the purpose of enjoying it we go to the city, to
the place where nothing is produced and where every thing is swallowed
up.

The industrious poor man, who is robbed in order that the rich may
possess this inexhaustible ruble, yearns for the city in his train; and
there he also takes to sharp practices, and either acquires for himself a
position in which he can work little and receive much, thereby rendering
still more oppressive the situation of the laboring classes, or, not
having attained to such a position, he goes to ruin, and falls into the
ranks of those cold and hungry inhabitants of the night-lodging houses,
which are being swelled with such remarkable rapidity.

I belong to the class of those people, who, by divers tricks, take from
the toiling masses the necessaries of life, and who have acquired for
themselves these inexhaustible rubles, and who lead these unfortunates
astray. I desire to aid people, and therefore it is clear that, first of
all, I must cease to rob them as I am doing. But I, by the most
complicated, and cunning, and evil practices, which have been heaped up
for centuries, have acquired for myself the position of an owner of the
inexhaustible ruble, that is to say, one in which, never working myself,
I can make hundreds and thousands of people toil for me--which also I do;
and I imagine that I pity people, and I wish to assist them. I sit on a
man's neck, I weigh him down, and I demand that he shall carry me; and
without descending from his shoulders I assure myself and others that I
am very sorry for him, and that I desire to ameliorate his condition by
all possible means, only not by getting off of him.

Surely this is simple enough. If I want to help the poor, that is, to
make the poor no longer poor, I must not produce poor people. And I
give, at my own selection, to poor men who have gone astray from the path
of life, a ruble, or ten rubles, or a hundred; and I grasp hundreds from
people who have not yet left the path, and thereby I render them poor
also, and demoralize them to boot.

This is very simple; but it was horribly hard for me to understand this
fully without compromises and reservations, which might serve to justify
my position; but it sufficed for me to confess my guilt, and every thing
which had before seemed to me strange and complicated, and lacking in
cleanness, became perfectly comprehensible and simple. But the chief
point was, that my way of life, arising from