17. Tolstoy’s Daughter and the Peasant Boy

One day Count Tolstoy’s little daughter, ten years old, was in front of the house playing with some peasant children of the village. In a quarrel that arose one of the boys struck the little girl with a stick on her arm, making it black and blue. She ran in the house crying, and said to her father: “That naughty boy has bruised my arm. I want you to go out and whip him.” The father took the little girl on his knee and said: “My daughter, tell me, what good would it do if I went out and beat him? Would not your arm really hurt just as much? He struck you because he was angry with you. For a few minutes he hated you. If I whip him he will hate you more than ever and hate me too, and all of us. Would it not be better to make him love us? Perhaps that would change his character for the rest of his life. I tell you what I would do if I were you. I would go to the pantry and get some of that nice raspberry jam and take it out to him, and I think he will be made to love us all, instead of hating us.”

The little girl did what her father told her. Such a spirit of love Tolstoy believed in and taught in all his writings. Were such a spirit of love shown everywhere in the world, evil would oftener be overcome by good.