Buch lesen: "A Great Iniquity"

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy

A Great Iniquity

Published by Good Press, 2022

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EAN 4064066462444

Table of Contents

The Free Age Press

A GREAT

INIQUITY

By LEO TOLSTOY

THE FREE AGE PRESS

The Free Age Press Series of Tolstoy Portraits. 13, Paternoster Row, London.

​

The Free Age Press

Table of Contents

A GREAT
INIQUITY
By LEO TOLSTOY

Table of Contents

Translated by V. Tchertkoff

and I. F. Mayo

with Note by the latter

NO RIGHTS RESERVED

THE FREE AGE PRESS

Table of Contents

13 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON

​

A GREAT INIQUITY.

Table of Contents

Russia is living through an important time destined to have enormous results.

The proximity and inevitableness of the approaching change is, as indeed is always the case, especially keenly felt by those classes of society who, by their position, are free from the necessity of physical labour absorbing all their time and power, and therefore have the possibility of occupying themselves with political questions. These men—the nobles, merchants, Government officials, doctors, engineers, professors, teachers, artists, students, advocates, chiefly townspeople, the so-called "intellectuals"—are now in Russia directing the movement which is taking place, and they devote all their powers to the alteration of the existing political order, and to replacing it by another regarded by this or that party as the most expedient and likely to ensure the liberty and welfare of the Russian people. These men, continually suffering from every kind of restriction and coercion on the part of the Government, from arbitrary exile, incarcerations, prohibition of meetings, prohibition of books, newspapers, strikes, unions—from the limitation of the rights of various nationalities, and at the same time living a life completely estranged from the majority of the Russian agricultural people, naturally see in these restrictions the chief evil, and in the liberation from them the chief welfare, of the Russian people.

​Thus think the Liberals. So also think the Social Democrats, who hope, through popular representation, by the aid of State power to realise a new social order in accordance with their theory. So also think the revolutionaries, hoping, by substituting a new Government for the existing one, to establish laws ensuring the greatest freedom and welfare of the whole people.

Yet one need only for a time free oneself from the idea which has taken root amongst our intellectuals, that the work now before Russia is the introduction into our country of those same forms of political life which have been introduced into Europe and America, and are supposed to ensure the liberty and welfare of all the citizens—and to simply think of what is morally wrong in our life, in order to see quite clearly that the chief evil from which the whole of the Russian people are unceasingly and cruelly suffering an evil of which they are keenly conscious and to which they continually point—cannot be removed by any political reforms, just as it is not up to the present time removed by any of the political reforms of Europe and America. This evil—the fundamental evil from which the Russian people, as well as the peoples of Europe and America, are suffering—is the fact that the majority of the people are deprived of the indisputable natural right of every man to use a portion of the land on which he was born. It is sufficient to understand all the criminality, the sinfulness of the situation in this respect, in order to understand that until this atrocity, continually being committed by the owners of the land, shall cease, no political reforms will give freedom and welfare to the people, but that, on the contrary, only the emancipation of the majority of the people from that land slavery in which they are now held can render political reforms—not a plaything and a tool for personal aims in the hands ​of politicians—but the real expression of the will of the people.

It is this thought which I wish to communicate in this article to those who, at the present important moment for Russia, desire to serve not, their personal aims, but the true welfare of the Russian people.

I.

The other day I was walking along the high road to Tula. It was on the Saturday of Holy Week; the people were driving to market in lines of carts, with calves, hens, horses, cows (some of the cows were being conveyed in the carts, so starved were they). A wrinkled old woman was leading a lean, sickly cow. I knew the old woman, and asked her why she was leading the cow.

"She's without milk," said the woman. "I ought to sell her and buy one with milk. Likely I'll have to add ten roubles, but I have only five. Where shall I take it? During the winter we have had to spend eighteen roubles on flour, and we've only got one bread-winner. I live alone with my daughter-in-law and four grandchildren; my son is house-porter in town."

"Why doesn't your son live at home?" I asked.

"He's nothing to work on. What's our land? Just enough for Kvas.^[1]

A peasant went tramping along, thin and pale, his trousers bespattered with mine clay.

"What business in town?" I asked.

"To buy a horse; it's time to plough and I haven't got one. But they say horses are dear."

"What price do you want to give?"

​"Well, according to what I have."

"How much have you?"

"I've scraped together fifteen roubles.^[2] But what can you buy at the present time for fifteen roubles?

