So far as he is concerned, there is not the slightest doubt that he would gladly attempt the life which he advocates.  But if he were to take up his residence in a peasant’s cottage, and try to support himself on what his labors brought in exclusively, he would be dead in less than a month.  He suffers from liver disease; he has not been used to hard labor from early youth; he cannot, at his age, accustom himself to it any more than he can compel his stomach to accept a purely vegetable diet in place of the meat diet on which he has been brought up.  He strives conscientiously to do it.  Even the fits of illness caused by his severe treatment of himself do not break his spirit.  He exercises not the slightest calculation or forethought in the care of his health, either before it breaks down or afterwards.  For example:  about five years ago he bruised his leg seriously against the wheel of a peasant cart.  Instead of resting it, he persisted in working.  Erysipelas developed.  The Tula doctor paid him numerous visits, at fifteen rubles a visit.  Then gangrene threatened, and a doctor was sent for from Moscow.  He was a celebrity; price three hundred and fifty rubles.  This was penny wise and pound foolish, of course.  But in all probability the count feels the responsibility of exerting his will in this matter of labor all the more because it does not come easy to him, and he attributes to weakness of will power what a peasant would recognize as simple physical exhaustion.  The peasant would not hesitate to climb to the top of his oven and stay there until his illness was over, with not a thought whether the work were done or not; and yet the peasant would work far beyond the bounds of what one would suppose that a man could endure.  But Count Tolstoy overrates his powers of endurance, and, having exhausted his forces in one desperate spurt, he is naturally obliged to spend more than a corresponding amount of time in recuperating, even if no serious complication intervenes; and this gives rise to the accusation of laziness and insincerity from those who chance to see him in one of these intervals of rest.

Another point which is too often lost sight of by people who disapprove of his labor theories is that, while he advocates living in all respects like a peasant, descending to that level in mind as well as in body, which doctrine seems to include the incessant toil of the masses, he has also announced his theory that men should divide their time each day between (1) hard labor unto perspiration and callosities; (2) the exercise of some useful handicraft; (3) exercise of the brain in writing and reading; (4) social intercourse; sixteen hours in all.  This is not a programme which a peasant could follow out.  In summer, during the “suffering” season, the peasant toils in the fields for nearly the whole of the twenty-four hours instead of the four thus allotted.  In winter, when no field labor is possible, he is likely to spend much more than four hours at whatever remunerative