Part 2

He blamed the schools for many of the errors that obtain in society, and claimed that there was too much education of the wrong kind, and too little of the right. In discussing this statement of his, I chanced to mention that education in the lower grades was compulsory with us. To this he strongly objected. All compulsion, he said, was wrong. Man must be gotten to do right by the law of love and not by the rule of force. Upon my telling him that but for compulsory education some parents would never send their children to school, he said: "What of it? The children would probably be no less moral and no less happy than those of highest education. I have associated with the learned and the ignorant, and I have found more honor and honesty, more fear of the Lord and more true happiness, among the unlettered than among the lettered. The more of education we cram into the heads of the people the more of the fear of God is crowded out of them. The world lives by the love of God and not by the primer or the multiplication table." "What, if you had had no education?" I ventured to ask. Quickly and feelingly came the answer "The world would have been none the worse, and I would have been the happier." "What if Jesus and the other prophets had had no schooling?" I asked. To which he replied "It was not what they got out of their schools that made them the spiritual and moral powers they became, but what they got out of their hearts. God puts more education into the human heart than man has ever been able to put into the head. Some of the wisest and best people hereabouts are peasants who have never seen the inside of a school, and who do not know one letter from another." "What of Paul," I asked, "who certainly enjoyed the benefits of the Greek schools of his day?" To which he replied "The schools made of Paul a theologian, and Christianity would have been the better without the theology of Paul."

Warped by unfavorable surroundings.

Other objections to some of his paradoxical views on education suggested themselves to me, but I left them unsaid. I perceived that while tolerant of objections, his opinions were fixed. He apparently judged of world-conditions from the view-point of his limited and unfavorable horizon. Under different conditions, some of his opinions on education, and on a number of other subjects which we discussed, would probably have been quite different.

Well informed of political and social conditions in United States.

The conversation turned to social conditions in the United States, and on these matters he displayed an amount of knowledge that was amazing. The more I listened the more I wondered, till finally I could not but ask him how he who wrote and worked so much could find time to keep himself so well informed of a country so far away as the United States. To which he replied "Your country has interested me even more than mine. I have lost hope in mine; all my hope was, at one time, centered in yours. But yours is a disappointment as much as mine. You call yourselves a Republic; you are worse than an autocracy. I say worse because you are ruled by gold, and gold is more conscienceless, and therefore, more tyrannical than any human tyrant. Your intentions are good; your execution is lamentable. Were yours the free and representative government you pretend to have, you would not allow it to be controlled by the money powers and their hirelings, the bosses and machines, as you do. I have read _Progress and Poverty_ by Henry George, and I know what Mr. Bryce says about you in his _The American Commonwealth_, and I have read and heard even worse things about your misgovernment than what they say."

Deplored rule of gold and growth of cities.

We were all right, he continued, as long as we were an agricultural people. Our modes of life, then, were simple, and our ideals were high. Politics then was a religion with us and not a matter of barter and sale. We became prosperous; prosperity brought luxury, and luxury, as always, brings corruption. The thirst of gold is upon us, and, in our eagerness to quench it and to gratify our lust of luxury, our one-time lofty principles and aspirations are dragged down and trampled in the mire. We build city upon city, and pride ourselves in making one greater than the other, and, in the mean time, we wipe out village after village, whence have come our strength and moral fibre. The price of real estate in the cities is soaring to the skies, while farms are deserted and farm-houses decay. We tempt the farmer's son and daughter from field to factory, and when we have exhausted them of their health and morals we think ourselves charitable when we prolong their miserable existence in hospitals or reformatories. We forget that our greatness lay in the pursuit of husbandry, and we seek our salvation in commerce and in the industries.

Prophesied war of classes.

With all our stupendous wealth, our slums are as bad, if not worse, as those of European cities, and we are building up a proletariat class which will some day prove our undoing. Our rich become degenerates, and our poor become desperates, and in the struggle to come the desperate will rise up and slay the degenerate. We keep things quiet by throwing crumbs of charity to those who are in need of justice more yet than they are in need of bread. Some day they will tire of crumbs, and will ask their full share of what the rich eat and have, and, if denied, they will make short work of it. Our origin and our destiny should have warned us against repeating the fatal errors of the past. But for our colossal resources, we would long since have been dashed against the rocks. We may yet save ourselves by going back to the farm, and taking up anew the life and labors of our fathers.

Disagreed, yet kept silent.

