with them, was struck by the hatred that animated them; they no longer, as before, saw the rich as “people who save their souls by distributing alms, but as bandits, brigands, who drink the blood of the labouring people.” Many were educated men, ruined, on the brink of that despair which makes a man capable of anything.
“It is not in the deserts and the forests, but in slums of cities and on the great highways that the barbarians are reared who will do to modern civilisation what the Huns and Vandals did to the ancient civilisation.”
So said Henry George. And Tolstoy adds:
“The Vandals are already here in Russia, and they will be particularly terrible among our profoundly religious people, because we know nothing of the curbs, the convenances and public opinion, which are so strongly developed among European peoples.”
Tolstoy often received letters from these rebels, protesting against his doctrine of non-resistance to evil, and saying that the evil that the rulers and the wealthy do to the people can only be replied to by cries of “Vengeance! Vengeance! Vengeance!” Did Tolstoy still condemn them? We do not know. But when, a few days later, he saw in his own village the villagers weeping while their sheep and their samovars were seized and taken from them by callous authorities, he also cried vengeance in vain against these thieves, “these ministers and their acolytes, who are engaged in the brandy traffic, or in teaching men to murder, or condemning
