respectable families, these amateurs of dramatic art whom we had
so alarmed, and I kept asking in what way these stupid, cruel, lazy,
and dishonest people were superior to the drunken and superstitious
peasants of Kurilovka, or in what way they were better than animals,
who in the same way are thrown into a panic when some incident
disturbs the monotony of their life limited by their instincts.
What would have happened to my sister now if she had been left to
live at home?

What moral agonies would she have experienced, talking with my
father, meeting every day with acquaintances? I imagined this to
myself, and at once there came into my mind people, all people I
knew, who had been slowly done to death by their nearest relations.
I remembered the tortured dogs, driven mad, the live sparrows plucked
naked by boys and flung into the water, and a long, long series of
obscure lingering miseries which I had looked on continually from
early childhood in that town; and I could not understand what these
sixty thousand people lived for, what they read the gospel for, why
they prayed, why they read books and magazines. What good had they
gained from all that had been said and written hitherto if they
were still possessed by the same spiritual darkness and hatred of
liberty, as they were a hundred and three hundred years ago? A
master carpenter spends his whole life building houses in the town,
and always, to the day of his death, calls a "gallery" a "galdery."
So these sixty thousand people have been reading and hearing of
truth, of justice, of mercy, of freedom for generations, and yet
from morning till night, till the day of their death, they are
lying, and tormenting each other, and they fear liberty and hate
it as a deadly foe.