Political events in Russia more and more grieved and distressed him. The Revolutionary Executive Committee condemned Alexander II to death, and carried out their sentence. This event shook the whole nation. Tolstoy was horrified by the crime but he profoundly pitied the criminals; he addressed an open letter to the new emperor, Alexander III, imploring him in the name of Christ to forgive the culprits, and declaring that the only way to Russia's salvation lay in following the precepts of Jesus; the other possible methods--cruel repression and liberal reforms--had both been tried and found wanting. No answer was made, and the regicides were put to death. Throughout Tolstoy's later work we perceive a horror of violence in all its forms, whether legal or illegal: to him all violent death is murder, and, no matter whether it is inflicted by the sentence of revolutionary committees or by the sentence of the law, it is equally criminal. Tolstoy went for a time to reside in Moscow, and was, more than ever, startled and dismayed by the great contrasts between the extremes of poverty and of wealth. In 1882 a census was taken; Tolstoy volunteered his help, and was thus enabled to plumb to the very depths the miseries of Moscow. A full account of this census is given in the book entitled _What to Do?_ It is a most clear, graphic, and ruthless study of the miseries of poverty and vice; Tolstoy shows with ironic completeness the total insufficiency of charity to compete with the evil, and asks what remedies are possible. He arrives at the same conclusion as Mr. Bernard Shaw: "What is wrong with the rich is idleness; what is wrong with the poor is poverty." He shows how the honest and hard-working toiler is defrauded of his comforts because the results of his labour are appropriated to find luxuries for his masters; {33} he shows how the work of the community is distracted from the production of the necessities required by all to luxuries available only for a few and enervating even to them; moreover the rich themselves, corrupted by their idleness, spread corruption around them which disseminates itself through all classes and creates a race of idlers, parasitic upon the labour of others; the analysis of social conditions given in this little book is acute and keen.