prince.
'Oh, papa!...how can you say that? And last Sunday in church?' said Dolly, listening to the conversation. 'Please give me a cloth,' she said to the old man, who was looking at the children with a smile. 'Why, it's not possible that all...'
'But what was it in church on Sunday? The priest had been told to read that. He read it. They didn't understand a word of it. Then they were told that there was to be a collection for a pious object in church; well, they pulled out their halfpence and gave them, but what for they couldn't say.'
'The people cannot help knowing; the sense of their own destinies is always in the people, and at such moments as the present that sense finds utterance,' said Sergey Ivanovitch with conviction, glancing at the old bee-keeper.
The handsome old man, with black grizzled beard and thick silvery hair, stood motionless, holding a cup of honey, looking down from the height of his tall figure with friendly serenity at the gentlefolk, obviously understanding nothing of their conversation and not caring to understand it.
'That's so, no doubt,' he said, with a significant shake of his head at Sergey Ivanovitch's words.
'Here, then, ask him. He knows nothing about it and thinks nothing,' said Levin. 'Have you heard about the war, Mihalitch?' he said, turning to him. 'What they read in the church? What do you think about it? Ought we to fight for the Christians?'
'What should we think? Alexander Nikolaevitch our Emperor has thought for us; he thinks for us indeed in all things. It's clearer for hint to see. Shall I bring a bit more bread? Give the little lad some more?' he said addressing Darya Alexandrovna and pointing to Grisha, who had finished his crust.
'I don't need to ask,' said Sergey Ivanovitch, 'we have seen and are seeing hundreds and hundreds of people who give up everything to sense a just cause, come from every part of Russia, and directly and clearly express their thought and aim. They bring their halfpence or go themselves and say directly what for. What does it mean?'
'It means, to my thinking,' said Levin, who was beginning to get warm, 'that among eighty millions of people there can always be found not hundreds, as now, but tens of thousands of people who have lost caste, ne'er-do- wells, who are always ready to go anywhere--to Pogatchev's bands, to Khiva, to Serbia...'
'I tell you that it's not a case of hundreds or of ne'er-do-wells, but the best representatives of the people!' said Sergey Ivanovitch, with as much irritation as if he were defending the last penny of his fortune. 'And what of the subscriptions? In this case it is a whole people directly expressing their will.'
'That word 'people' is so vague,' said Levin. 'Parish clerks, teachers, and one in a thousand of the peasants, maybe, know what it's all about. The rest of the eighty millions, like Mihalitch, far from expressing their will, haven't the faintest idea what there is for them to express their will about. What right have we to say that this is the people's will?'
Chapter 16
Sergey Ivanovitch, being practiced in argument, did not reply, but at once turned the conversation to another aspect of the subject.
'Oh, if you want to learn the spirit of the people by arithmetical computation, of course it's very difficult to arrive at it. And voting has not been introduced among us and cannot be introduced, for it does not express the will of the people; but there are other ways of reaching that. It is felt in the air, it is felt by the heart. I won't speak of those deep currents which are astir in the still ocean of the people, and which are evident to every unprejudiced man; let us look at society in the narrow sense. All the most diverse sections of the educated public, hostile before, are merged in one. Every division is at an end, all the public organs say the same thing over and over again, all feel the mighty torrent that has overtaken them and is carrying them in one direction.'
'Yes, all the newspapers do say the same thing,' said the prince. 'That's true. But so it is the same thing that all the frogs croak before a storm. One can hear nothing for them.'
'Frogs or no frogs, I'm not the editor of a paper and I don't want to defend them; but I am speaking of the unanimity in the intellectual world,' said Sergey Ivanovitch, addressing his brother. Levin would have answered, but the old prince interrupted him.
'Well, about that unanimity, that's another thing, One may say,' said the prince. 'There's my son-in-law, Stepan Arkadyevitch, you know him. He's got a place now on the committee of a commission and something or other, I don't remember. Only there's nothing to do in it--why, Dolly, it's no secret!--and a salary of eight thousand. You try asking him whether his post is of use, he'll prove to you that it's most necessary. And he's a truthful man too, but there's no refusing to believe in the utility of eight thousand roubles.'
'Yes, he asked me to give a message to Darya Alexandrovna about the post,' said Sergey Ivanovitch reluctantly, feeling the prince's remark to be ill-timed.
'So it is with the unanimity of the press. That's been explained to me: as soon as there's war their incomes are doubled. How can they help believing in the destinies of the people and the Slavonic races...and all that?'
'I don't care for many of the papers, but that's unjust,' said Sergey Ivanovitch.
'I would only make one condition,' pursued the old prince. 'Alphonse Karr said a capital thing before the war with Prussia: 'You consider war to be inevitable? Very good. Let everyone who advocates war be enrolled in a special regiment of advance-guards, for the front of every storm, of every attack, to lead them all!''
'A nice lot the editors would make!' said Katavasov, with a loud roar, as he pictured the editors he knew in this picked legion.
'But they'd run,' said Dolly, 'they'd only be in the way.'
'Oh, if they ran away, then we'd have grape-shot or Cossacks with whips behind them,' said the prince.
'But that's a joke, and a poor one too, if you'll excuse my saying so, prince,' said Sergey Ivanovitch.
'I don't see that it was a joke, that...' Levin was beginning, but Sergey Ivanovitch interrupted him.
'Every member of society is called upon to do his own special work,' said he. 'And men of thought are doing their work when they express public opinion. And the single-hearted and full expression of public opinion is the service of-the press and a phenomenon to rejoice us at the same time. Twenty years ago we should have been silent, but now we have heard the voice of the Russian people, which is ready to rise as one man and ready to sacrifice itself for its oppressed brethren; that is a great step and a proof of strength.'
