[375.] At this time the emigration of the Dukhobors to Canada had not yet been accomplished. Tolstoi took an active part in the affair: he addressed various people with the request for contributions for this purpose, he carried on a correspondence with friends in England in regard to a place of settlement for the Dukhobors, he sent letters to the authorities to try to remove obstacles which were in their way, he saw agents who suggested places of settlement, he carried on a correspondence with the Dukhobors themselves, etc.
[376.] February 15, 1899, Tolstoi wrote to V. G. Chertkov: “My back hurts all the time and I am weak and I am disgusted with Resurrection, which I can’t touch.”
[377.] The retired officer addressed himself to Tolstoi with the question whether the Gospels were not against military service. Tolstoi’s answer was printed in the leaflets of The Free Press, No. 5, 1899, and in 1906 in Petrograd in the publication, Obnovlenia, No. 130 (which was confiscated).
[378.] A group of representative Swedish intellectuals addressed themselves to Tolstoi with a letter as to the means of attaining universal peace. In this letter on the one hand, they expressed the thought that universal disarmament could be attained by the surest path of each separate individual refusing to take part in military service, and on the other hand, they acknowledged that the Peace Conference fixed for The Hague at the instigation of the Russian Government was useful to the attainment of universal peace....
[379.] In the middle of February, 1898, the students of the University of Petrograd, in the form of a protest against the beating of people in the streets, decided on the day of the student holiday, February 8th, as a peaceful-minded group of students, to cease work. They were soon joined by students of other higher schools in Petrograd and later in Moscow, Kiev, Kharkov, Jurev, Odessa, Tomsk, Kazan, Riga and Novaia Alexandria. In this way the studies of several thousand men and women students were suspended. The representatives of the Moscow and Petrograd student bodies came to Tolstoi with the purpose of obtaining his opinion and sympathy for the student movement.
[380.] Sinet, an artist, who refused military service on religious grounds and was sent to the Algerian disciplinary battalion and who escaped from there. Tolstoi called Sinet the first religious Frenchman, therefore, because he was the first Frenchman he met who believed truly as he did.
[381.] In his letter to V. G. Chertkov of July 9, 1899, Tolstoi wrote, “The matter of the translations worry me. I can imagine, therefore, how they worry you. To-day I thought this: To drop all contracts with the translators and print the following in the newspaper....” Further on Tolstoi expounds the project of his letter to the newspapers, that he, in the matter of translation, decided to destroy the contracts with the publishers of the translations and to refuse the royalty of the first printing of these translations. And yet the need of the Dukhobors was so great that “having no means of employing cattle, they have hitched themselves and their wives to the plough and are ploughing with human power to till their land.” For this reason, Tolstoi drops his plan: “I ask all the publishers who will print this novel and the translators of it, as well as the readers of the novel, to remember those people for whom this publication has been begun and as far as their strength and their desire go, to help the Dukhobors by giving their mite to the Dukhobor fund in England.”
[382.] Taking no part in 1899, in the work of organising help for the famine-stricken peasants, Tolstoi directed the contributions received for this purpose from various people, to be sent to those who were occupied on the spot in giving help to the inhabitants.
[383.] Originally in English.
[384.] This thought was maintained in the book then being read by Tolstoi: Vergleichenden Uebersicht der Vier Evangelien, von S. G. Verus, Leipzig, 1897. In the letter of Biriukov of August 1, 1899, Tolstoi wrote thus about the significance of Verus’ book: “This supposition or probability is the destruction of the last suburbs which are susceptible to attacks from the enemy, so that the fortress of the moral teaching of the good, flowing not from a source which is only temporary and local, but from a totality of the whole spiritual life of humanity, be unshaken.”