In this strain he continued for quite awhile, and the longer he spoke the sadder grew his speech and the more prophetic became his look. At length he ceased speaking, and an oppressive quiet ensued. I recognized that he was deeply moved, and I therefore did not care to contradict some of his statements which were obviously based on error. In other of his statements I fully agreed with him, yet, loyalty to my country forbade my seconding the gloomy prospect he held out for us.

Description of his relationship with wife and family.

A fortunate interruption relieved the situation. His wife approached with a letter or manuscript in hand. He arose, proceeded toward her, and, for a while, the two conferred together. In all probability it was a manuscript of his which she was translating or revising. I was told that she was always doing something of that sort. She was his consultant, his reviser, his translator, while his daughter, Tatiana, was his correspondent in a number of different languages. It is said that his wife copied twenty-one times the four large volumes of his novel _War and Peace_, and that there has been no novel nor little else of his writing, since their marriage in 1862, that did not pass through her hands. He found in her, in the fullest sense of the word, his help-mate, a woman of great culture as well of great practical sense, who looked after his literary interests no less than after those of the household, and who often found it no easy task to be, as has been well said, "the patient wife of an impatient genius." She bore him thirteen children, six of whom passed away in their early youth. She fairly idolized him and skilfully managed to slip, unknown to him, those little comforts into his life which he required for his well-being and which he had renounced. Neither she nor the children shared his view respecting the distribution among the peasantry of his estate and other property, and keeping for himself no more than an equal share with all the others. The family believed in availing themselves of the benefits of civilization, and for that they required the income of the farm and the royalty of his books. There was quite a wrangle, for a time, between the family and its head, but it was amicably disposed of in the end, the count agreeing to their living as they chose, on the condition that they permitted him to live as he pleased. And so in his Moscow home as well as in that at Yasnaya Polyana, while the family rooms are said to be comfortably furnished, his own were poorly fitted out, and while they have servants and butlers and footmen, he attended to his own wants, fetched his own water, cobbled his own shoes, and, in summer time, labored in the field, from morn to night, alongside the commonest peasant.

Description of his working room.

Stopping suddenly in his conversation with his wife, and begging us to excuse him for leaving us, I asked him whether he knew where my bag was put, as I wanted to get to my writing material for the purpose of dropping a line to the American Minister. Mr. White had feared that, not being wanted in Russia, I might get into trouble soon after leaving the protection of our embassy in St. Petersburg, and he had enjoined upon me that I keep in constant touch with him, as well as with the American consuls, while in the interior. The count informing me that my bag had been placed into his working-room, on the ground floor of the house, I had a glimpse of the room in which some of the greatest writings of our time, of all times, first saw the light of day. It was a small room with an ordinary, bare floor somewhat the worse for wear, with a vaulted ceiling, and with very thick walls that gave it the aspect of a mediaeval cloister cell. I have since read that at one time it was a storeroom, and that from the hooks in the ceiling were formerly suspended the ham supply for the family. Besides a crude writing-desk and a few chairs, there seemed to be no other furniture in the room, and its only ornaments, as far as I can recall, were some farm implements, tools, and seed bags. The desk was littered over with books and papers, and showed the kind of disorder one would expect of a genius like Tolstoy.

Favored suppression of lawyers.

Upon my return to the tree, I found the count in conversation with my companion, who told me later that upon Tolstoy's asking him what his occupation was, and upon his replying that he had graduated from the law-school of the University of Moscow, and that, owing to restrictive laws against Jews, he was not permitted to practice, the count had remarked that the government had done at least one good thing, it had diminished the number of lawyers.

Amazed at the amount of poverty in New York.

Resuming my seat alongside of him, he asked me whether it was true that New York expended as much as one hundred thousand dollars daily in public charity. I told him that it probably was true. He then returned to his discussion on the appalling contrast between the very rich and the very poor of the large cities in Europe and America. The rich, he said, would never be as rich as they are nor the poor as poor if the latter were scattered as farmers over the land. It is their congregating in large numbers in the cities, he said, that makes possible the extensive industries and commercial enterprises which enslave them, and which build up the great fortunes of the rich.

Belittled his own novels.

