Page:The life of Tolstoy.djvu/136

98 public subscription, philanthropic evenings, and by personal demand for help and sympathy from the rich.

Tolstoy offered his services to the Moscow municipality for the census, and, according to his express wish, he was appointed to one of the poorest quarters of the city, where the night shelters of Roshnoff are situated. During the census, Tolstoy plumbed to the very bottom of Moscow’s poverty and wretchedness, but all his efforts to organise some system of assistance were unsuccessful. He had an experience somewhat similar to that attending his philanthropic efforts among the peasants forty years before, described in the sketch, “A Morning of a Landowner.” He now, as then, saw that the poverty and destitution of these people were the result of the worldly, luxurious life which he himself lived, and consequently that it was impossible to help those people whose sufferings were the direct outcome of one’s own idle life—that real aid, the result of a moral and brotherly feeling, could not be given to people looking on one with defiance and hatred.

This unsuccessful attempt at charity was described by Tolstoy in a book, “What Then Must We Do?” He carefully, and in detail, examined the condition of the town, the division of the population