We do not pretend to know Tolstoi’s secret thoughts and his ultimate hopes, but we believe it possible that he may, without being an irrational enthusiast, or even a dreamer, have reckoned on his writings and opinions reaching the highest personages in the Russian empire through being read by all the upper classes of the world. He may have hoped that, after establishing his reputation throughout the literary world, and after having become the pride of his own nation, he would one day dare to speak such words to the rulers of all the Russians as might save him and his nation. Whatever may have been his expectations, there can be little doubt that he has met with dire disappointment, not so much in his personal career as in his hopes for his fellow-countrymen. To the framers of paper constitutions and to theoretical revolutionists, it may seem easy to introduce a new form of Government and to regenerate a nation, but, to one who, like Tolstoi, is in close contact with the masses to be regenerated, who has daily experienced all the frailty of the material he has to work with, who alone tries to swim against overwhelming currents,—to him, the uplifting of a nation or a race is a herculean task impossible to approach with the clap-trap of the modern agitator. Tolstoi, finding that it is the _morale_ of the people he has to work upon, that it is in the religious tendencies of his fellow-men that their strength lies, concludes, with the full consent of his emotional being, that religious conceptions, different from the Russian orthodox Church and from the western university theology, must be the foundation on which he has to build. What therefore is more rational than that he should plunge into religious speculation, and thus expose himself to the mistake of adopting religious views which are prompted as much by the needs of the situation, the circumstances, his own and his people’s characteristics, as by logical deductions. Greater men than he—Moses, Mahomet, and others—had done so before him. Besides, as the postulates he starts from do not spring from exact knowledge, but from faith and emotion—as all religious postulates necessarily must do,—and as these, his postulates, are diametrically opposed to those which Nordau would pre-suppose, Tolstoi’s conclusions must be the opposite of his; but to differ from Nordau is to be degenerate.