Extreme poverty, intensified by the pressure of the tax-gatherer and the inhuman methods of the money-lender, has a gnawing effect on a people living in an intensely rigorous climate, in miserable villages sparsely scattered over vast monotonous plains. The Russians being a sentimental people, it is natural that their forlorn condition should cause them to brood over their sad lives during the long and lonely winter nights, or that they should be driven to drown their consciousness in _vodka_. Such is the stage on which alone a character like Leo Tolstoi can become intelligible. But it is not only the powerful influences from external circumstances which give that direction to Tolstoi’s mind which Nordau insists in interpreting as a sign of degeneracy. The mode of life and the sphere of action he has adopted, in pursuance of the large and noble traits of his character, must have been powerfully conducive to his peculiar mood and ideas. Nobody who has read his works, even if only those works Nordau holds to be of the smallest literary merit and fullest of signs of degeneracy, would ever conceive the idea that Tolstoi’s mind was weak or distorted. But if this novelist had been driven to lunacy, it would have been extremely irrational to account for his mental aberration without considering the outward circumstances that would have produced it. Tolstoi’s sympathies were roused, as those of every noble-minded man would have been roused, by the miserable existence of a people who possess all the elements of a great nation. In Russia no such ways are open to the reformer as in free States. There is no Parliament, no organized political parties, no free Press. A political career is out of the question, except in the form of a consistent toadying of those in power, and of a blind obedience to those who crush the people. Any opposition to Government, or even proffered suggestions, would lead to exile in Siberia, and abruptly cut short any man’s activity. Tolstoi had therefore only two courses open to him: either to expatriate himself and to thunder forth in a foreign Press against the abuses of the Russian Government, unheard and unheeded by his own censor-ridden compatriots or to adopt the line of action he did. In the cities, where the alien element prevails, and where the scum of the Russian nation congregates, he would be out of contact with his people. His emotional nature would have revolted against the police tyranny and spying rampant in the cities, and he would soon have been landed in the clutches of the authorities. He therefore elected to live among the peasants as one of them, convinced both by his feelings and his reason that he would thus directly benefit his surroundings by his example and form that leaven by which the whole mass might in time be leavened; while his writings simultaneously appealed to those of his countrymen who read books, and those who, outside Russia, sympathize with the Russian people.