`That you can't tell without making the trial.'

`Well, supposing that is so,' said Levin, though he did not suppose so at all, `supposing that is so, still I don't see, all the same, why I should worry myself about it.'

`How so?'

`No; since we are talking, explain it to me from the philosophical point of view,' said Levin.

`I can't see where philosophy comes in,' said Sergei Ivanovich, in a tone, Levin fancied, as though he did not admit his brother's right to talk about philosophy. And that irritated Levin.

`I'll tell you, then,' he said with heat, `I imagine the mainspring of all our actions is, after all, self-interest. Now in the Zemstvo institutions I, as a nobleman, see nothing that could conduce to my prosperity. The roads are not better and could not be better; my horses carry me well enough over bad ones. Doctors and dispensaries are of no use to me. A justice of the peace is of no use to me - I never appeal to him, and never shall appeal to him. The schools are of no good to me, but positively harmful, as I told you. For me the Zemstvo institutions simply mean the liability of paying eighteen kopecks for every dessiatina, of driving into the town, sleeping with bedbugs, and listening to all sorts of idiocy and blather, and self- interest offers me no inducement.'

`Excuse me,' Sergei Ivanovich interposed with a smile, `self-interest did not induce us to work for the emancipation of the serfs, yet we did work for it.'

`No!' Konstantin Levin broke in with still greater heat; `the emancipation of the serfs was a different matter. There self-interest did come in. One longed to throw off that yoke that crushed us - all the decent people among us. But to be a member of the Zemstvo and discuss how many street cleaners are needed, and how sewers shall be constructed in the town in which I don't live - to serve on a jury and try a peasant who has stolen a flitch of bacon, and listen for six hours at a stretch to all sorts of jabber from the counsel for the defense and the prosecution, and the president cross-examining my old simpleton Alioshka: ``Do you admit, prisoner at the bar, the fact of the removal of the bacon' - ``Eh?''

Konstantin Levin had warmed to his subject, and began mimicking the president and the half-witted Alioshka: it seemed to him that it was all to the point.

But Sergei Ivanovich shrugged his shoulders.

`Well, what do you mean to say, then?'

`I simply mean to say that those rights that touch me... my interest, I shall always defend to the best of my ability; that when raids were made on us students, and the police read our letters, I was ready to defend those rights to the utmost, to defend my rights to education and freedom. I can understand compulsory military service, which affects my children, my brothers, and myself - I am ready to deliberate on what concerns me; but deliberating on how to spend forty thousand roubles of Zemstvo's money, or judging the half-witted Alioshka - that I don't understand, and I can't do it.'

Konstantin Levin spoke as though the floodgates of his speech had burst open. Sergei Ivanovich smiled.

`But tomorrow it'll be your turn to be tried; would it have suited your tastes better to be tried in the old criminal court?'

`I'm not going to be tried. I shan't murder anybody, and I've no need of it. Well, I tell you what,' he went on, flying off again to a subject quite beside the point, `our district self-government and all the rest of it - it's just like the birch saplings we stick in the ground, as we would do it on Trinity Day, to look like a copse which has grown up of itself in Europe, and I can't gush over these birch saplings and believe in them.'