In an article, published a few years ago in the _North American Review_, Tolstoy spoke of a group of peasants standing aside to let a picknicking party of rich folks drive by. One of the ladies' hats "has cost more than the horse with which the peasant plows the field," and for the gentleman's riding stick has been paid a week's wages of an underground workman. "Everywhere, two or three men in a thousand live so that, doing nothing for themselves, they eat and drink in one week what would have fed hundreds for a year; they wear garments costing thousands of dollars; they live in palaces, where thousands of workmen could have been housed; and they spend upon their caprices the fruits of thousands and tens of thousands of working days. The others, sleepless and unfed, labor beyond their strength, ruining their moral and physical health for the benefit of these few chosen ones." It is natural that the rich should not object to this arrangement, said he, the surprising thing is that the poor take it so complacently. "Why do all these men, strong in physical vigor, and in the habit of labor--the enormous majority of humanity--why do they submit to and obey a handful of feeble men, generally incapable of anything?" Tolstoy finds the answer very simple. It is because the minority have money, and the workingmen need the money to feed their families. Millions of workingmen submit "because one man has usurped the factory, another the land, and a third the taxes collected from the workmen." Were the millions, who now slave for the rich, to get their food from the soil, the rich, to keep alive, would be obliged to raise their own food, and the double redemption would have begun. It is because the number of workers who produce the prime necessities of life is diminishing that the number of those who use luxuries is increasing. Under such conditions, the health of society, wrote he, is as little possible as is the health of that person, whose body is continually growing heavier in weight, and his legs are continually growing thinner and weaker. When the support vanishes the body must fall.[4] [4] See also his book "_What To Do?_" and his essay "_The Russian Revolution_." His Remedy.