ot one to kick against it all. Think of the people who go to the
market for food: during the day they eat; at night they sleep, talk
nonsense, marry, grow old, piously follow their dead to the cemetery;
one never sees or hears those who suffer, and all the horror of life
goes on somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is quiet, peaceful, and
against it all there is only the silent protest of statistics; so many
go mad, so many gallons are drunk, so many children die of
starvation.... And such a state of things is obviously what we want;
apparently a happy man only feels so because the unhappy bear their
burden in silence, but for which happiness would be impossible. It is a
general hypnosis. Every happy man should have some one with a little
hammer at his door to knock and remind him that there are unhappy
people, and that, however happy he may be, life will sooner or later
show its claws, and some misfortune will befall him--illness, poverty,
loss, and then no one will see or hear him, just as he now neither sees
nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer, and the happy go on
living, just a little fluttered with the petty cares of every day, like
an aspen-tree in the wind--and everything is all right.'

"That night I was able to understand how I, too, had been content and
happy," Ivan Ivanich went on, getting up. "I, too, at meals or out
hunting, used to lay down the law about living, and religion, and
governing the masses. I, too, used to say that teaching is light, that
education is necessary, but that for simple folk reading and writing is
enough for the present. Freedom is a boon, I used to say, as essential
as the air we breathe, but we must wait. Yes--I used to say so, but now
I ask: 'Why do we wait?'" Ivan Ivanich glanced angrily at Bourkin. "Why
do we wait, I ask you? What considerations keep us fast? I am told that
we cannot have everything at once, and that every idea is realised in
time. But who says so? Where is the proof that it is so? You refer me to
the natural order of things, to the law of cause and effect, but is
there order or natural law in that I, a living, thinking creature,
should stand by a ditch until it fills up, or is narrowed, when I could
jump it or throw a bridge over it? Tell me, I say, why should we wait?
Wait, when we have no strength to live, and yet must live and are full
of the desire to live!

"I left my brother early the next morning, and from that time on I found
it impo