cter
of the investigation of a hopelessly sick person, but may have the
character of healing and restoration to health. For the occasion is
unique: eighty energetic, cultivated men, having under their orders two
thousand young men of the same stamp, are to make their way over the
whole of Moscow, and not leave a single man in Moscow with whom they have
not entered into personal relations. All the wounds of society, the
wounds of poverty, of vice, of ignorance--all will be laid bare. Is
there not something re-assuring in this? The census-takers will go about
Moscow, they will set down in their lists, without distinction, those
insolent with prosperity, the satisfied, the calm, those who are on the
way to ruin, and those who are ruined, and the curtain will fall. The
census-takers, our sons and brothers, these young men will behold all
this. They will say: "Yes, our life is very terrible and incurable," and
with this admission they will live on like the rest of us, awaiting a
remedy for the evil from this or that extraneous force. But those who
are perishing will go on dying, in their ruin, and those on the road to
ruin will continue in their course. No, let us rather grasp the idea
that science has its task, and that we, on the occasion of this census,
have our task, and let us not allow the curtain once lifted to be
dropped, but let us profit by the opportunity in order to remove the
immense evil of the separation existing between us and the poor, and to
establish intercourse and the work of redressing the evil of unhappiness
and ignorance, and our still greater misfortune,--the indifference and
aimlessness of our life.

I already hear the customary remark: "All this is very fine, these are
sounding phrases; but do you tell us what to do and how to do it?" Before
I say what is to be done, it is indispensable that I should say what is
not to be done. It is indispensable, first of all, in my opinion, in
order that something practical may come of this activity, that no society
should be formed, that there should be no publicity, that there should be
no collection of money by balls, bazaars or theatres; that there should
be no announcement that Prince A. has contributed one thousand rubles,
and the honorable citizen B. three thousand; that there shall be no
collection, no calling to account, no writing up,--most of all, no
writing up, so that there may not be the least shadow of any institution,
either governmenta