“But we do nothing to destroy the conditions in which people like these are produced; on the contrary, we support the establishments where they are formed.  These establishments are well known:  factories, mills, workshops, public-houses, gin-shops, brothels.  And we do not destroy these places, but, looking at them as necessary, we support and regulate them.  We educate in this way not one, but millions of people, and then catch one of them and imagine that we have done something, that we have guarded ourselves, and nothing more can be expected of us.  Have we not sent him from the Moscow to the Irkoutsk Government?” Thus thought Nekhludoff with unusual clearness and vividness, sitting in his high-backed chair next to the colonel, and listening to the different intonations of the advocates’, prosecutor’s, and president’s voices, and looking at their self-confident gestures.  “And how much and what hard effort this pretence requires,” continued Nekhludoff in his mind, glancing round the enormous room, the portraits, lamps, armchairs, uniforms, the thick walls and large windows; and picturing to himself the tremendous size of the building, and the still more ponderous dimensions of the whole of this organisation, with its army of officials, scribes, watchmen, messengers, not only in this place, but all over Russia, who receive wages for carrying on this comedy which no one needs.  “Supposing we spent one-hundredth of these efforts helping these castaways, whom we now only regard as hands and bodies, required by us for our own peace and comfort.  Had some one chanced to take pity on him and given some help at the time when poverty made them send him to town, it might have been sufficient,” Nekhludoff thought, looking at the boy’s piteous face.  “Or even later, when, after 12 hours’ work at the factory, he was going to the public-house, led away by his companions, had some one then come and said, ’Don’t go, Vania; it is not right,’ he would not have gone, nor got into bad ways, and would not have done any wrong.

“But no; no one who would have taken pity on him came across this apprentice in the years he lived like a poor little animal in the town, and with his hair cut close so as not to breed vermin, and ran errands for the workmen.  No, all he heard and saw, from the older workmen and his companions, since he came to live in town, was that he who cheats, drinks, swears, who gives another a thrashing, who goes on the loose, is a fine fellow.  Ill, his constitution undermined by unhealthy labour, drink, and debauchery—­bewildered as in a dream, knocking aimlessly about town, he gets into some sort of a shed, and takes from there some old mats, which nobody needs—­and here we, all of us educated people, rich or comfortably off, meet together, dressed in good clothes and fine uniforms, in a splendid apartment, to mock this unfortunate brother of ours whom we ourselves have ruined.

“Terrible!  It is difficult to say whether the cruelty or the absurdity is greater, but the one and the other seem to reach their climax.”