ives you only create new wants in them,
and new demands on their labour."

"Ach! Good heavens! But one must do something!" said Lida with
vexation, and from her tone one could see that she thought my
arguments worthless and despised them.

"The people must be freed from hard physical labour," said I. "We
must lighten their yoke, let them have time to breathe, that they
may not spend all their lives at the stove, at the wash-tub, and
in the fields, but may also have time to think of their souls, of
God--may have time to develop their spiritual capacities. The
highest vocation of man is spiritual activity--the perpetual
search for truth and the meaning of life. Make coarse animal labour
unnecessary for them, let them feel themselves free, and then you
will see what a mockery these dispensaries and books are. Once a
man recognises his true vocation, he can only be satisfied by
religion, science, and art, and not by these trifles."

"Free them from labour?" laughed Lida. "But is that possible?"

"Yes. Take upon yourself a share of their labour. If all of us,
townspeople and country people, all without exception, would agree
to divide between us the labour which mankind spends on the
satisfaction of their physical needs, each of us would perhaps need
to work only for two or three hours a day. Imagine that we all,
rich and poor, work only for three hours a day, and the rest of our
time is free. Imagine further that in order to depend even less
upon our bodies and to labour less, we invent machines to replace
our work, we try to cut down our needs to the minimum. We would
harden ourselves and our children that they should not be afraid
of hunger and cold, and that we shouldn't be continually trembling
for their health like Anna, Mavra, and Pelagea. Imagine that we
don't doctor ourselves, don't keep dispensaries, tobacco factories,
distilleries--what a lot of free time would be left us after all!
All of us together would devote our leisure to science and art.
Just as the peasants sometimes work, the whole community together
mending the roads, so all of us, as a community, would search for
truth and the meaning of life, and I am convinced that the truth
would be discovered very quickly; man would escape from this
continual, agonising, oppressive dread of death, and even from death
itself."

"You contradict yourself, though," said Lida. "You talk about
science, and are yourself opposed to elementary education."

"Element