- tribution of wealth is one of the greatest problems
of our civilization.
But Tolstoy says, could the meaning of renunciation, of giving up to others, be really understood, the battle would be won, and the need of force would not exist. The only crime is for man to act inhumanly to man. A change of heart is what Tolstoy pleads for, and every man and woman, he says, can do something to help, by example and having a purpose in life. "For life," he says in a letter to his son, "is a place of service, and in that service one has to suffer at times a great deal that is hard to bear, but more often to experience a great deal of joy. But that joy can only be real if people look upon their life as a service and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal affairs."
On seeing the terrible sight of capital punishment in France, Tolstoy wrote these striking words:
When I saw the head separate from the body and how
they both jumped into the box at the same moment, I understood
not with my mind but with my whole being, that
no theory of the reasonableness of our present progress
can justify this deed, and that though everybody from
the creation of the world, on whatever theory had held
it to be necessary, I know it to be unnecessary and bad,
and therefore the arbiter of what is good and evil is not
what people say and do and is not progress, but is my
heart and I.
Who is to be the judge of what is right or wrong?
asks Tolstoy, and answers, "A man's own soul." A
