the last forty years in Europe, and for the last ten years with us
here in Russia, millions of books and pictures and song-books have been
distributed, and stalls have been opened, and the people gaze and sing
and receive spiritual nourishment, but not from us who have undertaken to
provide it; while we, justifying our idleness by that spiritual food
which we are supposed to furnish, sit by and wink at it.

But it is impossible for us to wink at it, for our last justification is
slipping from beneath our feet. We have become specialized. We have our
particular functional activity. We are the brains of the people. They
support us, and we have undertaken to teach them. It is only under this
pretence that we have excused ourselves from work. But what have we
taught them, and what are we now teaching them? They have waited for
years--for tens, for hundreds of years. And we keep on diverting our
minds with chatter, and we instruct each other, and we console ourselves,
and we have utterly forgotten them. We have so entirely forgotten them,
that others have undertaken to instruct them, and we have not even
perceived it. We have spoken of the division of labor with such lack of
seriousness, that it is obvious that what we have said about the benefits
which we have conferred on the people was simply a shameless evasion.

CHAPTER IV.

Science and art have arrogated to themselves the right of idleness, and
of the enjoyment of the labor of others, and have betrayed their calling.
And their errors have arisen merely because their servants, having set
forth a falsely conceived principle of the division of labor, have
recognized their own right to make use of the labor of others, and have
lost the significance of their vocation; having taken for their aim, not
the profit of the people, but the mysterious profit of science and art,
and delivered themselves over to idleness and vice--not so much of the
senses as of the mind.

They say, "Science and art have bestowed a great deal on mankind."

Science and art have bestowed a great deal on mankind, not because the
men of art and science, under the pretext of a division of labor, live on
other people, but in spite of this.

The Roman Republic was powerful, not because her citizens had the power
to live a vicious life, but because among their number there were heroic
citizens. It is the same with art and science. Art and science have
bestowed much on mankind, but not