We say, There have been castes, we will abolish them. But what means the fact that some men and their children work, and other men and their children do not work?
Bring a Hindu who does not know our language, and show him the Russian and the European lives of many generations, and he will recognize the existence of two important definite castes of working-people and of non-working people as they are in existence in his own country. As in his country, so also among us, the right of not working is acquired through a peculiar initiation which we call art and science, and education generally.
It is this education, and the perversions of reason associated with it, that have brought to us this wonderful folly, whence it has come to pass that we do not see what is so plain and certain. We are eating up the lives of our brethren, and consider ourselves to be Christians, humane, educated, and quite in the right.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
What is to be done? What must we do?
This question, which includes acknowledgment of the fact that our life is bad and unrighteous, and at the same time hints that there is no possibility of changing it,—this question I hear everywhere, and therefore I chose it for the title of my work.
I have described my own sufferings, my search, and the answer which I have found to this question.
I am a man like others; and if I distinguish myself from an average man of my own circle in any thing, it is chiefly in the fact that I, more than this average man, have served and indulged the false teaching of our world, that I have been more praised by the men of the prevalent school of teaching, and that therefore I am more depraved, and have gone farther astray, than most of my fellows.
Therefore I think that the answer to this question which I have found for myself will do for all sincere persons who will put the same question to themselves. First of all, to the question, “What is to be done?” I answer that I must neither deceive other men nor myself; that I must not be afraid of the truth, whatever the result may be.
We all know what it is to deceive other men; and notwithstanding this, we do deceive from morning to evening,—“Not at home,” when I am in; “Very glad,” when I am not at all glad; “Esteemed,” when I do not esteem; “I have no money,” when I have it, and so on.