have read, and by so doing make it as pitiful, helpless, and perverted as yourselves.
You say you want a just organisation of life, but in fact you can exist only under an irregular, unjust organisation. Should a really just organisation be established, with no place for those who live on the labour of others, you all: landlords, merchants, doctors, professors, and lawyers, as well as factory-hands, manufacturers, workshop-owners, engineers, teachers and producers of cannons, tobacco, spirits, looking-glasses, velvet, etc., together with the members of the Government—would starve to death.
What you need is not a really just order of life: for nothing would be more dangerous for you than an order in which everyone had to do work useful to all.
Only cease to deceive yourselves: consider well the place you hold among the Russian people and what you are doing, and it will be clear to you that your struggle with the Government is the struggle of two parasites on a healthy body, and that both contending parties are equally harmful to the people. Speak, therefore, of your own interests; but do not speak for the people. Do not lie about them, but leave them in peace. Fight the Government, if you cannot refrain; but know that you are fighting for yourselves not for the people, and that in this violent struggle there is not only nothing noble or good, but that your struggle is a very stupid and harmful and, above all, a very immoral affair.
Your activity aims, you say, at making the general condition of the people better. But that the people's condition should be better, it is necessary for people themselves to be better. This is as much a truism, as that to heat a vessel of water, all the drops in it must be heated. That people may become better, it is necessary that they should turn their attention ever more and more to their inner life. But external public activity, and especially public strife, always diverts men's minds from the inner life; and therefore by perverting people, always and inevitably lowers the level of general morality, as has everywhere been the case, and as we now see most strikingly exemplified in Russia. This lowering of
