5) ... In order to wipe out one’s sin, one ought to ... repent before all the people for the deception, to say: forgive me that I have deceived you ... What a strong scene! And a true one. 6) Our art with its supplying of amusement for the rich classes, is not only similar to prostitution, but it is nothing else than prostitution. _Feb. 20. Moscow._ _To-day, Feb. 25. Moscow._ Have made no entries; corrected something. Wrote letters to-day, more than 7 letters. But I can’t write anything, although I haven’t stopped thinking about _Hadji Murad_ and _The Appeal_. _Feb. 26. Moscow. If I live._ Have made no entries for more than three weeks. To-day _March 19_. _Moscow._ Finished all my letters. During this time wrote serious letters: 1) To the American colony,[296] 2) _Peterburgskia Viedomosti_ about the Dukhobors;[297] 3) to the English papers also about the Dukhobors, and 4) a preface to the English edition _What is Art_--about the censor distortions.[298] My inner life is the same. As I foresaw, the new consciousness of life for God, for the perfection of love, has become dulled, weakened, and when I needed it, these days, it proved itself to be, if not exactly ineffectual, yet less effectual than I expected. The principal event during this time was the permission to the Dukhobors to emigrate. _What is Art?_ seems to me to be entirely finished now. ... I have worked very little during all this time. I made rather many notes; I shall try to write them out: 1) One of the greatest errors in summing up a man, is that we call, we define a man as intelligent, stupid, good, evil, strong, weak. But man is everything, all possibilities, is a flowing matter.[299] This is a good theme for an artistic work and a very important one and a good one, because it destroys malicious judging--“the cancer”--and assumes the possibility of everything good. The workers of the devil, convinced of the presence of bad in man, achieve great results: superstition, capital punishment, war. The workers of God would attain greater results, if they believed more in the possibility of good in people. 2) They want to become the masters of China--the Russians, Japan, England, the Germans: there are quarrels, diplomatic struggles, there will even be military ones. And all this is only for the mixing of the yellow race into one Christian batter, the propagating and the assimilating of ideas like the Crusades and the Napoleonic wars. 3) Lebon writes: “Not only are they going to make food in laboratories, but there will be no need for labour.” People have so badly distributed their two functions, food and labour, that instead of joy, these functions are a torture to them and therefore they want to be freed from them. It is just the same as if people would so pervert their functions of perspiration and breathing, that they would seek a way of changing them by an artificial method.