more elevated sphere,
education means all this with the addition of the English language, and a
diploma from the highest educational institution. But education is
precisely the same thing in the first, the second, and the third case.
Education consists of those forms and acquirements which are calculated
to separate a man from his fellows. And its object is identical with
that of cleanliness,--to seclude us from the herd of poor, in order that
they, the poor, may not see how we feast. But it is impossible to hide
ourselves, and they do see us.

And accordingly I have become convinced that the cause of the inability
of us rich people to help the poor of the city lies in the impossibility
of our establishing intercourse with them; and that this impossibility of
intercourse is caused by ourselves, by the whole course of our lives, by
all the uses which we make of our wealth. I have become convinced that
between us, the rich and the poor, there rises a wall, reared by
ourselves out of that very cleanliness and education, and constructed of
our wealth; and that in order to be in a condition to help the poor, we
must needs, first of all, destroy this wall; and that in order to do
this, confrontation after Siutaeff's method should be rendered possible,
and the poor distributed among us. And from another starting-point also
I came to the same conclusion to which the current of my discussions as
to the causes of the poverty in towns had led me: the cause was our
wealth.] {108}

CHAPTER XV.

I began to examine the matter from a third and wholly personal point of
view. Among the phenomena which particularly impressed me, during the
period of my charitable activity, there was yet another, and a very
strange one, for which I could for a long time find no explanation. It
was this: every time that I chanced, either on the street on in the
house, to give some small coin to a poor man, without saying any thing to
him, I saw, or thought that I saw, contentment and gratitude on the
countenance of the poor man, and I myself experienced in this form of
benevolence an agreeable sensation. I saw that I had done what the man
wished and expected from me. But if I stopped the poor man, and
sympathetically questioned him about his former and his present life, I
felt that it was no longer possible to give three or twenty kopeks, and I
began to fumble in my purse for money, in doubt as to how much I ought to
give, and I always ga