Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/475

 various subtilities and philosophies. But if you consider this, you will see that it is so. Supposing a man should make a tub without a bottom, and should then devise all sorts of clever schemes to carry water in it! This is what all our methods for curing existent evils amount to!

In fact, whence arise the calamities of men, if you exclude from the number the calamities that men directly bring on one another by murders, capital punishments, taxes, brawls, and all sorts of cruelties in which they sin by not refraining from violence?

All the calamities of mankind, with the exceptions of those caused by direct violence, proceed from hunger, from all kinds of deprivation, from overwork, and at the same time from superfluity, from sloth, and from the vices growing out of them. Whatever may be the holiest duty of man, is there any more so than that of bringing about the destruction of this inequality, of these calamities, of. lack in some and of superfluity in others? And how can a man coöperate in the destruction of these calamities otherwise than by taking part in the labor which overcomes need, and by refraining from the superfluities and the idleness which produce vices and temptations; in other words, that everyone should labor for his daily bread, should provide himself with food by the work of his hands, as Bondaref says?

We have so involved ourselves, laying down so many laws, both religious and social and domestic, so many precepts,—as Isaiah says, precept on precept, here a precept, there a precept,—that we have entirely lost the meaning of what is good and what is bad.

A man conducts a mass, another collects an army or taxes for it, a third sits on the bench, a fourth studies books, a fifth practises medicine, a sixth teaches men; and under these pretexts, freeing themselves from manual labor, they shirk it on others, and forget that men are dying of overwork, toil, and starvation: and in order that some one may sing at mass, some one may be protected by an army, some one may sit in judgment, some one may practise medicine or teach, it is