"Excuse me," Sergey Ivanovitch interposed with a smile,

"self-interest did not induce us to work for the emancipation of

the serfs, but we did work for it."

"No!" Konstantin Levin broke in with still greater heat; "the

emancipation of the serfs was a different matter. There

self-interest did come in. One longed to throw off that yoke

that crushed us, all decent people among us. But to be a

town councilor and discuss how many dustmen are needed, and how

chimneys shall be constructed in the town in which I don't

live--to serve on a jury and try a peasant who's stolen a flitch

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of bacon, and listen for six hours at a stretch to all sorts of

jabber from the counsel for the defense and the prosecution, and

the president cross-examining my old half-witted Alioshka, 'Do

you admit, prisoner in the dock, the fact of the removal of the

bacon?' 'Eh?'"

Konstantin Levin had warmed to his subject, and began mimicking

the president and the half-witted Alioshka: it seemed to him that

it was all to the point.

But Sergey Ivanovitch shrugged his shoulders.

"Well, what do you mean to say, then?"

"I simply mean to say that those rights that touch me...my

interest, I shall always defend to the best of my ability; that

when they made raids on us students, and the police read our

letters, I was ready to defend those rights to the utmost, to

defend my rights to education and freedom. I can understand

compulsory military service, which affects my children, my

brothers, and myself, I am ready to deliberate on what concerns

me; but deliberating on how to spend forty thousand roubles of

district council money, or judging the half-witted Alioshka--I

don't understand, and I can't do it."

Konstantin Levin spoke as though the floodgates of his speech had

burst open. Sergey Ivanovitch smiled.

"But tomorrow it'll be your turn to be tried; would it have

suited your tastes better to be tried in the old criminal

tribunal?"

"I'm not going to be tried. I shan't murder anybody, and I've

no need of it. Well, I tell you what," he went on, flying off

again to a subject quite beside the point, "our district

self-government and all the rest of it--it's just like the

birch branches we stick in the ground on Trinity Day, for

instance, to look like a copse which has grown up of itself in

Europe, and I can't gush over these birch branches and believe

in them."




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