“Science, in so far as it describes and clarifies the real state of things, does a useful and necessary work. But as soon as it starts laying down programmes for the future, it becomes useless. All these ideas about an eight-hour working day, etc., only increase and legalize the evil. Labour must be free, not slavish, and that is all.
“When a peasant gets up before sunrise and works all day long in the field, he is not a slave. He has intercourse with nature, he does a useful work. But when he stands by a piece of machinery in a Morosov’s factory all his life long, manufacturing textiles which he will never see, and neither himself nor any one of his people will ever use, then he is a slave and perishes in slavery.
“Railways, telephones, and the other accessories of the civilized world—all that is useful and good. But if one had to choose either the whole of this civilization, for which not hundreds of thousands of ruined lives are required, but only the certain destruction of one single existence, or, on the other hand, no civilization at all, then no thank you for this civilization with its railways and telephones, if a necessary condition of them is the destruction of human life.”
February 24th. On the 18th and 20th I was at the Tolstois’. On the 18th Tolstoi went to the “Pod Deviche” playhouse and afterwards to a dirty public-house, where there is an extraordinary amount of drunkenness and debauchery, to make observations.
Tolstoi said:
“Twenty years ago I saw at the ‘Pod Deviche,’ Churkin, a play composed by a drunken tramp, and this time I saw Stenka Rasin—and it is all the same thing. Murder and violence are represented as heroic and are acclaimed by the crowd. And it is remarkable that whilst every word in a book which may enlighten the minds of the people is carefully struck out by the censorship, such performances are readily allowed, under the police inspector’s censorship. During the last twenty years probably over a million people have seen these Churkins and Rasins.”
In telling this, Tolstoi recollected how he was once in a workhouse where the priest explained the Gospels:
“The passage was read where Christ says: ‘It is said: thou shalt not kill; but I say unto you, do not be angry without cause.’ The priest began to explain that one must not be angry without cause, but, if the authorities become angry, that is right and as it should be. ‘Do not kill’ also does not mean that one should never kill. In war or at an execution, killing is necessary and is not a sin. This is the only chance that an illiterate person has to understand the meaning of the Gospels, for in church all the chapters are either indistinctly read by the sexton, or shouted so loud that they are perfectly unintelligible—and this is the way in which the Gospels are explained to the people!”
A long talk about the Boers and the English took place.