CHAPTER XXXIX
I HAVE finished, having said all that relates to myself; but I cannot refrain from a desire to say what relates to everyone, and to verify the conclusions I have come to, by general considerations.
I wish to say why it seems to me that very many people of our circle must reach the same conclusion that I arrived at; and also what will come of it if even a few people do so.
I think many will come to the conclusion I came to, because if only men of our circle, of our caste, look seriously about them, the young people seeking personal happiness will be horrified at the ever-increasing misery of their lives, clearly drawing them towards perdition; the conscientious people will be horrified at the cruelty and injustice of their lives, and the timid people will be horrified at the danger of their lives.
The unhappiness of our life; patch up our false way of life as we will, propping it up by the aid of the sciences and arts-that life becomes feebler, sicklier, and more tormenting every year; every year the number of suicides and the avoidance of motherhood increases; every year the people of that class become feebler; every year we feel the increasing gloom of our lives.
Evidently salvation is not to be found by increasing the comforts and pleasures of life, medical treatments, artificial teeth and hair, breathing exercises, massage, and so forth; this truth has become so evident that in the newspapers advertisements of stomach-powders for the rich are printed under the heading, ‘Blessings for the poor’, in which it is
said that only the poor have good digestions but that the rich need aids, among which are these powders.
It is impossible to remedy this by any amusements, comforts, or powders-it can only be remedied by a change of life.
Discord of our life and our conscience; try as we may to justify to ourselves our betrayal of humanity, all our excuses crumble to dust in face of the obvious facts: people around us die from excessive work and from want, while we use up food, clothes and human labour, merely to find distraction and change. And therefore the conscience of a man of our circle, if he retains but a scrap of it, cannot rest, and poisons all the comforts and enjoyments of life supplied to us by the labour of our brothers, who suffer and perish at that labour.
And not only does every conscientious man feel this himself (he would be glad to forget it, but cannot do so in our age) but all the best part of science and art-that part which has not forgotten the purpose of its vocation-continually reminds us of our cruelty and of our unjustifiable position. The old firm justifications are all destroyed; the new ephemeral justifications of the progress of science for science’s sake and art for art’s sake do not stand the light of simple common sense.
Men’s consciences cannot be set at rest by new excuses, but only by a change of life which will make any justification of oneself unnecessary as there will be nothing needing justification.
The danger of our way of life: try as we may to hide from ourselves. the simple, most obvious, danger that the patience of those whom we are stifling may be exhausted; try as we may to counteract that danger by all sorts of deception, violence, and cajolery-that danger is growing every day and every hour and has long threatened us! but now has matured so that we hardly maintain ourselves in our little boat above the roaring sea which already washes over us and threatens angrily to swallow and devour us.
The workers’ revolution with horrors of destruction and murder not merely threatens us, but we have been living over it for some thirty years already, and only for a while have somehow managed by various temporary devices to postpone its eruption. Such is the condition of Europe; such is the condition with us, and it is yet worse with us because it has no safety-valves. Except the Tsar, the classes that oppress the masses have now no justification in the people’s eyes; those masses are all held down in their position merely by violence, cunning, and opportunism, that is, by agility, but hatred among the worst representatives of the people and contempt for us among the best of them, increases hour by hour.
During the last three or four years a new significant word has come into general use among our people, which I never heard formerly; it is used opprobriously in the street, and defines us as ‘drones’.1
The hatred and contempt of the oppressed masses are growing and the physical and moral forces of the wealthy classes are weakening; the deception on which everything depends
1 Not finding a new English word with which to translate darmoedy, I have to use ‘drones’, which is an old one. Literally darmoedy means ‘people who eat giving nothing in return’.-A. M.
is wearing out, and the wealthy classes have nothing to console themselves with in this deadly peril.
To return to the old ways is impossible, to restore the ruined prestige is impossible; only one thing is left for those who do not wish to change their way of life, and that is to hope that ‘things will last my time’-after that let happen what may.
That is what the blind crowd of the rich are doing, but the danger is ever growing and the terrible catastrophe draws nearer.
Three reasons indicate to people of the wealthy classes the necessity of altering their way of life: the need of well-being for themselves and for those near to them, which is not met on the path they are following; the need of satisfying the voice of conscience, to do which is evidently impossible on the present path; and the menace and ever-growing danger of their life, which is not to be avoided by any external means. All three reasons together should move men of the wealthy classes to change their lives-to a change satisfying their welfare and their conscience, and averting the danger.
And there is only one such change: to cease to deceive, to repent, and to recognize toil to be not a curse but the joyful business of life.
But of what avail will it be that I do ten, eight, or five hours’ physical work which thousands of peasants would gladly do for the money I have?-people say in reply to this.
In the first place the simplest and most certain result will be that you will be merrier, healthier, fitter, and kindlier, and will learn what real life is, from which you have been hiding yourself or which has been hidden from you.
In the second place, if you have a conscience, it not only will not suffer as it does now, seeing people’s labour (the hardship of which from ignorance we always either exaggerate or underrate), but you will experience all the time the joyous consciousness that every day you satisfy the demands of your conscience more and more, and get away from the terrible position of having such an. accumulation of evil in your life as makes it impossible to do good to people; you will feel the joy of living freely, with the possibility of doing good; you will pierce a window, letting in a chink of light from the sphere of the moral world which has hitherto been closed to you. Instead of the constant fear of revenge for the evil you do, you will feel that you are saving others from that revenge, and above all that you are saving the oppressed from the grievous sensation of hatred and vengeance.
‘But really it is ridiculous’, people usually say, ‘for us, people of our society, with the profound problems that confront us-philosophic, scientific, political, artistic, ecclesiastical, and social-for us, ministers, senators, academicians, professors, artists, and singers; for us, a quarter of an hour of whose time is so highly valued-for us to spend our time on what?
On cleaning our boots, washing our shirts, digging, planting potatoes, or feeding our chickens, our cows, and so forth, on affairs which are gladly done for us not only by our own porters and cooks but by thousands of people who appreciate the value of our time. But why do we dress ourselves, wash ourselves, scratch ourselves (excuse the details), hold the po for ourselves, why do we walk, hand chairs to ladies and to guests, open and shut doors, help people into carriages, and do hundreds of similar things that used to be done for us by slaves?
Because we consider that so it ought to be, that it accords with human dignity, that it is a man’s duty and obligation.
Sq it is with physical labour. It is man’s dignity, his sacred duty and obligation, to use the hands and feet given him for the purpose for which they were given, and to expend the food he consumes on labour to produce food, and not to let them atrophy, nor to wash them and clean them and use them only to put food, drink, and cigarettes into his own mouth.
That is a significance physical labour has for every man in any society, but in our society where the evasion of this law of nature has become the misfortune of a w hole circle of people, occupation with physical labour acquires yet another significance-that of a sermon and an activity preventing terrible calamities that threaten humanity. To say that for an educated man physical labour
