at haphazard, as I had done in the Rzhanoff tavern. And I gave up
the whole thing, and went off to the country with despair in my
heart.

In the country I tried to write an essay about all this that I had
experienced, and to tell why my undertaking had not succeeded. I
wanted to justify myself against the reproaches which had been made
to me on the score of my article on the census; I wanted to convict
society of its in difference, and to state the causes in which this
city poverty has its birth, and the necessity of combating it, and
the means of doing so which I saw.

I began this essay at once, and it seemed to me that in it I was
saying a very great deal that was important. But toil as I would
over it, and in spite of the abundance of materials, in spite of the
superfluity of them even, I could not get though that essay; and so I
did not finish it until the present year, because of the irritation
under the influence of which I wrote, because I had not gone through
all that was requisite in order to bear myself properly in relation
to this essay, because I did not simply and clearly acknowledge the
cause of all this,--a very simple cause, which had its root in
myself.

In the domain of morals, one very remarkable and too little noted
phenomenon presents itself.

If I tell a man who knows nothing about it, what I know about
geology, astronomy, history, physics, and mathematics, that man
receives entirely new information, and he never says to me: "Well,
what is there new in that? Everybody knows that, and I have known it