spect for your present way of living.
In the town you are misunderstood and there is nobody to understand you,
because, as you know, it is full of Gogolian pig-faces. But I guessed
what you were at the picnic. You are a noble soul, an honest,
high-minded man! I respect you and think it an honour to shake hands
with you. To change your life so abruptly and suddenly as you did, you
must have passed through a most trying spiritual process, and to go on
with it now, to live scrupulously by your convictions, you must have to
toil incessantly both in mind and in heart. Now, please tell me, don't
you think that if you spent all this force of will, intensity, and power
on something else, like trying to be a great scholar or an artist, that
your life would be both wider and deeper, and altogether more
productive?"

We talked and when we came to speak of physical labour, I expressed this
idea: that it was necessary that the strong should not enslave the weak,
and that the minority should not be a parasite on the majority, always
sucking up the finest sap, _i. e._, it was necessary that all without
exception--the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor--should share
equally in the struggle for existence, every man for himself, and in
that respect there was no better means of levelling than physical labour
and compulsory service for all.

"You think, then," said the doctor, "that all, without, exception,
should be employed in physical labour?"

"Yes."

"But don't you think that if everybody, including the best people,
thinkers and men of science, were to take part in the struggle for
existence, each man for himself, and took to breaking stones and
painting roofs, it would be a serious menace to progress?"

"Where is the danger?" I asked. "Progress consists in deeds of love, in
the fulfilment of the moral law. If you enslave no one, and are a burden
upon no one, what further progress do you want?"

"But look here!" said Blagovo, suddenly losing his temper and getting
up. "I say! If a snail in its shell is engaged in self-perfection in
obedience to the moral law--would you call that progress?"

"But why?" I was nettled. "If you make your neighbours feed you, clothe
you, carry you, defend you from your enemies, their life is built up on
slavery, and that is not progress. My view is that that is the most real
and, perhaps, the only possible, the only progress necessary."

"The limits of universal progress, which is common t