portion as you are able to transfer into it the things of the future. Strive to reach it! work for it! bring it nearer to man. Transfer from it into the present all that you are able to transfer."[1]
XVI.
A year later the new union was in perfect running order. Both shops were closely connected; one shop would give the other orders when there was slack work and the other had time to fill them. A running account was kept between them. Their means proved sufficient to enable them to open a sale-shop on the Nevsky, when once they had knit the bonds between them closer still. The arrangement of this cost Viéra Pavlovna and Mertsálova a great deal of trouble. Although the two unions were friendly, although one often gave receptions to the other, although they often united for picnics out of town, still the idea of the union of accounts of two different shops was a new idea, of which it was necessary to give long and careful explanations. However, the benefit of having their own sale-shop on the Nevsky was evident, and in a few months of labor in joining the two accounts, Viéra Pavlovna succeeded in accomplishing it: on the Nevsky appeared a new sign. "Au Bon Travail: Magasin des Nouveautés." After this sale-shop was opened, the business began to increase more rapidly than before, and the profits were much larger. Mertsálova and Viéra Pavlovna already began to dream that in two years, instead of two shops, there would be four, five, and then soon ten and twenty.
Three months after the sale-shop was opened, one of Kirsánof's friends, or rather one of his acquaintances at the medical school, came to him, told him a great deal about his various medical experiences, and still more about his won-
- ↑ Comment on this epic vision is hardly necessary. But those who object to idealized socialism as presented by Tchernuishevsky must be both enchained by selfishness and the slaves of Antichrist. Only he who is selfish can wish that the best that he wishes for should not be shared by all the world; and how many millions and billions of dollars, how many lives of labor and sadness, are wasted every year because each family and each man and woman is trying vainly by himself to do what might be done better, more easily, and more happily by systematic union. The great corporations which pour useless wealth into the hoards of the few monopolists who control them, the great bazaars which are now seen in all our cities, point to what, in the future, will be the physical salvation of the world. The great hotels and flats are but the practical realization of the homes of the men and women of the future. But is Tchernuishevsky after all such a rabid radical? Is not his ideal what all men want when they pray for the coming of the kingdom of Heaven?—not the republic of Heaven, by the way.
