Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/141

 AN AFTERWORD 126

Not to speak of the insensate luxury of parks, con- servatories and hunting, every glass of wine, every bit of sugar, butter, or meat, is so much food taken from the people, and so much labour added to their task.

We Russians are specially well situated for seeing our position clearly. 1 remember, long before these famine years, how a young and morally sensitive savant from Prague, wlio visited me in the country in winter — on coming out of the hut of a ^comparatively well-to-do peasant at wliich we had called, and in which, as every- where, tliere was an overworked, prematurely aged woman in rags, a sick child who had ruptured it<elf while screaming, and, as everywliere in spring, a tethered calf and a ewe that had lambed, and dirt and damp, and foul air, and a dejected, careworn peasant — I remember liow, on coming out of the hut, my young acquaintance began to say sometliing to me, when suddenly his voice broke and he wept. For the first time, after some months spent in Moscow and Peters- burg — where he liad walked along asphalted pavements, past luxurious shops, from one rich house to another, and from one rich museum, library, or palace, to other similar grand buildings — ^he saw for the first time those whose labour supplies all that luxury, and he was amazed and horrified. To him, in rich and educated Bohemia (as to every man of 'estern Europe, especially to a Swede, a Swiss, or a Belgian), it might seem (though incorrectly) that where comj)arative liberty exists — where education is general, where everyone has a chance to enter the ranks of the educated — luxury is a legitimate reward of labour, and does not destroy human life. He might manage to forget the successive generations of men who mine tlie coal by the use of which most of the articles of our luxury are produced, he might forget — since they are out of sight — tlie men of other races in the colonies, who die out, working to satisfy our whims ; but we Russians cannot share such thoughts : the connection between our luxury and the sufferings and deprivations of men of the same race as ourselves is too evident. We cannot avoid seeing the