Page:Tolstoy - A Great Iniquity.djvu/15

Rh is quite a tiny fellow with quick, intelligent eyes.

He looks small, but he can do everything,” she says.

“But why do you hire out such a little one?”

“Well, sir, at least it’ll be one mouth less to feed. I have four besides myself, and only one allotment. God knows, we’ve nothing to eat. They ask for bread and I’ve none to give them.”

With whomsoever one talks, all complain of their want and all similarly from one side or another come back to the sole reason. There is insufficient bread, and bread is insufficient because there is no land.

These may be mere casual meetings on the road; but cross all Russia, all its peasant world, and one may observe all the dreadful calamities and sufferings which proceed from the obvious cause that the agricultural masses are deprived of land. Half the Russian peasantry live so that for them the question is not how to improve their position, but only how not to die of hunger, they and their families, and this only because they have no land.

Traverse all Russia and ask all the working people why their life is hard, what they want, and all of them with one voice will say one and the same thing, that which they unceasingly desire and expect, and for which they unceasingly hope, of which they unceasingly think.

They cannot help thinking and feeling this, for, apart from the chief thing, the insufficiency of land for the maintenance of most of them, they cannot but feel themselves the slaves of the landed gentry, and merchants, and landowners, whose estates have surrounded their small insufficient allotments, and they cannot but think and feel this—for every minute, for a bag of grass, for a handful of fuel, without which they cannot live,