Page:Tolstoy - A Great Iniquity.djvu/16

8 for a horse gone astray from their land on to the landlord’s, they perpetually suffer fines, blows, humiliation.

Once, as I was going along the road. I entered into conversation with a blind peasant beggar. Recognising in me from my conversation a literate man who read the papers, but not taking me for a gentleman, he suddenly stopped and gravely asked: “Well, and is there any rumour?”

I asked, “About what?”

“Why, about the gentry’s land.”

I said I had heard nothing. The blind man shook his head and didn’t ask me anything more.

“Well, what do they say about the land?” I asked a short time ago of a former pupil of mine, a rich, steady, and intelligent literate peasant.

“It is true the people prattle.”

“And you yourself, what do you think?”

“Well, it’ll probably come over to us,” he said.

Of all events which are taking place, this alone is important and interesting to the whole people. And they believe, and cannot but believe, that it will “come over.”

They cannot but believe this, because it is clear to them that a multiplying people living by agriculture cannot continue to exist when only a small portion of the land is left them from which they must feed themselves and all the parasites who have fastened on to them and are crawling about them.

“What is man?” says Henry George in one of his speeches.

“In the first place, he is an animal, a land animal who cannot live without land. All that man produces comes from the land; all productive labour, in the final analysis, consists in working up land, or materials drawn from land, into such forms as fit them for the satisfaction