A Russian Troika.

Russians say, is "a city of muzhiks "-there was very little appreciation of the fact that a great man dwelt in Israel. The most appreciative answer which I ever received from a muzhik was that "he is a good barin." This peasant had read "War and Peace" and also a little pamphlet by the Count on sobriety, which he condemned on the excellent ground, "Yes, but Gosudar Imperator drinks champagne." Among most of the muzhiks there was a singular unanimity of suspicious fear. Some condemned him as a besbozhnik or atheist, and others told the most absurd stories as to his relations with the Government, one informing me coolly that he was paid by the' authorities to encourage military service. In short, the great mass seemed utterly ignorant of everything except Tolstoy's name and his practice of wearing peasant's clothes.

There is no doubt that this lack of influence, combined with his celebrity abroad, accounts largely for the indulgence with which Tolstoy is treated by the Russian Government. As a philosopher Tolstoy has certainly more disciples in the s nallest of European states than in h: own great country. From practical Tolstoyism the Russian Government has hitherto had little to fear. Anti-militarism is really the only applicable part of his teaching, and the anti-military sects of Russia are much older than Tolstoy, and in no way traceable to him, though he has certainly gained them much moral support by his writings in the foreign press. It is a very strange thing, and quite characteristic of Europe's outlook on Russia, that these sects are encouraged in countries where military service, and war taxes, which Tolstoy himself regards as precisely the same thing, are obligatory. The Russian Government, says Tolstoy, is entitled to the severest condemnation for upholding conscription, but this condemnation is equally deserved by every other

country, whether it maintains a conscript or a volunteer army. But having once established conscription, Tolstoy recognised that it is an absurdity for Westerners to condemn the Russian Government for refusing to recognise conscientious objections, no such objections being listened to for a moment in any other country. Tolstoy sees this more keenly than most persons, and pays scant attention to expressions of sympathy coming from abroad. There is no doubt whatever that his employment of the foreign press is dictated solely by the lack of publicity in Russia, and not from any expectation of sincere sympathy from abroad.

Tolstoy's influence certainly has tended to increase abroad; why has it not increased commensurately in his own country? The novelty and uncompromising character of his doctrines, when stated in the abstract, have attracted foreigners. But in Russia the novelty is not so great. Tolstoy is not a pioneer in Russia. The democratic faith in the people which, rather than Christianity, is the practical basis of his gospel, is many years older than Tolstoy. The great Russian social movement of the middle of last century, of which Tolstoy is but the heritor, produced a host of enlightened men and women such as he, who succeeded in doing for a time what he has done for a lifetime-in undergoing the process of oprostchenie, becoming first of all simple. These people were as well aware as Tolstoy that only through simplicity they could make themselves one with the people, and that only by sharing the burdens of their lives could they lift up out of the dust a people to whom all appeals from above would have been addressed in vain. Turgenieff, the historian of the movement, shows us how this movement, ended in disillusion and disenchantment. It was too ardent to last, and too little in accord with actuality to succeed even for a time. Turgenieff's dreamer of high dreams, who could find community with the muzhiks only by drinking himself to intoxication in their company, was a characteristic type. Even the practical Bazarof, who admitted no dreams and no ideals, found that the muzhik could not understand his language. The emulators of Turgenieff's heroes in real life had no more success. Suicide, Siberia, and expatriation were the ends of most. But the first ardour of this reforming movement had been exhausted before Tolstoy came under its influence, and the one Russian who succeeded in showing how far identification with the people was practicable has therefore had few imitators in his own country. Abroad, on the other hand, the so-called Tolstoyan doctrine is new, and there is no country in Europe which has not its little circle of adherents.