"Have you read my book _What To Do_?" he suddenly asked me. I was obliged to answer "No." I have read it since, and several times, and profitably, too, but, though I had read quite a number of his books before I met him, it was exceedingly embarrassing to be questioned concerning the particular book which I had not read. Not to appear altogether ignorant of his writings, I proceeded to tell him that I had read his "War and Peace," "Anna Karénina," etc., etc., and started telling him how much I admired them, when, with an impatient look and gesture, he interrupted me, saying "These works are all chaff, chaff, play-toys, amusing gilded youth and idle women. It is my serious writings which I want the world to read. I have ceased publishing novels because readers do not know the meaning of them. They look for entertainment and not instruction, and even though I write only for the uplift of man, for the purification of society, they, like the hawk, seek out only the carrion. They neither recognize themselves under the fictitious name I adopt, nor do they see their share in the wrongs and vices and injustices depicted, neither do they perceive that it is for their co-operation that the novelist appeals when he pleads for the kingdom of heaven on earth."

Spoke of his book _What To Do_.

Returning to his book _What To Do_, he said, "even if you have not read it, you have read the Prophets, and having read them, you know my teachings. The book is an appeal for pity for the submerged, for justice for the wronged, for liberation of the oppressed and persecuted, and for the application of the only remedy--a return to the simple life and labor on the soil. As our subsistence comes from the soil so can justice and right and happiness come from it alone. Help can never come from wealth, for wealth is the creator of poverty and inequality and injustice. It can not come from the government for that exists largely for the purpose of keeping up inequality and injustice. It cannot come from the church, for she fears the Czar more than she fears God. It cannot even come from the schools which tend to train a class of people who think themselves too good for manual labor."

Saw solution of Jewish problem only in agriculture.

"Your plan to lead your people back to the soil," he continued, "back to the occupation which your fathers followed with honor in Palestinian lands, is of some encouragement to me. It shows that the light is dawning. It is the only solution of the Jewish problem. Persecution, refusal of the right to own or to till the soil, exclusion from the artisan guilds, made traders of the Jew. And the world hates the trader. Make bread-producers of your people, and the world will honor those who give it bread to it."

Made a request of me.

"There is little chance at present," he continued, "for a Jewish colonization scheme in Russia. The government does not want to see the Jews rooting themselves on Russian soil, and spreads the report that they are unfit for agricultural labor, though I have been reliably informed that in the few Jewish agricultural colonies that have been tolerated on the steppes from the time of Alexander I they are as successful farmers as are the best." And he asked me as a favor that I make a special trip to those colonies and report to him, preferably in person, the result of my observations. I was only too anxious to consent to his request.

And yet another promise he asked of me, and which I gave no less cheerfully. But of this I shall speak in my next discourse.

My Visit to Tolstoy.

(_Continued._)

A DISCOURSE, AT TEMPLE KENESETH ISRAEL, BY RABBI JOSEPH KRAUSKOPF, D. D.

Philadelphia, December 25th, 1910.

RESUMÉ--_Discourse I_: Reasons for my visit to Russia and for my calling on Tolstoy. His appearance and personality. Some of his views on Russia, its statesmen, religion, misgovernment. A pause under the Poverty Tree--his burial place.

_Discourse II_: Recalled food-relief for famine-stricken in Russia from Philadelphia and from Jewish congregation in California. Admired Quakers for their opposition to war. Blamed schools for many social wrongs. Severely criticised political and economical evils of our country. Ascribed them to growth of cities and to farm-desertions. His relationship with wife and family. His working-room. Against lawyers. Belittled his novels. Spoke of his book _What To Do?_ Saw solution of Jewish problem in agriculture only.

Tolstoy suggests school for training American lads in agriculture.

At the conclusion of my last discourse I made mention of yet another request count Tolstoy made of me. It was in connection with his prediction that the Russian government would not look favorably upon my proposition to colonize Russian Jews upon unoccupied farm-lands in the interior. "If the plan cannot be entered upon in Russia," he asked, "why can it not be made successful in the United States? What are you, Americans, doing to prevent a Jewish problem in your own country? How long before the evils that are harrowing your people in the old world may be harrowing them in the new? Your people are crowding into your large cities by the thousands and tens of thousands. You have built up Ghettoes worse than those of Europe. There is excuse for it in Russia; there is no excuse for it in the United States. Yours is the right to own land and the best of it, and to till as much of it as you please. Granted that ages of enforced abstention from agricultural labor have weaned the elder generation from a love of country life and farm-labor, why may not a love for it be instilled in the young? Lead your young people to the country and to the farm. Start agricultural schools for them. Teach them to exchange the yard-stick for the hoe, the peddler's pack for the seed-bag, and you will solve the problem while it may yet be solved. You will see the lands tilled by them overflow, as of old, with milk and honey. You will see them give of their plenty to the people of the land, and receive in return goodly profit and esteem. And once again there will arise from among Jewish husbandmen prophets, lawgivers, inspired bards and teachers to whom the civilized world will do homage."

