Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/558

534 effeminacy and dissoluteness of wealth, and, thanks to his good nature, is ruined.

Then begins a series of physical sufferings, poverty and humiliation to which he is especially sensitive, and with which he knows not how to contend. He has aspirations toward a moral life,—but his flesh is weak; he has grown effeminate by being accustomed to luxury and idleness; he struggles in vain; he falls lower and ever lower; he indulges in drunkenness to drown thought, then comes crime or insanity or suicide.

And indeed one cannot regard without horror the education of the children of the wealthy class in our day. Only the cruelest foe would, one would think, inoculate a child with those defects and vices which are now instilled into him by his parents, especially by mothers. One is horror-struck at the sight, and still more at the results of this, if only one knows how to discern what is taking place in the souls of the best of these children, so carefully ruined by their parents.

Young creatures are inoculated with habits of effeminacy at a time when they do not yet understand their moral significance.

Not only is the habit of temperance and self-control neglected, but, contrary to the educational practice of Sparta and the ancient world in general, this quality is altogether atrophied. Not only do men grow up unaccustomed to work, and devoid of the qualities essential to all labor,—concentration of mind, strenuousness, firmness, enthusiasm for the work, ability to repair what is spoiled, familiarity with fatigue, joy in attainment,—but they are habituated to idleness, and to contempt for all the products of labor, are taught to spoil, throw away, and again procure for money anything they fancy, without a thought as to how things are made. Men are bereft of the power of acquiring the virtue,—first in order of consecutiveness, and indispensable for the attainment of all the others,—reasonableness, and are let loose in a world where the lofty virtues of justice, the service of man, and love are preached, and apparently esteemed.