"No; for you only buy the bread. It costs you no personal labor."
"But suppose I had made the bread?--I can make capital bread, only I cannot make it here where I have no conveniences; so I give the money instead."
"If you had made the bread, still you would not have raised the grain,--plowed, sowed, reaped, threshed, and ground it. It would not be your labor."
"If that is the case, then I have just done a very evil thing. I have made some caps for the Siberian exiles in the Forwarding Prison. It would have been better to let their shaved heads freeze."
"Why? You gave your labor, your time. In that time you could probably have done something that would have pleased you better."
"Certainly. But if one is to dig up the roots of one's deeds and motives, mine might be put thus: The caps were manufactured from remnants of wool which were of no use to me and only encumbered my trunk. I refused to go and deliver them myself. They were put with a lot of other caps made from scraps on equally vicious principles. And, moreover, I neither plowed the land, sowed the grass, fed the sheep, sheared him, cleansed and spun the wool, and so on; neither did I manufacture the needle for the work."
The count retreated to his former argument,--that one's personal labor is the only righteous thing which can be given to one's fellow-man; and that the labor must be given unquestioningly when asked for.
"But it cannot always be right to work unquestioningly. There are always plenty of people who are glad to get their work done for them. That is human nature."
"We have nothing to do with that," he answered. "If a man asks me to build his house or plow his field, I am bound to do it, just as I am bound to give the beggar whatever he asks for, if I have it. It is no business of mine why he asks me to do it."
"But suppose the man is lazy, or wants to get his work done while he is idling, enjoying himself, or earning money elsewhere for vodka or what not? I do not object to helping the weak, or those who do not attempt to shirk. One must use discrimination."