At yet greater length he spoke on this subject, and the more he spoke the more he quickened within me the resolve to do as he wished it to be done.

Founding of Farm School promised.

And there, under _The Poverty Tree_, it was where I gave Tolstoy the solemn promise that upon my return home the earliest task I would enter upon would be the establishment of an agricultural school for Jewish lads, and other lads. And the existence of the _National Farm School_, near Doylestown in this state, is testimony that I kept my promise. I had gone to Russia to see the Czar, and I saw a greater man instead. I had gone with a plan for colonizing Russian Jews in Russia, and I returned with a plan for teaching agriculture chiefly to Russian Jewish lads in the United States. Verily, "man proposes and God disposes." And the hundreds of young men who have received their agricultural training at the National Farm School, and the hundreds of others, young and old, who, directly and indirectly, have been encouraged by that school to forsake the congested cities and to take up the farmer's life, owe their escape from the miseries of the Ghetto, and their enjoyment of health and happiness, to the promise asked of me by that noblest of all farmers, count Tolstoy.

Promise kept under difficulties.

The establishment of the school was not an easy task, nor is its maintenance easy even now, notwithstanding the excellent record it has made. The bulk of our people have not yet acquired that profound grasp of the seriousness of our problem, and of its only possible solution, that Tolstoy had, sixteen years ago. Therefore is the support of that school still so meagre. Therefore has it still less than a hundred students in attendance when it easily could have a thousand, and more, if it had the means. And, therefore, are our Ghettoes more crowded than ever, and a greater drain than ever on our charities. That despite indifference and even hostility the school has persevered is due, to a very large extent, to the determination to keep sacred a promise solemnly given to one of the best of men.

Parting from Tolstoy.

It was late that night when I took leave of the count and of some of the members of his family. Before departing, it was agreed that I enter at once upon my journey to the Jewish agricultural colonies in the interior, that I might see them at work during the height of their harvesting, and a peasant and his wagon were engaged to take me on that trip. The count bade me a hearty God-speed, and repeatedly urged me to make my report personally to him, and I promised that I would avail myself a second time of his proffered hospitality, if my way should lead me back again to Moscow or St. Petersburg.

Never heard from him again.

Unfortunately, after my inspection of the Jewish agricultural colonies, which fully confirmed the favorable reports the count had received of them, my investigations led me to the Southern and Polish provinces, and consumed so much of my limited time that a return North was impossible. And so I never got to see the count again. And I never heard from him. Neither my report, which I sent to him in writing, nor my other communications to him, written in Russia and outside of it, have brought from him a reply. Never a line from him even in answer to the information sent him that the National Farm School, which he had so strongly urged, had been founded. Never an acknowledgment from him of the early annual reports of the School that were sent him to show the headway it was making.

Probable reason of silence.

The heartiness of his reception of me, his almost affectionate farewell, his deep interest in my mission and his earnest invitation that I repeat my visit to him, preclude the thought that I was forgotten by him or became indifferent to him after my departure. There is but one explanation--an explanation strengthened by similar experiences of others in connection with him--none of my communications ever reached him. I was not wanted in Russia. I was a _persona non grata_ to the government; my name was blacklisted, and my mail fell under the ban of the censor.

With him in spirit under Poverty Tree.

But, if my mail has never reached him, my thoughts have been with him often. Many a time have I sat with him, in spirit, under that _Poverty Tree_. And yet more often will I sit with him there in the future, now that that site has become _Holy Ground_.

Has become his grave.

Gladly do I forgive the church of Russia many an outrage or blunder she has perpetrated or permitted to be perpetrated, for the one good act she has performed--that of refusing Tolstoy sepulture in what she is pleased to call "consecrated ground." She thus obliged him to designate as his last resting-place a spot that was one of the dearest on earth to him, a spot that was intimately associated with his life's philosophy, a spot located within a confine wherein he ruled more mightily and more exaltedly than any Czar that ever wielded scepter in vast Russia, where he wrote those epochal books of his which are destined some day to become of the basal elements of the religion of the future.