He

It is very remarkable that Tolstoy should have succeeded so far where his predecessors had failed. came of a family whose habits, we are told, were so luxurious that his grandfather sent his linen to be washed in Holland; his education was unfavourable; he was hampered by family attachments, and he began to change his views at a time when the old ardour for selfsacrifice had been killed by failure and disenchantment. Moreover, as a practical man, he had always a clea idea of the limitations of Russian popular life. The real explanation of his success seems to be that he was never led away by reformatory zeal. He had taken the peasant Sutayeff as a model and master himself, and he regarded the peasant's life not as something to be raised and lifted up to his own level, but as an ideal already materialised. The earlier reformers had regarded the Russian peasantry as so much valuable raw material, which would display its true value when

impregnated with revolutionary moral and political ideas. Tolstoy never had anything to do with revolution; and in morals he found a better standard among the peasants than anywhere else. He was convinced that culture had nothing to do with morality, and he became therefore a pupil rather than a master in the great peasant school. He found there, more than in any other class, his own indispensable trinity of moral attributes-purity, humility, and love. So he respected the people not for what they might become, but for what they were.

It is plainly this which differentiates Tolstoy from the hundreds of other educated Russians who devote their lives to the people, and earn in return nothing better than the reputation of "characters," and the benevolent con-. tempt of peasants who do not understand them, and whom they do not understand. But Tolstoy found not only his ethical but also his æsthetic doctrines realised among the people. The common life, he says, is not only the basis of all true morals, but of all true art. What cannot be understood by the simplest, he argues again and again, is not true art. Art requires no commentary; it is infective in its nature, and if it is not it is not true art. It is a "means of communion," 33 66 a condition of human life." The remark made by another celebrated Russian, that Turgenieff's "Recollections of a Sportsman "had exhausted the life of the people, awakened his wrath, and he asked indignantly :

"The life of the people exhausted?-the life of the people with its manifold labours, its dangers on sea and land, its relations with employers, leaders, companions, with men of other faiths and nationalities, its travels, its struggles with Nature, with wild beasts, its relations to domestic animals, all the problems of life for self and family-all these interests, all permeated with religious sentiments. . . . . is this to be regarded as exhausted, and to make way for descriptions of how one hero kissed his lady's hand, another her arm, a third in some other way-is this to be given up for that other art whose only objects are to flatter pride, dissipate ennui, and develop eroticism?"

This is not art, he says. As the life of the people is the best of all lives, the art which the people create, and which is created by students and imitators of the people, is the best of all art. Tolstoy's ideas of art and morals are thus complementary and mutually indispensable, and his productiveness as an artist, in the sense understood by himself, is multiplied by his mode of life. The work which he does in the fields, his long tramps from village to village, his visits to night-refuges and prisons, his teaching of peasants at his country home, his stories and fables written specially for the people, his popular works on science and on morals, not only form a part of what he regards as the ideal life, but a part also of the necessary equipment of the true artist. It is from intercourse with the people also that he has acquired his peculiarly vigorous style, and the rich and picturesque language which he pours forth in such torrents when provoked into a heated discussion.

Yet it would be untrue to say that Tolstoy as a teacher enjoys a wide influence among any Russian class. What' the future will do with his doctrines no one can say. At present the masses of the Russian people are far too susceptible to mystical emotions to find any attraction in a rationalistic guide still in the flesh. But if they remain in their present state of culture, fifty years hence they will be quite capable of reviving Tolstoyism as a religious cult, with its founder endowed with supernatural attributes somewhere in the background, and around his name a great tangle of traditions which Tolstoy would regard with

horror. Meantime Tolstoy as a man, in his immediate circle, enjoys much greater honour than as a prophet in a wider sphere.

