ght, or five hours at physical work, which thousands of
peasants will gladly perform for the money which I possess?" people say
to this.

The first, simplest, and indubitable result will be, that you will become
a more cheerful, a healthier, a more alert, and a better man, and that
you will learn to know the real life, from which you have hidden
yourself, or which has been hidden from you.

The second result will be, that, if you possess a conscience, it will not
only cease to suffer as it now suffers when it gazes upon the toil of
others, the significance of which we, through ignorance, either always
exaggerate or depreciate, but you will constantly experience a glad
consciousness that, with every day, you are doing more and more to
satisfy the demands of your conscience, and you will escape from that
fearful position of such an accumulation of evil heaped upon your life
that there exists no possibility of doing good to people; you will
experience the joy of living in freedom, with the possibility of good;
you will break a window,--an opening into the domain of the moral world
which has been closed to you.

"But this is absurd," people usually say to you, for people of our
sphere, with profound problems standing before us,--problems
philosophical, scientific, artistic, ecclesiastical and social. It would
be absurd for us ministers, senators, academicians professors, artists, a
quarter of an hour of whose time is so prized by people, to waste our
time on any thing of that sort, would it not?--on the cleaning of our
boots, the washing of our shirts, in hoeing, in planting potatoes, or in
feeding our chickens and our cows, and so on; in those things which are
gladly done for us, not only by our porter or our cook, but by thousands
of people who value our time?

But why should we dress ourselves, wash and comb our hair? why should we
hand chairs to ladies, to guests? why should we open and shut doors, hand
ladies, into carriages, and do a hundred other things which serfs
formerly did for us? Because we think that it is necessary so to do;
that human dignity demands it; that it is the duty, the obligation, of
man.

And the same is the case with physical labor. The dignity of man, his
sacred duty and obligation, consists in using the hands and feet which
have been given to him, for that for which they were given to him, and
that which consumes food on the labor which produces that food; and that
they should be used,