m to see. Shall I bring a bit more bread? Give
the little lad some more?" he said addressing Darya Alexandrovna
and pointing to Grisha, who had finished his crust.

"I don't need to ask," said Sergey Ivanovitch, "we have seen and
are seeing hundreds and hundreds of people who give up everything
to serve a just cause, come from every part of Russia, and
directly and clearly express their thought and aim. They bring
their halfpence or go themselves and say directly what for. What
does it mean?"

"It means, to my thinking," said Levin, who was beginning to get
warm, "that among eighty millions of people there can always be
found not hundreds, as now, but tens of thousands of people who
have lost caste, ne'er-do-wells, who are always ready to go
anywhere--to Pogatchev's bands, to Khiva, to Serbia..."

"I tell you that it's not a case of hundreds or of
ne'er-do-wells, but the best representatives of the people!" said
Sergey Ivanovitch, with as much irritation as if he were
defending the last penny of his fortune. "And what of the
subscriptions? In this case it is a whole people directly
expressing their will."

"That word 'people' is so vague," said Levin. "Parish clerks,
teachers, and one in a thousand of the peasants, maybe, know what
it's all about. The rest of the eighty millions, like Mihalitch,
far from expressing their will, haven't the faintest idea what
there is for them to express their will about. What right have
we to say that this is the people's will?"

Chapter 16

Sergey Ivanovitch, being practiced in argument, did not reply,
but at once turned the conversation to another aspect of the
subject.

"Oh, if you want to learn the spirit of the people by
arithmetical computation, of course it's very difficult to arrive
at it. And voting has not been introduced among us and cannot be
introduced, for it does not express the will of the people; but
there are other ways of reaching that. It is felt in the air, it
is felt by the heart. I won't speak of those deep currents which
are astir in the still ocean of the people, and which are evident
to every unprejudiced man; let us look at society in the narrow
sense. All the most diverse sections of the educated public,
hostile before, are merged in one. Every division is at an end,
all the public organs say the same thing over and over again, all
feel the mighty torrent that has overtaken them and is carrying
them in one direction."

"Yes, a