Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/21

 Rh the Mohammedans. Bóndaref says, in one place, that if people but recognised bread-labour as a religious obligation, no private or special occupations could prevent their doing it, any more than special occupations prevent Church-people from keeping their holidays. There are about eighty holidays in the year, but to perform 'bread-labour,' according to Bóndaref's calculation, only forty days are needed.

However strange it may seem at first that such a simple method, intelligible to everyone, and involving nothing cunning or profound, can save humanity from its innumerable ills, yet more strange, when one comes to think of it, must it seem that we, having at hand so clear, simple, and long familiar a method, can, while neglecting it, seek a cure for our ills in various subtleties and profundities. Yet consider the matter well and you will see that such is the case.

A man omitting to fix a bottom to his tub, and then devising all sorts of cunning means to keep the water from running away, would typify all our efforts to heal existing ills.

Indeed, from what do all the ills of life arise, if we except those that people cause to one another directly, by murders, executions, imprisonments, fights, and the many cruelties in which men sin by using violence? All the ills of humanity—except those produced by direct violence—come from hunger, from want of all kinds, from being overworked, or, on the other hand, from excess and idleness, and the vices they produce. What more sacred duty can man have than to co-operate in the destruction of this inequality—this want, on the one hand, and this temptation of riches on the other? And how can man co-operate in the destruction of these evils but by taking part in work which supplies human needs, and by liberating himself from superfluities and idleness productive of temptations and vices