owners, feeling their guilt, endeavour to redeem it by renting their land to the peasants on more lenient conditions, by selling it through the peasant banks, by arranging schools for the people, ridiculous houses of recreation, magic lantern lectures, and theatres.
Exactly the same also is the indifferent attitude of the Government to the question. And as then the question was solved, not by those who invented artful devices for the alleviation and improvement of the condition of peasant life, but by those who, recognising the urgent necessity of the right solution, did not postpone it indefinitely, did not foresee special difficulties in it, but immediately, straight off, endeavoured to arrest the evil and did not admit the idea that there could be conditions in which evil once recognised must continue, but took that course which under the existing conditions appeared the best—the same now also with the land question.
The question will be solved, not by those who will endeavour to mitigate the evil or to invent alleviations for the people or to postpone the task of the future, but by those who will understand that, however one may mitigate a wrong, it remains a wrong, and that it is senseless to invent alleviations for a man we are torturing and that one cannot postpone when people are suffering, but should immediately take the best way of solving the difficulty and immediately apply it in practice. And the more should it be so that the method of solving the land problem has been elaborated by Henry George to such a degree of perfection that, under the existing State organisation and compulsory taxation[1] it is impossible to invent any other
- ↑ In view of a seeming contradiction in the eyes of some readers of Tolstoy between his support of Henry George’s scheme and his simultaneous denial of all coercive State power, it is important to pay particular attention to
