Page:Tolstoy - A Great Iniquity.djvu/11



is living through an important time destined to have enormous results.

The proximity and inevitableness of the approaching change is, as indeed is always the case, especially keenly felt by those classes of society who, by their position, are free from the necessity of physical labour absorbing all their time and power, and therefore have the possibility of occupying themselves with political questions. These men—the nobles, merchants, Government officials, doctors, engineers, professors, teachers, artists, students, advocates, chiefly townspeople, the so-called “intellectuals”—are now in Russia directing the movement which is taking place, and they devote all their powers to the alteration of the existing political order, and to replacing it by another regarded by this or that party as the most expedient and likely to ensure the liberty and welfare of the Russian people. These men, continually suffering from every kind of restriction and coercion on the part of the Government, from arbitrary exile, incarcerations, prohibition of meetings, prohibition of books, newspapers, strikes, unions—from the limitation of the rights of various nationalities, and at the same time living a life completely estranged from the majority of the Russian agricultural people, naturally see in these restrictions the chief evil, and in the liberation from them the chief welfare, of the Russian people.