Page:The Journal of Leo Tolstoy.djvu/10

 and toward which, express it in any materialistic or naturalistic terms it may, the Russian nation has with one mind been working with such marvellous self-consciousness.

Again, after the emancipation of the serfs, Tolstoi seemed to fail the New Russia, interesting himself only at this moment with the education of the youth and the need of reform—ever the need of reform, when already for over a decade the cry of Russia was for new forms entirely, new land arrangements, new relations between man and man, and man and his property. The time had come, they said, for the Will of the People to be made manifest.

But before Tolstoi could decide on that, he had to decide on a more fundamental problem of what his relation was to God, as well as what his relation was to man. In other words, what were the true spiritual relations between man and man, not only the economic, political and social ones. And it is this attempt to solve the real fundamental meaning to all relationship, the very reason for the youth's outbursts against the economic, political and social injustices that existed, that kept him moving forward so slowly. For he moved whole worlds at a step.

The only reason for life, he said, is the universal desire for well being, which in man, whose reason has awakened, is expanded into a desire