm to ask for her thirteen-year-old daughter admission to the eating-room because they cannot feed her at home. This daughter is of illegitimate birth, and therefore she is not liked and is not willingly fed. There are many similar cases, and therefore the distribution of help in flour from hand to hand does not keep the old, the feeble, and the unpopular members of the family from sickness and death, in consequence of the unsuitability or lack of food.

Painful as it is to say this, notwithstanding the remarkable energy and even self-control of the majority of provincial workers, their activity, consisting in the distribution of help in corn, does not fulfil its purpose of supporting the agricultural peasantry or of preventing the possibility of diseases from famine.

But if what is done now is not good, what is good? What should be done?

Two things in my opinion are necessary, not for the support merely of the agricultural peasantry, but to prevent them from ultimate ruin: the organization of work for every community able to work; and the establishment of free refectories for the young, the old, the feeble, and the sick in all country places suffering from the famine.

The organization of labor ought to be such that it should be accessible, well-known, and familiar to the population, and not such as the people have never occupied themselves with or even seen, or else such as they are often unable to perform; as, for instance, by compelling the members of the families who have never gone away to leave home, or undergo other adverse conditions, such as lack of clothing.

Work ought to be such that, besides their work out of doors, to which all the capable and able-bodied muzhiks can resort for wages, there should be domestic work