“I wonder why they have not put me into prison yet? Particularly now, after my article on ‘Patriotism.’ Perhaps they have not read it yet? It ought to be sent to them.” Tolstoi spoke again of his indifference to modern complicated music: “I tried to accustom myself to modern dissonances, but these are all a perversion of taste. A modern composer takes a musical idea, now and then even a lovely one, and twists it round and round without end or measure, combines it with other themes, and, when at last he manages to express something simple, one is ready to heave a sigh of relief and say: Thank God!” _July 4th._ Yesterday Tolstoi said to me: “Buddha says that happiness consists in doing as much good as possible to others. However strange this may seem on the face of it, yet it is true without a doubt: happiness is only possible when the struggle for personal happiness is renounced.” Then Tolstoi smiled and said: “And yet you play the piano! But certainly that is better than many other things. At any rate you need not pass sentence on any one, or commit murder.” Tolstoi said of newspapers: “At present the newspaper infection has reached its ultimate limits. All the questions of the day are artificially puffed up by the newspapers. The worst danger is that the newspapers present everything ready made, without making people stop to think about anything. A liberal Kuzminsky, or even a Koni, takes his fresh newspaper with his morning coffee, reads it, goes to his court, where he meets others who have just read the very same newspaper, and the contagion is spread!” Tolstoi went on to say: “It has suddenly become perfectly clear to me that the evil lies in regulations, _i.e._ the chief thing is not that people do wrong, but that some force others to do a wrong which is considered to be right. Hitherto not a single one even of the most extreme socialist doctrines has dispensed with compulsion. But slavery will only cease when every one is free to choose his work and the time needed for it. “People always put an end to things by asking: ‘Well; let us suppose that we have liberated the slave, what will follow next? How is it going to be done?’ I do not know how it is going to be done, but I do know that the existing order is the greatest evil, and therefore I must try to take as little part as possible in keeping it going. But what will come in place of that evil--I do not and must not know. For what reason did we, the well-to-do classes, take upon ourselves the rôle of the controllers of life? Let the freed slaves arrange things for themselves. I know only this, that it is bad to be a slave and worse still to own slaves, and therefore I must rid myself of the evil. That’s all.” Tolstoi wanted to take for the motto of his new book, _The Slavery of our Times_, Marx’s saying that since the capitalists made themselves masters of the working classes the European governments lost all shame.