manner of shams, hypocrisy, and cant in the broad Carlylean sense of
those terms. To the "beautiful souls" of the older generation, who had
habitually, in conversation and literature, shed pathetic tears over the
defects of Russian social and political organisation without ever moving
a finger to correct them--especially the landed proprietors who
talked and wrote about civilisation, culture, and justice while living
comfortably on the revenues provided for them by their unfortunate
serfs--these had the strongest aversion; and this naturally led them to
condemn in strong language the worship of aesthetic culture. But here
again they fell into exaggeration. Professing extreme utilitarianism,
they explained that the humble shoemaker who practises his craft
diligently is, in the true sense, a greater man than a Shakespeare, or
a Goethe, because humanity has more need of shoes than of dramas and
poetry.

Such silly paradoxes provoked, of course, merely a smile of compassion;
what alarmed the sensible, respectable "Philistine" was the method of
cleansing the Augean stable recommended by these enthusiasts. Having
discovered in the course of their desultory reading that most of
the ills that flesh is heir to proceed directly or indirectly from
uncontrolled sexual passion and the lust of gain, they proposed to seal
hermetically these two great sources of crime and misery by abolishing
the old-fashioned institutions of marriage and private property. When
society, they argued, should be so organised that all the healthy
instincts of human nature could find complete and untrammelled
satisfaction, there would be no motive or inducement for committing
crimes or misdemeanours. For thousands of years humanity had been
sailing on a wrong tack. The great law-givers of the world, religious
and civil, in their ignorance of physical science and positivist
methods, had created institutions, commonly known as law and morality,
which were utterly unfitted to human nature, and then the magistrate
and the moralist had endeavoured to compel or persuade men and women to
conform to them, but their efforts had failed most signally. In vain
the police had threatened and punished and the priests had preached and
admonished. Human nature had systematically and obstinately rebelled,
and still rebels, against the unnatural constraint. It is time,
therefore, to try a new system. Instead of continuing, as has been done
for thousands of years, to force men