“Please allow me to settle my affairs, and to choose what to read and what not to read, myself,” said Nekhlúdoff, turning pale. Feeling his hands grow cold, and that he was no longer master of himself, he stopped, and began drinking his tea.
XXXIII
“Well, and how are the children?” Nekhlúdoff asked his sister when he was calmer. His sister told him about the children. She said they were staying with their grandmother (their father’s mother), and, pleased that his dispute with her husband had come to an end, she began telling him how her children played that they were travelling, just as he used to do with his three dolls, one of them a negro and another which he called the French lady.
“Can you really remember it all?” said Nekhlúdoff, smiling.
“Yes, and just fancy, they play in the very same way.”
The unpleasant conversation had been brought to an end, and Nathalie was quieter, but she did not care to talk in her husband’s presence of what could be comprehensible only to her brother, so, wishing to start a general conversation, she began talking about the sorrow of Kámenskaya’s mother at losing her only son, who had fallen in a duel, for this Petersburg topic of the day had now reached Moscow. Rogózhinsky expressed disapproval at the state of things that excluded murder in a duel from the ordinary criminal offences. This remark evoked a rejoinder from Nekhlúdoff, and a new dispute arose on the subject. Nothing was fully explained, neither of the antagonists expressed all he had in his mind, each keeping to his conviction, which condemned the other. Rogózhinsky felt that Nekhlúdoff condemned him and despised his activity, and he wished to show him the injustice of his opinions.
Nekhlúdoff, on the other hand, felt provoked by his brother-in-law’s interference in his affairs concerning the land. And knowing in his heart of hearts that his sister, her husband, and their children, as his heirs, had a right to do so, was indignant that this narrow-minded man persisted with calm assurance to regard as just and lawful what Nekhlúdoff no longer doubted was folly and crime.
This man’s arrogance annoyed Nekhlúdoff.
“What could the law do?” he asked.
“It could sentence one of the two duellists to the mines like an ordinary murderer.”
Nekhlúdoff’s hands grew cold.
“Well, and what good would that be?” he asked, hotly.
“It would be just.”
“As if justice were the aim of the law,” said Nekhlúdoff.
“What else?”
“The upholding of class interests! I think the law is only an instrument for upholding the existing order of things beneficial to our class.”
“This is a perfectly new view,” said Rogózhinsky with a quiet smile; “the law is generally supposed to have a totally different aim.”
“Yes, so it has in theory but not in practice, as I have found out. The law aims only at preserving the present state of things, and therefore it persecutes and executes those who stand above the ordinary level and wish to raise it—the so-called political prisoners, as well as those who are below the average—the so-called criminal types.”
“I do not agree with you. In the first place, I cannot admit that the criminals classed as political are punished because they are above the average. In most cases they are the refuse of society, just as much perverted, though in a different way, as the criminal types whom you consider below the average.”
“But I happen to know men who are morally far above their judges; all the sectarians are moral, from—”
But Rogózhinsky, a man not accustomed to be interrupted when he spoke, did not listen to Nekhlúdoff, but went on talking at the same time, thereby irritating him still more.
“Nor can I admit that the object of the law is the upholding of the present state of things. The law aims at reforming—”
“A nice kind of reform, in a prison!” Nekhlúdoff put in.
“Or removing,” Rogózhinsky went on, persistently, “the perverted and brutalised persons that threaten society.”
“That’s just what it doesn’t do. Society has not the means of doing either the one thing or the other.”
“How is that? I don’t understand,” said Rogózhinsky with a forced smile.
“I mean that only two reasonable kinds of punishment exist. Those used in the old days: corporal and capital punishment, which, as human nature gradually softens, come more and more into disuse,” said Nekhlúdoff.
“There, now, this is quite new and very strange to hear from your lips.”
“Yes, it is reasonable to hurt a man so that he should not do in future what he is hurt for doing, and it is also quite reasonable to cut a man’s head off when he is injurious or dangerous to society. These punishments have a reasonable meaning. But what sense is there in locking up in a prison a man perverted by want of occupation and bad example; to place him in a position where he is provided for, where laziness is imposed on him, and where he is in company with the most perverted of men? What reason is there to take a man at public cost (it comes to more than 500 roubles per head) from the Toúla to the Irkoútsk government, or from Koúrsk—”
“Yes, but all the same, people are afraid of those journeys at public cost, and if it were not for such journeys and the prisons, you and I would not be sitting here as we are.”
“The prisons cannot ensure our safety, because these people do not stay there forever, but are set free again. On the contrary, in those establishments men are brought to the greatest vice and degradation, so that the danger is increased.”
“You mean to say that the penitentiary system should be improved.”
“It cannot be improved. Improved prisons would cost more than all that is being now spent on the people’s education, and would lay a still
