17 NOVEMBER 1900, Page 39

The Slavery of Our Time. By Leo Tolstoy. (Free Age

Press. ls.)—It would not be easy for the most docile statesman to please Count Tolstoy. His leading principle may be described as a combination of non - resistance and Anarchism, not the Anarchism of the revolver and dynamite, it must be understood, but of passive resistance and endurance. Socialism he does not like; economic science he abhors; in the communalisation of property, &c., he does not believe. If a factory worker gets more wages it is not of real benefit to him. Labour is slavery. You do not enslave the man, but the five shillings which he needs enslave him. These are crude statements of Tolstoy's thought, but they are, we think, substantially correct. There is no need of commenting on them.