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because the peasant does not like to be treated as children
are by their teachers. As a matter of course, he does
not like to have morals preached to him. When an
attempt was lately made on an estate to give a new
drama of Tolstoï, aimed against intoxicating liquors, and
in which the devil personally appears as the maker and
distributer of spirits, the peasants expressed their
disgust at it. It was, they said, a tale for children.
But the same peasants would readily believe that, if
the harvest was poor this year, it was because the priests
were now on a fixed salary. Heretofore the latter said
the mass earnestly, to get a good harvest and rich tithe:
this year it was all the same to them; therefore they
prayed negligently and without real heartiness. Drought
followed. And the same peasants explained the last
Russian-Turkish war by saying that in the country of the
Turks there lies in the ground a huge beast, of great age,
and under the claw of his left hind-leg an immense treasure
of gold is buried, which the Tsar wanted to wrest
from the Turk.
It must not be forgotten that by the last returns
seventy-six out of one hundred of the soldiers could neither
read nor write.
On the other hand, let us examine the moral idea which
underlies the whole struggle of the intelligent people of
Russia: The wish to be useful, to see those about them
happy in freedom. This idea crops out in many different
guises, now in the costume of the utilitarianism of
Bentham and Mill, now in the garb of Tchernuishevski’s
phalanstery, now in Dostoyevski’s strait-jacket, but it
is the basis of the philosophy of the enlightened
reformers of the fatherland and their friends of reform.
In speaking of the relations of the two sexes, attention
has been called to the equality between the man
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