Page:Tolstoy - A Great Iniquity.djvu/40

32 It is this feeling in regard to landed property which must awaken in the well-to-do classes in order that the great work of the liberation of the land should be accomplished; this feeling should awaken in such a degree that people should be ready to sacrifice everything if only they can free themselves from the sin in which they have lived and are living.

Possessing hundreds, thousands, scores of thousands of acres, trading in land, profiting one way or the other by landed property, and living luxuriously, thanks to the oppression of the people, possible through this cruel and obvious injustice—to argue in various committees and assemblies about the improvement of the conditions of the peasant’s life without surrendering one’s own exclusively advantageous position growing from this injustice, is not only an unkind but a detestable and evil thing, equally condemnable by common sense, honesty, and Christianity. It is necessary, not to invent cunning devices for the improvement of men deprived of their lawful right to the land, but to understand one’s own sin in relation to them, and before all else to cease to participate in it, whatever this may cost. Only such moral activity of every man can and will contribute to the solution of the question now standing before humanity.

The emancipation of the serfs in Russia was effected not by Alexander II., but by those men who understood the sin of serfdom, and independently of their own advantages endeavoured to free themselves from it, and it was chiefly effected by such men as Novikoff, Radischeff, the Decembrists, those men who were ready to suffer and