longing for a smoke. While he smoked he chatted to a man from Demensk,
asking the price of cattle, as he saw that he would not be able to
manage without selling a cow. When he returned to the others, they were
already back at work again; and so it went on till the evening.

Among these downtrodden, duped, and defrauded men, who are becoming
demoralised by overwork, and being gradually done to death by
underfeeding, there are men living who consider themselves Christians;
and others so enlightened that they feel no further need for
Christianity or for any religion, so superior do they appear in their
own esteem. And yet their hideous, lazy lives are supported by the
degrading, excessive labour of these slaves, not to mention the labour
of millions of other slaves, toiling in factories to produce samovars,
silver, carriages, machines, and the like for their use. They live among
these horrors, seeing them and yet not seeing them, although often
kind at heart--old men and women, young men and maidens, mothers and
children--poor children who are being vitiated and trained into moral
blindness.

Here is a bachelor grown old, the owner of thousands of acres, who has
lived a life of idleness, greed, and over-indulgence, who reads The
New Times, and is astonished that the government can be so unwise as to
permit Jews to enter the university. There is his guest, formerly the
governor of a province, now a senator with a big salary, who reads with
satisfaction that a congress of lawyers has passed a resolution in favor
of capital punishment. Their political enemy, N. P., reads a liberal
paper, and cannot understand the blindness of the government in allowing
the union of Russian men to exist.

Here is a kind, gentle mother of a little girl reading a story to her
about Fox, a dog that lamed some rabbits. And here is this little girl.
During her walks she sees other children, barefooted, hungry, hunting
for green apples that have fallen from the trees; and, so accustomed is
she to the sight, that these children do not seem to her to be children
such as she is, but only part of the usual surroundings--the familiar
landscape.

Why is this?

THE YOUNG TSAR

THE young Tsar had just ascended the throne. For five weeks he had
worked without ceasing, in the way that Tsars are accustomed to work. He
had been attending to reports, signing papers, receiving ambassadors and
high officials who came to be presented to him, and revie