"A knacker's beast," put in another peasant.

"In whose mine do you work?" I asked, glancing at his trousers stretched at the knee and coloured with red clay.

"In Komaroff's, Ivan Komaroffs."

"Why have you made so little?"

"Oh, I was working for half profit."

"How much did you earn?" I asked.

"Two roubles a week or even less. What can one do? Bread didn't last till Christmas. We can't buy enough."

A little further, a young peasant was leading a sleek, well fed horse to sell.

"Nice horse," said I.

"Couldn't be better," said he, thinking me a buyer. "Good for ploughing and driving."

"Then why do you sell it?"

"I can't use it. I've only two allotments. I can manage them with one horse. I've kept them both over the winter, and I'm sorry enough for it. The cattle have eaten up everything, and we want money to pay the rent."

"From whom do you rent?"

"From Maria Ivanovna; thanks be to her, she let us have it. Otherwise it would have been the end of us."

"What are the terms?"

"She fleeces us of fourteen roubles. But where else can we go? So we take it."

A woman passed driving along with a boy wearing a little cap. She knew me, clambered out, and offered me her boy for service. The boy ​is quite a tiny fellow with quick, intelligent eyes.

He looks small, but he can do everything," she says.

"But why do you hire out such a little one?"

"Well, sir, at least it'll be one mouth less to feed. I have four besides myself, and only one allotment. God knows, we've nothing to eat. They ask for bread and I've none to give them."

With whomsoever one talks, all complain of their want and all similarly from one side or another come back to the sole reason. There is insufficient bread, and bread is insufficient because there is no land.

These may be mere casual meetings on the road; but cross all Russia, all its peasant world, and one may observe all the dreadful calamities and sufferings which proceed from the obvious cause that the agricultural masses are deprived of land. Half the Russian peasantry live so that for them the question is not how to improve their position, but only how not to die of hunger, they and their families, and this only because they have no land.

Traverse all Russia and ask all the working people why their life is hard, what they want, and all of them with one voice will say one and the same thing, that which they unceasingly desire and expect, and for which they unceasingly hope, of which they unceasingly think.

They cannot help thinking and feeling this, for, apart from the chief thing, the insufficiency of land for the maintenance of most of them, they cannot but feel themselves the slaves of the landed gentry, and merchants, and landowners, whose estates have surrounded their small insufficient allotments, and they cannot but think and feel this—for every minute, for a bag of grass, for a handful of fuel, without which they cannot live, ​for a horse gone astray from their land on to the landlord's, they perpetually suffer fines, blows, humiliation.

Once, as I was going along the road. I entered into conversation with a blind peasant beggar. Recognising in me from my conversation a literate man who read the papers, but not taking me for a gentleman, he suddenly stopped and gravely asked: "Well, and is there any rumour?"

I asked, "About what?"

"Why, about the gentry's land."

I said I had heard nothing. The blind man shook his head and didn't ask me anything more.

"Well, what do they say about the land?" I asked a short time ago of a former pupil of mine, a rich, steady, and intelligent literate peasant.

"It is true the people prattle."

"And you yourself, what do you think?"

"Well, it'll probably come over to us," he said.

Of all events which are taking place, this alone is important and interesting to the whole people. And they believe, and cannot but believe, that it will "come over."

They cannot but believe this, because it is clear to them that a multiplying people living by agriculture cannot continue to exist when only a small portion of the land is left them from which they must feed themselves and all the parasites who have fastened on to them and are crawling about them.

II.

"What is man?" says Henry George in one of his speeches.

"In the first place, he is an animal, a land animal who cannot live without land. All that man produces comes from the land; all productive labour, in the final analysis, consists in working up land, or materials drawn from land, into such forms as fit them for the satisfaction ​of human wants and desires. Why, man's very body is drawn from the land. Children of the soil, we come from the land, and to the land we must return. Take away from man all that belongs to the land, and what have you but a disembodied spirit? Therefore he who holds the land on which and from which another man must live is that man's master, and the man is his slave. The man who holds the land on which I must live can command me to life or to death just as absolutely as though I were his chattel. Talk about abolishing slavery—we have not abolished slavery; we have only abolished one rude form of it, chattel slavery. There is a deeper and more insidious form, a more cursed form yet before us, to abolish, in this industrial slavery that makes a man a virtual slave, while taunting him and mocking him in the name of freedom."^[3]