Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/140

 124 ESSAYS AND LETrKR?

to exist, and the time is coming when they will not exist — and that time is near.

However well the wine cup may seem to us to he hidden from the lahourinir classes — liowever artful, ancient, and generally acce[>ted may he the excuses wherewith we justify our life of luxury amid a working folk who, cruslied with toil and underfed, supply our luxury — the li^ht is penetrating more and more into our relations with the peojde, and we shall soon appear in the shameful and dan^-erous position of a criminal wliom the unexpected dawn of day exposes on the scene of his crime. If a defiler disposin^f of harmful or worthless goods among the working folk, and trying to charge as much as possihle — or disposing even of good and needful hread, hut hread which he had bought cheap and was selling dear — could formerly have said he was serving the needs of the people l>y honest trade ; or if a manufacturer of cotton prints, looking-glasses, cigarettes, spirits, or beer, could say that he was feed- ing his workmen by giving them employment ; or if an official, receiving hundreds of pounds a year salary collected in taxes from the people's last pence, could assure himself that he was serving for the people's good ; or (a thing specially noticeable these last years in the famine-stricken districts) if formerly a landlord could say — to peasants who worked his land for less pay than would buy them bread, or to those who hired land of him at rack-rents — that by introducing improved methods of agriculture he was promoting the prosperity of the rural population : if all this were formerly pos- sible, now, at least, when people are dying of hunger for lack of bread, amid wide acres belonging to land- lords and planted with potatoes intended for distilling spirits or making starch — these things can no longer be said. It has become impossible, surrounded by people who are dying-out for want of food and from excess of w^ork, not to see that all we consume of the product of their work, on the one hand deprives them of what they need for food, and on the other h'ld increases the work which already taxes their strenj:lli to the utmost.