If Tolstoi’s conversion had had to do with sex matters alone, it would have had but little significance. But it was something far greater than that; it was the cry of anguish of a member of the privileged classes, who realized that his whole life, all his equipment of leisure and knowledge and power, was made out of the blood and sweat and tears of the debased masses of his Russian people. He wanted to give up his landed estates, and live as a peasant, and return to the workers what he had taken from them. But, alas, in the meantime he had raised a large family, and this family had something to say about the matter. The Countess Tolstoi had been her husband’s devoted helper, so long as he was content to remain a literary man; but when he wanted to become a prophet and a saint, she thought he was mad. She had the children to look out for, and the children, of course, wanted to grow up as their father had done, in the great world of pleasure and fashion. Tolstoi himself retired to live in a hut; he put on peasant’s clothes and spent his time cobbling shoes. He gave up his copyrights, but he could never get the courage to give up his land; so he continued to grow rich, in spite of all his agonized preachings, and the balance of his life was continuous contradiction and disharmony. In the end he could stand it no longer; he saw his children quarreling over the property, like so many birds of prey over a carcass, and so he went out from his home, with no one but his secretary. For a time no one knew where he was, and at last he was discovered, ill and dying. His flight was one of the great gestures of history, and the scenes which took place about his death-bed summed up in dramatic form all the conflicting forces of the time. Tolstoi had repudiated the Russian church as a creature of superstition and exploitation. He had gone back to primitive Christianity, and the church had excommunicated him. Now, when he was dying, they wanted to get him back, realizing that their very existence depended upon it. If they could not persuade him to confess and repent, they would lie about it, and say that he had done so, as orthodox churches have done for many other great heretics. So here were Tolstoi’s friends, mounting guard in the railroad station where he lay dying, to keep the priests and the bishops away! And here also were the police agents and spies, a swarm of vermin, prying into the affairs of every person about the death-bed, and telegraphing in panic to headquarters for instructions. When the great soul had passed on, and the body had to be moved, some students tried to sing a hymn, and there were the usual scenes of brutality to which the Russian people were accustomed.