I believe that one will not go astray in finding in the above-mentioned book against Shakespeare a prosecution at the same time of Tolstoï's campaign against the æsthetic-artistic view of life in general. His purpose is to overthrow one of the chief idols of the æsthetic cult. As far as the arguments on the moral side are concerned, he will certainly have a following. The son of a tavern-keeper, himself an actor, Shakespeare was certainly not the ideal of a gentleman. Tolstoï will, however, have difficulty in abolishing wonder at the artistic power of this most sumptuous of all geniuses. Tolstoï dealt with the influence of general opinion again in another connection. He was speaking of the mischief that the newspapers do in the world, but chose, in my opinion, a very inappropriate example of this. "During the Dreyfus case," said he, "I received at least a thousand letters from all parts of the world asking me to express an opinion. How could I have responded? Here I am in Russia; the transaction was in France. It was absolutely impossible to get a correct idea of the proceedings, for every paper reported it differently. In and of itself, what was the thing that had happened? An innocent officer had been condemned. That was an unimportant occurrence. There were much greater crimes committed by those in power. But the whole world took the alarm. Everybody had an incontrovertible conviction as to the guilt or the innocence of a man whom nobody knew, and whose judges nobody knew. A thing like that is an epidemic, not thinking." One must certainly travel a very strange and lonely road to fail to appreciate that in this very instance the press accomplished an enormous work in arousing mankind, and in showing them the danger threatening from the Jesuits. The Dreyfus affair belongs to world-history as an epoch-making event. Perhaps the deliverance of the whole white race from the octopus-like embrace of clericalism and militarism is its work. And Count Tolstoï, who regards it as his mission to fight militarism, lives through the chief battle and does not suspect it! One certainly ought not to forget that he is in Russia, where the incarceration of innocent men is an every-day affair, and that the Russian papers think they fulfil their duty to an allied nation by treating the matter from the stand-point of Méline and Marcier.