v.
Unhappily the reign of Progress was short. The bureaucratic circle
hemming in the Czar took alarm, and made haste to secure their
ascendancy by fresh measures of oppression. Many schools were closed,
including that of Tolstoy, and the nascent liberty of the Press was
stifled by the most rigid censorship.

In this lamentable manner the history of Russia's internal misrule
and disorder has continued to repeat itself for the last sixty
years, revolving in the same vicious circle of fierce repression and
persecution and utter disregard of the rights of individuals, followed
by fierce reprisals on the part of the persecuted; the voice of protest
no sooner raised than silenced in a prison cell or among Siberian
snow-fields, yet rising again and again with inextinguishable
reiteration; appeals for political freedom, for constitutional
government, for better systems and wider dissemination of education, for
liberty of the Press, and for an enlightened treatment of the masses,
callously received and rejected. The answer with which these appeals
have been met by the rulers of Russia is only too well known to the
civilised world, but the obduracy of Pharoah has called forth the
plagues of Egypt. Despite the unrivalled agrarian fertility of Russia,
famines recur with dire frequency, with disease and riot in their train,
while the ignominious termination of the Russo-Japanese war showed that
even the magnificent morale of the Russian soldier had been undermined
and was tainted by the rottenness of the authorities set over him. What
in such circumstances as these can a handful of philanthropists achieve,
and what avails alms-giving or the scattering of largesse to a people on
the point of spiritual dissolution?

In these conditions Tolstoy's abhorrence of money, and his assertion
of its futility as a panacea for human suffering, appears not merely
comprehensible but inevitable, and his renunciation of personal property
the strictly logical outcome of his conclusions. The partition of his
estates between his wife and children, shortly before the outbreak of
the great famine in 1892, served to relieve his mind partially; and
the writings of Henry George, with which he became acquainted at this
critical time, were an additional incentive to concentrate his thoughts
on the land question. He began by reading the American propagandist's
"Social Problems," which arrested his attention by its main principles
and by the clearness and nov