Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/232

 suitable for the whole population of the famine-stricken places—men, women, hale old men, and half-grown children.

This year's distress is due not only to lack of grain, but also to the no less absolute lack of both money and chances of earning money—there is no work, and several millions of the population are condemned to enforced idleness.

If the grain necessary for the support of the population is at hand, in other words can be placed where it is needed, at a price within their reach, then the starving people might earn this grain for themselves, provided only there was an opportunity of work, and materials for work and sale.

But if they do not have this opportunity, hundreds of millions will be irrevocably wasted in the distribution of gratuitous aid, but the misery will not be relieved. The matter is not wholly in the material loss; the idleness of a whole population receiving gratuitous food has a terribly demoralizing tendency.

Outside industries may be organized in the most varied ways, both for winter and still more for summer-time, and God grant that these industries may be organized as speedily as possible and on the largest possible scale. But besides these great private industries, it is a matter of immediate necessity and enormous importance that the population be furnished with the opportunity of doing their own familiar work, without leaving their homes and their accustomed surroundings, and of getting pay for it, even though it be at a very cheap rate.

In the famine-stricken country districts neither hemp nor flax grew, oats almost wholly failed, and the women have no yarn and nothing to weave. The wives, the girls, and the old women, ordinarily occupied, sit idle. Moreover, the muzhiks, who stay at home and have no money to buy linden bark, also sit without their usual winter avocations—the weaving of lapti, or bark shoes. The children, as well, waste their time idly, for the schools are for the most part closed. The population,