Mark, by my order, is at liberty to go immediately, with his wife, where he likes; and I beg you (1) to compensate him for the three-and-a-half months he has been illegally kept at work by you since the Decree was published, and (2) for the blows still more illegally inflicted on his wife. If my decision displeases you, you have a right of appeal to the Magistrates' Sessions and to the Government Sessions. I shall not enter into further explanations on this subject.--With entire respect I have the honour to remain, your humble servant, C^{t.} L. TOLSTOY. The lady appealed to the Magistrates' Sessions, and Tolstoy's decision was annulled; but on the case being carried to the Government Sessions, his view of the case prevailed. Before he had been a year in office we find him writing to the Government of the Toúla Board of Peasant Affairs as follows: As the complaints [here follows a list of several cases] lodged against my decisions have no legal justification, but yet in these and many other cases my decisions have been and are being repealed, so that almost every decision I give is subsequently reversed; and as under such conditions--destructive both of the peasants' and the landowners' confidence in the Arbiter--the latter's activity becomes not merely useless but impossible, I humbly request the Government Board to authorise one of its members to hasten the examination of the above-mentioned appeals, and I have to inform the Government Board that until such investigations are completed I do not consider it proper that I should exercise the duties of my office, which I have, therefore, handed over to the senior Candidate. The following month he resumed official work, but six weeks later, on 30th April 1862, on the score of ill-health, he handed the duties over to a substitute; and on 26th May--about a year after he had first assumed the office--the Senate informed the Governor of Toúla that it 'had decided to discharge the Lieutenant of Artillery, Count Leo Tolstoy, on the ground of ill-health' from the post of Arbiter of the Peace. His unsatisfactory experience of administrative work no doubt helps to account for the anti-Governmental bias shown in his later works. Even at this time, he quite shared the dislike of civil and criminal law expressed by Rousseau when he wrote in his _Confession_: The justice and the inutility of my appeals left in my mind a germ of indignation against our stupid civil institutions, in which the true welfare of the public, and veritable justice, are always sacrificed to I know not what apparent order, really destructive of all order, and which merely adds the sanction of public authority to the oppression of the weak and the iniquity of the strong.