Page:Tolstoy - A Great Iniquity.djvu/35

Rh another the load which is in the cart, imagining that he can thus help matters.

Why is this?

The answer to this question is the same as to all questions as to why people of our time, who might live well and happily, are living badly and miserably.

It comes from the circumstance that these men, both governmental and anti-governmental, who are organising the welfare of the people, have no religion—for without religion man cannot himself lead a rational life, and still less can he know what is good and what is bad, what is necessary and what unnecessary, for other people. For this reason alone do people of our time in general, and the Russian educated people in particular—altogether bereft of religious consciousness and openly announcing this with pride—so perversely misunderstand life and the demands of the people they wish to serve, demanding for them everything save the one thing which they require.

Without religion one cannot really love men, and without loving men one cannot know what they require, and what is more, and what is less, necessary for them. Only those who are not religious, and therefore do not truly love, can invent trifling, unimportant improvements in the condition of the people without seeing that chief evil from which others are suffering, and which they themselves are partly producing. Only such people can preach more or less cleverly-constructed abstract theories supposed to render the people happy in the future and not see the sufferings the people are bearing in the present and which demand immediate and practical alleviation. As it were, a man who has deprived a hungry man of his food is giving him his counsel (and that of a very doubtful character) as to how he should get food in the future, without deeming it necessary immediately