&EORGE BRUCE HALSTED — SCIENCE ON CONDUCT OF LIFE. 10 i 
Here is a truly marvelous personage. He is an erudite scholar of the 
classics. He writes English, German, French, and has such a mastery of 
Russian as no man ever had. He is a profound student of the Scriptures 
in the original tongues. Himself a count, his father was a noble of most # 
ancient lineage, his mother a princess. 
His Anna Karenina is the greatest novel since' the world began. 
His penetration into the deepest sources, the profoundest springs of 
human action seems supernatural, uncanny. Yet as outcome of in- 
tensest wrestling with the problem of this life, the man of whose works 
Howells says, “To my thinking they transcend in truth, which is the 
highest beauty, all other works of fiction which have been written”; this 
man, winner of the world’s adoring admiration, puts off the garb of civil- 
ization, dons the inside-out sheepskin coat of the moozhik, renounces 
wealth, denounces courts, ecclesiasticism, militarism, renounces even 
meat, preaches universal non-resistance, goes to plowing. 
Do not imagine that this great man lacks weighty arguments. 
Perhaps no one has attempted to compute the daily cost of ecclesiasti- 
cism in mere money. Ho one seems to notice the extraordinary oddness 
of paying to maintain an army of missionaries to Mexico to convert 
people already Christians. 
But some one has reckoned that the standing armies are costing the 
world eight million dollars per day, a figure easily remembered by asso- 
ciation with Hawthorne’s eight million starved-to-death subjects of Vic- 
toria, whose jubilee was simply a shockingly expensive military pageant. 
Only a short time ago Russia passed through the horrors of a gigantic 
famine. 
When I sailed down “mother Volga” toward Samara, the center of the 
stricken district, despair seemed still brooding over the land. 
Even in favored years it is only by heroic toil of men and women, 
moozhik and baba together, throughout the brief season, that grim neces- 
sity can be held at bay. 
All appliances are still of the most primitive. I saw new wind-mills 
building of precisely the pattern charged on by Don Quixote. 
I saw a moozhik and a baba threshing their wheat on the ground with 
flails. 
I saw prisoners for Siberia marching each between two soldiers with 
fixed bayonets. 
Through the streets of the cities I saw drawn at a gallop, as with fire 
horses, holy images to visit sick patients instead of physicians. On the 
sides of the cathedrals I saw frescoed the immortal souls roasting in blaz- 
ing hell forever. 
The whole atmosphere seemed murky with two associated ideas — 
obedience and punishment. These two strictly human ideas, obedience, 
