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What to Do? by Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
page 10 of 23 (43%)
full satisfaction, and the love and sympathy of men.

What, then, will be the outcome of a few eccentric individuals, or
madmen, tilling the soil, making shoes, and so on, instead of smoking
cigarettes, playing whist, and roaming about everywhere to relieve
their tedium, during the space of the ten leisure hours a day which
every intellectual worker enjoys? This will be the outcome: that
these madmen will show in action, that that imaginary property for
which men suffer, and for which they torment themselves and others,
is not necessary for happiness; that it is oppressive, and that it is
mere superstition; that property, true property, consists only in
one's own head and hands; and that, in order to actually exploit this
real property with profit and pleasure, it is necessary to reject the
false conception of property outside one's own body, upon which we
expend the best efforts of our lives. The outcome us, that these men
will show, that only when a man ceases to believe in imaginary
property, only when he brings into play his real property, his
capacities, his body, so that they will yield him fruit a hundred-
fold, and happiness of which we have no idea,--only then will he be
so strong, useful, and good a man, that, wherever you may fling him,
he will always land on his feet; that he will everywhere and always
be a brother to everybody; that he will be intelligible to everybody,
and necessary, and good. And men looking on one, on ten such madmen,
will understand what they must all do in order to loose that terrible
knot in which the superstition regarding property has entangled them,
in order to free themselves from the unfortunate position in which
they are all now groaning with one voice, not knowing whence to find
an issue from it.

But what can one man do amid a throng which does not agree with him?
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