WITH COUNT TOLSTOI. 113 



living a Christly life in a truly unselfish sense, the 

 Count was for getting rid of his property forthwith by 

 distributing it among the peasantry. His plan was to 

 descend at once to the level of the poorest of those 

 about him, and earn his living with the plow and the 

 hoe. That this was not done was due entirely to the 

 Countess and friends of the family. 



Such, then, was the apostle of this new religion, or, 

 as he would say, of the Christian religion rightly inter- 

 preted, at home. Practical people in America would 

 find in many of his ideas the vagaries of an ill-balanced 

 but brilliant intellect. 



Genius-like, he was not always logical and con- 

 sistent. In discussing the merits of Bellamy's "Look- 

 ing Backward," he condemned the author's judgment 

 in presuming that such a state of society as he de- 

 scribes would be possible with human beings, possessed 

 with the weaknesses and frailties of our kind. Only 

 angels, he said, could exist under such conditions. 

 Yet in the case of these same human beings, with the 

 same weaknesses and frailties that would be the stum- 

 bling block in Bellamy's new social world, he advocated 

 " no government, no police, no prisons, no army, no 

 church, no judiciary, no punishment for wrong doing." 



The Count's ideas of what is best were still in a 

 state of development. A couple of years before my 

 visit Mr. Stead, of the " Review of Reviews," paid him 

 a visit. At that time he told Stead that he regretted 

 every moment that he did not feel he was dying. He 

 longed to have done with this world and to fathom 

 the mystery of the next. Now he had changed his 

 mind and told me his only fear was that he would not 



