e sensitive people in
our ranks to enjoy our good fortune in peace.

This is what I propose: (1) That all our directors and enumerators should
join to their business of the census a task of assistance,--of work in
the interest of the good of these people, who, in our opinion, are in
need of assistance, and with whom we shall come in contact; (2) That all
of us, directors and enumerators, not by appointment of the committee of
the City Council, but by the appointment of our own hearts, shall remain
in our posts,--that is, in our relations to the inhabitants of the town
who are in need of assistance,--and that, at the conclusion of the work
of the census, we shall continue our work of aid. If I have succeeded in
any degree in expressing what I feel, I am sure that the only
impossibility will be getting the directors and enumerators to abandon
this, and that others will present themselves in the places of those who
leave; (3) That we should collect all those inhabitants of Moscow, who
feel themselves fit to work for the needy, into sections, and begin our
activity now, in accordance with the hints of the census-takers and
directors, and afterwards carry it on; (4) That all who, on account of
age, weakness, or other causes, cannot give their personal labor among
the needy, shall intrust the task to their young, strong, and willing
relatives. (Good consists not in the giving of money, it consists in the
loving intercourse of men. This alone is needed.)

Whatever may be the outcome of this, any thing will be better than the
present state of things.

Then let the final act of our enumerators and directors be to distribute
a hundred twenty-kopek pieces to those who have no food; and this will be
not a little, not so much because the hungry will have food, but because
the directors and enumerators will conduct themselves in a humane manner
towards a hundred poor people. How are we to compute the possible
results which will accrue to the balance of public morality from the fact
that, instead of the sentiments of irritation, anger, and envy which we
arouse by reckoning the hungry, we shall awaken in a hundred instances a
sentiment of good, which will be communicated to a second and a third,
and an endless wave which will thus be set in motion and flow between
men? And this is a great deal. Let those of the two thousand
enumerators who have never comprehended this before, come to understand
that, when going about among the