written to appeal to
them. He put his other labours on one side and wrote a series of
charming narratives to touch the unlettered and draw them from their
passion for _vodka_, or Russian brandy, and their harmful dissipations.
_Ivan the Fool_ was one of the first of these. The _Power of Darkness_
had an enormous popularity. The ABC books and simple versions of the
Scriptures did much to dispel sloth of mind in the {224} peasant, but
the Government did not look kindly on these efforts. To them the
progressive Count was dangerous, though he held apart from those
fanatics of the upper classes who had begun to move among the people in
the disguise of workers, that they might spread disturbing doctrines.

The police system of Russia involved a severe censorship of literature.
Yet only one allusion did Tolstoy make in his _Confessions_ to the
revolutionary movement which led young men and women to sacrifice their
homes and freedom from a belief that the section of society which they
represented had no right to prey upon the lower. Religion, he says,
had not been to them an inspiration, for, like the majority of the
educated class in Russia, they were unbelievers. Different in his
service toward God and toward Mankind was the man who had begun life by
declaring that happiness came from self-worship. He prayed, as age
came upon him, that he might find truth in that humanity which believed
very simply as others had believed of old time, but he could not be
satisfied by the practises of piety. He was tortured until he built up
that religion for himself which placed him apart from his fellows who
loved progress.

The days of persecution in the East were as terrible as in the bygone
days of western mediaeval tortures. For their social aims, men and
women were condemned to death or banishment. The dreary wastes of
Siberia absorbed lives once bright and beautiful. Known by numbers,
not by names, these dragged out a weary existence in the bitter cold of
an Arctic winter. "By order of the Tsar" they were flogged, tormented,
put in chains, and reduced to the level of animals, bereft of reason.
Fast as the spirit of freedom raised its head, it was cowed by
absolutism and the powerful machinery {225} of a Government that used
the wild Cossacks to overawe the hot theories of defenceless students.
Educated men were becoming more common among the peasants, thanks to
Tolstoy's guidance. He had shown the way to them and could no