Page:Tolstoy - A Great Iniquity.djvu/29

Rh the Russian people, unceasingly suffering from the want of land, every kind of European institution, forgetting and denying the chief thing; that which alone the Russian people require—the liberation of the land from private property, the establishment of equal rights on the land for all men.

One can understand how European parasites living not directly by the labour of their own British, French or German working men, but by the labour of Colonial working men who produce the bread for which the others exchange their factory produce, may, without seeing the labour and sufferings of those working men who feed and support them, invent a future Socialistic organisation for which they think they are educating mankind, and with unawakened conscience amuse themselves with electioneering campaigns, the strife of parties, parliamentary debates, the establishment and overthrow of ministeries, and every other kind of recreation which they call science and art.

The true bread supporters of these European parasites are the labourers they do not see, in India, Africa, Australia, and partly in Russia. But it is not so for us Russians ; we have no colonies where slaves invisible to ourselves feed us for our manufacturing produce. Our bread-winners, suffering, hungry, are always before our eyes, and we cannot transfer the burden of our iniquitous life to distant colonies that slaves invisible to us should feed us. Our sins are always before us.

And behold, instead of entering into the needs of those who support us, instead of hearing their cries and endeavouring to satisfy them, we, instead of this, under pretext of serving them, also prepare, according to the European sample, Socialistic organisations for the future, and in the present occupy ourselves with what amuses and distracts