“Freedom cannot come from the slaves. Individual slaves who have rid themselves of the yoke of slavery become in the majority of cases particularly harsh oppressors and tyrants over their late brothers. Nor can it be otherwise. How can you expect from them--harassed and tortured--anything else? It is only when we voluntarily give up the shameful use of the labour of the slaves, our brothers, that slavery will come to an end. “Science, in so far as it describes and clarifies the real state of things, does a useful and necessary work. But as soon as it starts laying down programmes for the future, it becomes useless. All these ideas about an eight-hour working day, etc., only increase and legalize the evil. Labour must be free, not slavish, and that is all. “When a peasant gets up before sunrise and works all day long in the field, he is not a slave. He has intercourse with nature, he does a useful work. But when he stands by a piece of machinery in a Morosov’s factory all his life long, manufacturing textiles which he will never see, and neither himself nor any one of his people will ever use, then he is a slave and perishes in slavery. “Railways, telephones, and the other accessories of the civilized world--all that is useful and good. But if one had to choose either the whole of this civilization, for which not hundreds of thousands of ruined lives are required, but only the certain destruction of one single existence, or, on the other hand, no civilization at all, then no thank you for this civilization with its railways and telephones, if a necessary condition of them is the destruction of human life.” _February 24th._ On the 18th and 20th I was at the Tolstois’. On the 18th Tolstoi went to the “Pod Deviche” playhouse and afterwards to a dirty public-house, where there is an extraordinary amount of drunkenness and debauchery, to make observations. Tolstoi said: “Twenty years ago I saw at the ‘Pod Deviche,’ _Churkin_, a play composed by a drunken tramp, and this time I saw _Stenka Rasin_--and it is all the same thing. Murder and violence are represented as heroic and are acclaimed by the crowd. And it is remarkable that whilst every word in a book which may enlighten the minds of the people is carefully struck out by the censorship, such performances are readily allowed, under the police inspector’s censorship. During the last twenty years probably over a million people have seen these _Churkins_ and _Rasins_.” In telling this, Tolstoi recollected how he was once in a workhouse where the priest explained the Gospels: