106 THROUGH RUSSIA ON A MUSTANG. 



Tax collectors he considers highwaymen, who are able 

 to rob people without bloodshed, simply because the 

 tax-payers know that it would be useless to resist the 

 powerful organization of which they are members. He 

 was looking forward to a day when men would see 

 through the fiction of government and would no longer 

 consent to be robbed of money, nor to be instructed 

 in the art of murdering one another in war. 



He admires America because we have only a hand- 

 ful of soldiers, and the bitterness of his soul went out 

 to the armed camps of which Berlin and Paris are the 

 centers. In his younger days the Count was an officer 

 and saw service in the Crimean war ; but since his 

 conversion the earth contains for him no more mon- 

 strous thing than a body of men drilling and practicing 

 every day to perfect themselves in the art of killing the 

 largest number of their brothers in the shortest pos- 

 sible time. 



The accumulation of vast possessions by individuals 

 the Count regards as one of the great evils that people 

 have become so accustomed to seeing that they deem 

 the wrong far less than it really is. He believed, how- 

 ever, that the mission of the large American million- 

 aires would be to hasten the climax, when the eyes of 

 the people will be opened by the display of tremendous 

 contrasts. The moral consciousness of the people 

 needs a rude awakening, he thought, and only the de- 

 velopment of abnormal contrasts in wealth and poverty 

 is likely to bring the people to consider seriously the 

 equal rights of all. Just as the undue development 

 of the military will one day result in general disarma- 

 ment, so, he believes, will the vast accumulations of 



