It was perhaps inevitable that Tolstoy colonies
should be founded, although Tolstoy himself has always insisted
that each man should live his life as nearly as possible in the
place in which he was born. The visit Miss Smith and I made a
year or two later to a colony in one of the southern States
portrayed for us most vividly both the weakness and the strange
august dignity of the Tolstoy position. The colonists at
Commonwealth held but a short creed. They claimed in fact that
the difficulty is not to state truth but to make moral conviction
operative upon actual life, and they announced it their intention
"to obey the teachings of Jesus in all matters of labor and the
use of property." They would thus transfer the vindication of
creed from the church to the open field, from dogma to experience.
The day Miss Smith and I visited the Commonwealth colony of
threescore souls, they were erecting a house for the family of a
one-legged man, consisting of a wife and nine children who had
come the week before in a forlorn prairie schooner from Arkansas.
As this was the largest family the little colony contained, the
new house was to be the largest yet erected. Upon our surprise
at this literal giving "to him that asketh," we inquired if the
policy of extending food and shelter to all who applied, without
test of creed or ability, might not result in the migration of
all the neighboring poorhouse population into the colony.
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