more than one milliard could be collected. Well, and what of that?
Nothing. There would be still greater sin if we were to think of
distributing this money among the poor. Money is not needed. What is
needed is self-sacrificing action; what is needed are people who would
like to do good, not by giving extraneous sin-money, but by giving their
own labor, themselves, their lives. Where are such people to be found?
Here they are, walking about Moscow. They are the student enumerators. I
have seen how they write out their charts. The student writes in the
night lodging-house, by the bedside of a sick man. "What is your
disease?"--"Small-pox." And the student does not make a wry face, but
proceeds with his writing. And this he does for the sake of some
doubtful science. What would he do if he were doing it for the sake of
his own undoubted good and the good of others?

When children, in merry mood, feel a desire to laugh, they never think of
devising some reason for laughter, but they laugh without any reason,
because they are gay; and thus these charming youths sacrifice
themselves. They have not, as yet, contrived to devise any means of
sacrificing themselves, but they devote their attention, their labor,
their lives, in order to write out a chart, from which something does or
does not appear. What would it be if this labor were something really
worth their while? There is and there always will be labor of this sort,
which is worthy of the devotion of a whole life, whatever the man's life
may be. This labor is the loving intercourse of man with man, and the
breaking-down of the barriers which men have erected between themselves,
so that the enjoyment of the rich man may not be disturbed by the wild
howls of the men who are reverting to beasts, and by the groans of
helpless hunger, cold and disease.

This census will place before the eyes of us well-to-do and so-called
cultivated people, all the poverty and oppression which is lurking in
every corner of Moscow. Two thousand of our brothers, who stand on the
highest rung of the ladder, will come face to face with thousands of
people who stand on the lowest round of society. Let us not miss this
opportunity of communion. Let us, through these two thousand men,
preserve this communion, and let us make use of it to free ourselves from
the aimlessness and the deformity of our lives, and to free the condemned
from that indigence and misery which do not allow th