Before them lay some loose tobacco and paper cartridges. They were making Cigarettes. The woman rubbed the tobacco between her hands, placed it in a machine, drew on the cartridge, pressed it home, and threw It to !he girl. The girl rolled up a piece of paper, pushing a wad into the Cigarette, threw it aside, and started on another. This all was done with such rapidity and with such tension that it is impossible to describe it to a man who has not seen it. I expressed surprise at their rapidity.
‘Have been doing nothing else for fourteen years,’ said the woman. ‘Is it hard?’
‘Yes one’s chest hurts and it is hard to breathe.’ Indeed she need not have said so. One had only to look at her and at the little girl. The girl has been working for over two years, and anyone seeing her at it would say that she had a strong constitution but was already beginning to break up. My acquaintance, a kindly and. liberal minded man, had hired them to fill cigarettes at two rubles fifty kopeks1 a thousand. He has money and gives it them for their work-what harm is there in that? He gets up about noon; spends his evenings from six till two in the morning at cards or at the piano, and eats tasty and sweet food; other people do all his work for him. He devised a new pleasure-smoking. I remember when he began it.
Here are a woman and a girl who by making machines of themselves can barely manage to support themselves, and who spend their whole lives inhaling tobacco, and so ruin their health. He has money which he did not earn, and he prefers to play bridge2 to making cigarettes for himself. He gives money to these women only on condition that they continue to live as wretchedly as before, that is, that they make cigarettes for him.
I like cleanliness, and give my money only on condition that a laundress washes the shirt I change twice a day, and this work has drained her last strength and she has died.
‘What is there bad in it? People buy and hire whether I do or not, and will go on compelling others to make velvet and sweets and will buy them, and will go on hiring people to make cigarettes and to wash shirts, even if I don’t. So why should I deprive myself of velvet and sweets and cigarettes and clean shirts, if things are so arranged?’ I often, almost always, hear this argument. It is the same that is used by a maddened crowd that is destroying something. It is the same that dogs are guided by when one of them flies at
1 About 5s. . . .
2 The game actually mentioned in the Russian is vint, which much resembles bridge.
another and overthrows it, and the rest rush at it and tear it to pieces. Once it has been started and injury has been done, why should not I share in it? ‘Well, what good will it do if I wear a dirty shirt and make my own cigarettes? Would anyone be the better for it?’ ask those who wish to justify themselves. Were we not so far from the truth one would be ashamed to reply to such a question, but we are so entangled that this question seems natural to us, and, ashamed as one is to answer it, it must be met.
What difference will it make if I wear my shirt for a week instead of a day and make my cigarettes myself, or do not smoke at all?
This difference, that some washerwoman and some cigarette-maker will strain her strength less, and the money I should have paid for the washing and cigarette-making I shall be able to give to that washerwoman, or even to quite other washerwomen and workers who are weary of work, and who, instead of working beyond their strength, may then rest and drink tea. But to this I hear a reply (so reluctant are the rich, luxurious people to understand their position). They reply: ‘Even if I wear dirty linen and stop smoking and give this money to the poor instead, all the same the poor will have everything taken from them, and my drop in the ocean will not help matters.’
One feels still more ashamed to reply to this retort, but it must be answered. It is such a common rejoinder and the answer is so simple.
If I visit savages and they treat me to tasty cutlets, and next day I learn (or perhaps see) that these tasty cutlets are made of a prisoner whom they have killed to make them; then if I do not think it right to eat people, however tasty the cutlets may be and however general the practice of eating men may be among those I am living with, and however little the prisoners who are kept to serve as food may gain by my refusal to eat the cutlets, still I shall not and cannot eat them again. Perhaps I might even eat human flesh if compelled by hunger, but I should not entertain others at, or take part in, feasts where human flesh was eaten, and should not seek such feasts or feel proud of taking part in them.
CHAPTER XXV
‘WELL, what must we do? We didn’t make things so.’ But if not we, who did? We say: we did not do it, it has just done itself, as children when they have broken something say it broke itself. We say that once the towns exist we, living in them, support people by buying their labour .
But it is not true, and we need only consider how we live in the country and support people there.
The winter is past in town, and Easter Week comes. In town that same orgy of the rich continues; on the boulevards, in the gardens, in the parks and on the river, are music, theatres, rides, promenades, all kinds of illuminations and fireworks, but in the country there are still better things-the air is better, the trees, the meadows, and the flowers are fresher. We must go where all this is budding and flowering. And so most rich people, utilizing the labour of others, go to the country to breathe this better air and to see these still better meadows and woods.
And so the rich people settle down in the country amid the rough peasants who live on rye bread and onion, work eighteen hours a day, do not get enough sleep at night, and wear tattered clothes. Here at least no one has tempted these people: there are no mills or factories here, and no idle hands of whom there are so many in town, and whom we are supposed to feed by giving them work. Here during the whole summer the people are unable to keep up with their work, and not only are there no unemployed hands but quantities of things perish for lack of labour, and many people, children, old men, and women with child, perish by overstraining themselves. How do the rich folk arrange their lives here?
Why… in this way. If there is an old house built in the days of serfdom, it is renovated and ornamented; or if there is none, a new one is built-two or three stories high, with from twelve to twenty or more rooms all about fourteen feet high.
Parquet floors are laid, the windows have large glass panes, there are costly carpets, expensive furniture, with a sideboard costing from two hundred to six hundred rubles.
The paths near the house are made of gravel, the ground is levelled, flower-beds are set out, a croquet-ground is arranged, a giant-stride is put up, reflecting globes are set up, and often conservatories, hot-houses, and high stables, always with ornamented ridge-pieces. It is all painted with oil-colours-made with the oil the old peasants and their children do not get in their porridge. If the rich man is able he settles down in such a house, or if he cannot afford that, he hires such a house; but however poor and liberal minded a man of our circle may be, when he settles in the country he settles in a house for the building and cleaning of which dozens of working people have to be taken from the village where they are unable to cope with the work needed for growing grain for their own sustenance.
There at least one cannot say that factories exist and it will be all the same whether I do or do not make use of them; here it cannot be said that I feed idle hands; here we directly introduce the manufacture of things we want and directly exploit the needs of those around us, tearing them away from work necessary for them, for us, and for everybody, and we thus pervert some and ruin the life and the health of others.
An educated and honourable family let us say, of the gentry or official class, is living in the country.
All the members of the family and their guests gather there in the middle of June, for till then they have been studying and passing their examinations-that is, they arrive at the