But if Tolstoy is not a great influence in Russia, what is his value as a representative of Russian ideas? The first thing notable is that his philosophy, even although he finds its germs more widespread in Russia than anywhere else, is a general human philosophy in its application, and is even more generally comprehensible than his art. Yet Tolstoy is really a very faithful representative of Russian life. If Tolstoy has never made a Russian sect, the Russian sects have made Tolstoy. He is a pupil, not a teacher, in his own country. It is only abroad that Tolstoy stands as a revolutionary apostle of novel moral ideas. His relation to his own countrymen is that he expresses, divested of mysticism, the practical religion which animates a large proportion of Russian sectarians, Dukhobortsi, Molokani, Stundists and Vagabonds. How far he is right in declaring that the masses of his countrymen are informed by the same spirit is another question. And even if he is right in this, is he right in regarding racial conditions as the determining factor, and not merely a low state of culture? Either view seems to strike at the general applicability of his doctrines. If the Russian peasant is really the spiritual salt of the earth by history and race, what of the other races? If he is merely a better man because he leads a primitive life, what of his future, and what of the future of the advanced races? For Tolstoy is no dreamer, and he knows very well that the machine even of "false civilisation" cannot. be stopped. The answers to these questions put to Tolstoy the practical man, are given by Tolstoy the academic thinker, who replies that consequences matter nothing, as they mattered nothing to the preacher of asceticism in "The Kreuzer Sonata." Let each man settle with his own conscience. The rest may perish.

upon that capital will have to be remitted in some way or other to the United States. The Americans are producing everything they want themselves, but what is it that we can give them in exchange for their goods? It is nonsense to say that we have to pay for it in gold, because there is not gold enough in the country for any such purpose, and the question which puzzles some people is how much longer it will be possible for business to be carried on between a country which has more than enough of everything that it wants and another country which has nothing which it can sell in the American market. To this there is one answer, and a very unpleasant one-to wit, that although the Americans may no longer take our steel or our copper or our coals, they will buy up England itself-or rather, to use the phrase, they will pick out the eyes of England and take them in exchange for their superabundance of natural commodities. Already we see this process going on in the purchases of the famous country seats in the old country by wealthy Americans. Mr. Astor, by the might of his millions, supplants the Duke of Westminster at Cleveland. Mr. Carnegie establishes himself at Skibo. Mr. Phipps, of the Carnegie firm, succeeds Lord Lytton at Knebworth; and even Mr. Croker establishes himself in his modest retreat in King Alfred's, Wantage. As it is with palaces and castles, so it is likely to be in an ever-increasing ratio with titles and all manner of bric-àbrac. If we produce from field, factory or mine nothing which the Americans care to take in exchange for their commodities, we have a few crowns and coronets left in the Old World, and it will take some time before all the treasure trove of centuries goes up the spout to pay our debts to the New World.

[May 18.

persistence. The American papers which announced the transit of the Leyland line to Pierpont Morgan and his colossal combination, maliciously headed the news with the title, "England selling off!" There is just sufficient truth in the matter to make some of us a little uneasy. Sir Robert Giffen has been administering consolation to the Institute of Bankers; but although he said a great many things which were very true and very sensible, he did not quite meet the point, which is this: The United States send us every year an enormous excess of goods, wheat, cotton, beef, over and above the quantity that was needed to pay for the exports from this country. All international commerce is a matter of barter. Nations do not pay for their purchases from one another in gold. They exchange commodities. Specie is but the small change which is employed to balance up the accounts. If the United States export to this country goods valued at £100,000,000 sterling, in excess of the value of the British goods exported to the United States, this represents two things; first, the interest upon British capital invested in the United States; and secondly, freight and profit. The balance of trade which the Americans exultantly declare is so much in their favour, is in reality but a payment of tribute to the great creditor nation of the world. Sir Robert Giffen's figures seem to show that there is no diminution of the volume of British capital invested in the United States. At one time there seemed some ground for the suggestion that the enormous excess of American imports into this country represented the paying-off of American debts, the return on capital which we had in previous years invested in American railways and other industries; but according to Sir Robert Giffen the increase of the annual assessments of the income tax, amounting to 20 per cent. or £128,000,000 in ten years, does not imply that our investments abroad have been diminished. So far so good, but the question arises how long this can` be kept up. American capital is now coming over here to be invested in British enterprises, and interest