m the speaker's lips.

"Yes," went on Kostanzhoglo, "folk are always scheming to educate the
peasant. But first make him well-off and a good farmer. THEN he will
educate himself fast enough. As things are now, the world has grown
stupid to a degree that passes belief. Look at the stuff our present-day
scribblers write! Let any sort of a book be published, and at once you
will see every one making a rush for it. Similarly will you find
folk saying: 'The peasant leads an over-simple life. He ought to be
familiarised with luxuries, and so led to yearn for things above his
station.' And the result of such luxuries will be that the peasant will
become a rag rather than a man, and suffer from the devil only knows
what diseases, until there will remain in the land not a boy of eighteen
who will not have experienced the whole gamut of them, and found himself
left with not a tooth in his jaws or a hair on his pate. Yes, that is
what will come of infecting the peasant with such rubbish. But, thank
God, there is still one healthy class left to us--a class which has
never taken up with the 'advantages' of which I speak. For that we ought
to be grateful. And since, even yet, the Russian agriculturist remains
the most respect-worthy man in the land, why should he be touched? Would
to God every one were an agriculturist!"

"Then you believe agriculture to be the most profitable of occupations?"
said Chichikov.

"The best, at all events--if not the most profitable. 'In the sweat
of thy brow shalt thou till the land.' To quote that requires no
great wisdom, for the experience of ages has shown us that, in the
agricultural calling, man has ever remained more moral, more pure, more
noble than in any other. Of course I do not mean to imply that no other
calling ought to be practised: simply that the calling in question lies
at the root of all the rest. However much factories may be established
privately or by the law, there will still lie ready to man's hand all
that he needs--he will still require none of those amenities which
are sapping the vitality of our present-day folk, nor any of those
industrial establishments which make their profit, and keep themselves
going, by causing foolish measures to be adopted which, in the end,
are bound to deprave and corrupt our unfortunate masses. I myself am
determined never to establish any manufacture, however profitable,
which will give rise to a demand for 'higher things,' such as sugar
and to