The Wenatchee daily world. [volume] (Wenatchee, Wash.) 1905-1971, 1910-11-24
LEO TOLSTOY;; A CHARACTER STUDY


ed, there is still Nemesis that with
tireless feet and pitiless arm follows
every social crime and sooner or
later smites the people, as a people,
who permits such crime; that each
individual must act upon and be act
ed upon by the society of which he
is part; that all must in some de-
gree suffer for the sins of each. and
be dominated by the conditions i'm
posed by all.
Here stands out the greatness of
the man. What must have been the
wisdom and strength of character
that turned this born aristocrat, this
inheritor of unearned wealth and
privilege, from the glittering career
of courtier to become the cham
pion of the poor and distressed. But
surely there is a crying need for
such men.
For in the full blaze of the open
ing years of the twentieth century,
when every child in our schools may
know as common truths things of
which the Egyptian sages never
dreamed, when the earth has been
mapped and the stars have been
weighed; when steam and electricity
have been pressed into our service,
end science is wrestling from nature
secret after secret-it would be rea-
sonable to suppose that the conli-
tons of life for even the weakest
and most inefficient would be i'm
proved.
And yet, for all this wonderful
increase of knowledge, for all this
enormous gain of productive power.
where is the country in the civilized
world in which today there is not
want and suffering-where the
masses are not condemned to toll
that gives no leisure, and all classes
are not pursued by greed of gain
that makes life an ignoble struggle
to get and to keep?
Three thousand years of advance
from the time the Mosaic code was
promulgated and still the moan goes
up, They have made our lives bit
ter with hard bondage, in mortise
and in brick and in all manner of
hard service =" Three thousand years
of adj - land the piteous voices
of little children and the sobs of the
locked-out girl cloakmakers of Chi
cago are in the moan.
We progress and progress; We
girdle continents with iron roads and
unite cities together with meshes of
telegraph wires; each day brings
some new invention, airships and
what not-each. year marks fresh
advance-the power Of production
is increased-the avenues of ex-
change cleared and broadened. Yet
the conditions of life grow harder,
everywhere are working men and
working women harassed by care,
and haunted by the fear of want.
With swift, steady strides anu pro-
digious leaps and bounds, the power
of human hands to satisfy human
wants advances and advances, is
multiplied again and again. Yet the
struggle for mere existence is more
and more intense, and human labor
is becoming the cheapest of all
commodities. Beside glutted ware
houses human beings grow faint
with hunger and shiver with cold;
under the shadow of churches fes-
tiers the vice that is born of want.
Trace to this source the causes
that are producing want in the
midst of plenty; ignorance in the
midst of intelligence; aristocracy in
democratic America-that are CIV
ing to civilization a one-sided and
unstable development and you will
find it to be just what Tolstoy said
il was, namely, the possession by a
favored class of the natural resources
upon which and from which the
whole people must live. He said
that to permit speculation in the