The Brothers Karamazov
ing freedom as the multiplication and rapid satisfaction of
desires, men distort their own nature, for many senseless
and foolish desires and habits and ridiculous fancies are
fostered in them. They live only for mutual envy, for luxu-
ry and ostentation. To have dinners visits, carriages, rank,
and slaves to wait on one is looked upon as a necessity, for
which life, honour and human feeling are sacrificed, and
men even commit suicide if they are unable to satisfy it. We
see the same thing among those who are not rich, while the
poor drown their unsatisfied need and their envy in drunk-
enness. But soon they will drink blood instead of wine, they
are being led on to it. I ask you is such a man free? I knew
one ‘champion of freedom’ who told me himself that, when
he was deprived of tobacco in prison, he was so wretched at
the privation that he almost went and betrayed his cause for
the sake of getting tobacco again! And such a man says, ‘I
am fighting for the cause of humanity.’
How can such a one fight? What is he fit for? He is ca-
pable perhaps of some action quickly over, but he cannot
hold out long. And it’s no wonder that instead of gaining
freedom they have sunk into slavery, and instead of serving,
the cause of brotherly love and the union of humanity have
fallen, on the contrary, into dissension and isolation, as my
mysterious visitor and teacher said to me in my youth. And
therefore the idea of the service of humanity, of brotherly
love and the solidarity of mankind, is more and more dying
out in the world, and indeed this idea is sometimes treated
with derision. For how can a man shake off his habits? What
can become of him if he is in such bondage to the habit of