But in "What Then Must We Do?" he treats the usual organized dabbling in
charity as utterly preposterous: "Give away all you have or else you can
do no good." ... "If I give away a hundred thousand and still withhold
five hundred thousand, I am far from acting in the spirit of charity,
and remain a factor of social injustice and evil. At the sight of the
freezing and hungering I must still feel responsible for their plight,
and feel that since we should live in conditions where that evil can be
abstained from, it is impossible for me in the position in which I
deliberately place myself to be anything other than a source of general
evil."
It was chiefly due to the influence of two peasants, named Sutayeff and
Bondareff, that Tolstoy decided by a path of religious reasoning to
abandon "parasitical existence,"--that is, to sacrifice all prerogatives
of his wealth and station and to share the life of the lowly. He
reasoned as follows: "Since I am to blame for the existence of social
wrong, I can lessen my blame only by making myself like unto those that
labor and are heavy-laden." Economically, Tolstoy reasons from this
fallacy: If all men do not participate equitably in the menial work that
has to be performed in the world, it follows that a disproportionate
burden of work falls upon the shoulders of the more defenseless portion
of humanity. Whether this undue amount of labor be exacted in the form
of chattel slavery, or, which is scarcely less objectionable, in the
form of the virtual slavery imposed by modern industrial conditions,
makes no material difference. The evil conditions are bound to continue
so long as the instincts that make for idleness prevail over the
co-operative impulses. The only remedy lies in the simplification of
life in the upper strata of the social body, overwork in the laboring
classes being the direct result of the excessive demands for the
pleasures and luxuries of life in the upper classes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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